Cape Cod; its people and their history

By Henry C. Kittredge

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Title: Cape Cod; its people and their history

Author: Henry C. Kittredge

Release date: July 14, 2026 [eBook #79093]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79093

Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPE COD; ITS PEOPLE AND THEIR HISTORY ***

[Illustration:_Copyright, 1898, by A. W. Elson & Co._ James Otis ]

CAPE COD
ITS PEOPLE AND THEIR HISTORY

BY
HENRY C. KITTREDGE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1930

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

TO
G. L. K.

PREFACE

Some years ago, being idly present at a tiny harbor--a mere nook in
the coast of the Cape (for _the_ Cape it is to all good Americans)--I
scraped acquaintance with an ancient and solitary fisherman who had
just landed and was lunching in the shade. He was so quietly at home
in the landscape that I felt a scrupulous and uneasy impulse to
authenticate myself as the real thing and not a naturalized colonist
or a floating element in the population. I told him, accordingly,
that I claimed all the rights and privileges of a native (which, be
it remembered, are many and important), because, though I was born in
Boston, my mother came from Barnstable and was a direct descendant of
the first settlers of 1639. ‘And so,’ I concluded with modest triumph,
‘I may claim to go back pretty far as a Cape man.’ ‘Yes,’ he replied,
with a slow smile, ‘you have a good claim; and as for me, I go back
pretty far too.’ ‘How far?’ I asked. ‘Oh, my great-grandmother was
descended from the Hockanom Indians of Yarmouth.’ As Artemus Ward puts
it, ‘He _had_ me there!’

The author of this book, it may be inferred from this anecdote, has
grown up in propitious nurture and admonition. He, too, in his daily
walk, claims with pride the privileges of a native, and he writes
with that intimacy and understanding which befit the chronicler of so
distinguished a region as Cape Cod. It is ‘a piece of prudence, as well
as good manners,’ Swift tells us, ‘to put men upon talking on subjects
they are best versed in.’ And so I leave him with confidence to the
friendly reader.

GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Alfred Crocker, Esq., of Centerville, for detailed
information about salt-making in the salt works of his father, Loring
Crocker, of Barnstable. Mr. Alfred Crocker spent several years in this
business and is one of the few persons alive who is qualified to give
first-hand information on it. Thanks are due to Mr. Thomas F. Hall, of
Omaha, Nebraska, for facts about the Shiverick clipper, Belle of the
West, in which he sailed for over four years, part of the time as mate.
I wish to thank Mr. Gilbert Coleman, one of the leading oyster dealers
of Cotuit, for information about the shellfisheries in that village
for the last seventy years; and Mr. Elmer Rich, chairman of the Board
of Selectmen of Wellfleet, and Mr. Frank A. Williams, town clerk, for
information about the oyster and quahaug industries in their town. Both
these men have long been engaged in the business there. Particular
thanks are due to Mr. Elmer Mayo, of Chatham, for permission to copy a
letter to him from L. M. Shaw, Secretary of the United States Treasury,
recounting the facts of Mr. Mayo’s rescue of surfman Ellis off Monomoy.
This letter accompanied the medal which the Department presented to Mr.
Mayo on that occasion. I am also indebted to Ezra H. Baker, Esq., of
Boston, for information about anchor-dragging off the south side of the
Cape in the eighties, when he used to watch the boats thus employed. I
have especially to thank Mr. John H. Edmonds, State Archivist, for the
map showing locations of wrecks and for his perfectly authenticated
narrative of the Whidaw episode.

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Crowell, of East Dennis, have shown me every
courtesy and assistance in obtaining the photograph of the Wild Hunter,
which is taken from the original painting in the possession of Mr.
Crowell’s mother, Mrs. Louisa M. Crowell. I wish also to thank Miss
Edith M. White, of Yarmouthport, for her great kindness in lending me
pictures of Captains Asa, John, and Oliver Eldridge, reproductions of
which appear in this volume. The portrait of James Otis is copyright
by A. W. Elson, of Belmont, to whom thanks are due for permission to
use it. The same acknowledgment is due Mr. Fred Small, of Buzzards Bay,
for his photographs of marsh and beach. The picture of the Dillingham
house in Brewster is reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. Isaac
Dillingham, of Newton Center, and that of the old Sears house in
Dennis with the permission of Mrs. Margaret Richardson, its present
owner, to whom I am also indebted for the date of its construction.
The present volume would never have been undertaken without the advice
and assistance of my father, George L. Kittredge, whose collection of
documents pertaining to the Cape has always been at my disposal, whose
knowledge of the bibliography of Cape history has saved me months of
searching, and whose suggestions for the arrangement of material have
been as happy as they were welcome.

CONTENTS

I. GEOLOGY AND EARLY APPEARANCE 3

II. THE EXPLORERS 13

III. THE INDIANS 27

IV. THE FIRST SETTLERS 52

V. HOW THEY LIVED IN THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS 71

VI. CIVIL AND MILITARY HISTORY TO 1775 88

VII. THE REVOLUTION 112

VIII. FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE CIVIL WAR ASHORE 134

IX. WHALING 164

X. FISHERIES 182

XI. STORMS, WRECKS, AND WRECKERS 208

XII. THE MERCHANT MARINE 232

XIII. THE CIVIL WAR 257

XIV. THE CHURCH 265

XV. THE CANAL 292

EPILOGUE 304

NOTES 307

BIBLIOGRAPHY 313

INDEX 319

ILLUSTRATIONS

JAMES OTIS _Frontispiece_
From a photogravure by A. W. Elson & Co., after the portrait by J. D.
Blackburn

MAP OF EASTHAM, ORLEANS, AND NAUSET BEACH

CHAMPLAIN’S DRAWING OF THE FIGHT WITH THE INDIANS AT CHATHAM
From Champlain’s _Voyages_ in the Harvard College Library

CHAMPLAIN’S MAP OF NAUSET HARBOR
From Champlain’s _Voyages_ in the Harvard College Library

CHAMPLAIN’S MAP OF CHATHAM, SHOWING INDIAN HOUSES AND MONOMOY
From Champlain’s _Voyages_ in the Harvard College Library

PAGE OF SERMON THAT JOHN COTTON PREACHED TO THE YARMOUTH
INDIANS IN 1712 (IN ENGLISH AND INDIAN)
From the original in the Massachusetts Historical Society

CAPTAIN JAMES BAXTER’S HOUSE, BARNSTABLE
Photograph by Francis W. Sprague, 2d

SEARS HOUSE, DENNIS
Photograph by Fred Small

ISAAC DILLINGHAM HOUSE, BREWSTER
Photograph by Fred Small

WALTER DILLINGHAM HOUSE, BREWSTER
Photograph by Fred Small

CAPTAIN JOHN COLLINS
From an old lithograph in Frederick Freeman’s
_History of Cape Cod_ (1858)

CAPTAIN JOHN ELDRIDGE
Photograph in possession of Miss Edith White, Yarmouthport

THE WILD HUNTER, CLIPPER SHIP
From a painting in possession of Mrs. Louise M. Crowell, East Dennis

LORING CROCKER’S BARNSTABLE SALT WORKS IN 1870
Photograph supplied by Mr. Alfred Crocker

MAP OF PROVINCETOWN AND EAST HARBOR

BLACKFISH ASHORE AT PROVINCETOWN
Photograph by John A. Smith, Provincetown

SANDY NECK AND THE HAY-GROUNDS, WEST BARNSTABLE
Photograph by Fred Small

PART OF PROVINCETOWN’S FISHING FLEET A GENERATION AGO
Photograph by John A. Smith, Provincetown

PROVINCETOWN FISH-FLAKES WITH SCHOONER FREDDIE W. ALTON AT THE DOCK
Photograph taken about 1890 by John A. Smith, Provincetown

MAP SHOWING APPROXIMATE LOCATIONS OF CAPE COD WRECKS DOWN TO 1903
Section of a map compiled and drawn in the United States
Engineer Office, Newport, R.I. By courtesy of Mr. John H. Edmonds

THE WRECK OF THE CALEDONIA, JANUARY 1, 1863
From a contemporary lithograph

WRECKERS PULLING OFF A BEACHED SCHOONER AT PROVINCETOWN
Photograph by John A. Smith, Provincetown

ELIJAH COBB
From a lithograph in Frederick Freeman’s _History of Cape Cod_ (1858)

ASA SHIVERICK
From a steel engraving in Simeon L. Deyo’s
_History of Barnstable County_

ROWLAND R. CROCKER
From an engraving in Frederick Freeman’s _History of Cape Cod_ (1858)

CAPTAIN ASA ELDRIDGE
From a daguerreotype in possession of Miss Edith White, Yarmouthport

CAPTAIN OLIVER ELDRIDGE
From a daguerreotype in possession of Miss Edith White, Yarmouthport

WEST BARNSTABLE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BUILT 1717-18
Photograph by Francis W. Sprague, 2d

CAPE COD

ITS PEOPLE AND THEIR HISTORY

CAPE COD

• •
•

CHAPTER I

GEOLOGY AND EARLY APPEARANCE

A generation or two ago the notion existed in the minds of those who
were at all interested that Cape Cod had risen from the sea--a Cytherea
of sand and scrub pine--washed into being by the whim of tides and
currents. There was good reason for this belief. Every year new sand
bars appeared in the harbors, and old bars changed their shape. Year
by year the inhabitants watched their long peninsulas of outer beach
stretch farther and farther into the sea, the wind piling them into
sand dunes as they went. Sometimes, too, they saw whole sections of
beach washed away, leaving new channels between sea and harbor, until
the tides of another year closed them with solid barriers of sand.

In the face of such performances it is no wonder that our fathers
believed they were watching miniature manifestations of the same forces
that little by little had swept the Cape itself out of the sea. Not
until geologists advanced the glacial theory, and laymen accepted it,
did it occur to any one that Cape Cod as it appears to-day is the
result of the passing of glaciers, and that the activity of winds and
tides in shifting the restless sands of its coast line was merely the
trimming off and polishing of what the glaciers had left in the rough.
But such was the case.

The speed with which Science marches from discovery to discovery,
leaving behind her a trail of shattered theories, compels the most
dogmatic of us to be cautious. Nowadays, if we are wise, we qualify our
boldest assertions with some verbal loophole or other through which
we may escape when our thesis is shattered by the findings of a new
decade. The geology of Cape Cod is a case in point. But the most widely
accepted theory at the moment--one that has held for more than thirty
years and is probably correct--is that the foundation of the Cape, the
solid bed of clay that lies under the loose gravel and sand on the
surface, antedates all glaciers, and is one of the ‘ancient drainage
divides of the country.’ This very old foundation exists under almost
the whole length of the Cape, cropping out at the surface here and
there, as in the clay deposits that supply the West Barnstable Brick
Yard, and the spectacular cliffs, called the Clay Pounds, at North
Truro. For the rest, it is the despair of well-drivers, who have the
greatest difficulty in working through it. What the glaciers did, then,
was merely to cap this antique foundation with a blanket of light,
loose soil. This fact should be borne in mind in connection with all
that follows.

It took two glaciers, it seems, to apply this top layer of earth. One,
called the Buzzards Bay Glacier, stopped its journey southward with its
southern edge resting along the curving line of the Elizabeth Islands,
and its eastern side lying along the eastern shore of Buzzards Bay.
From here it stretched north along the coast line of Massachusetts.
Close beside it on the east was the Cape Cod Glacier, the southern
edge of which exactly fitted the curve of Cape Cod Bay. The movement
of the ice in glaciers is in three directions. It crawls southward,
of course, but at the same time spreads sideways in both directions;
thus the upper part of the Cape (from Bourne south to Falmouth and
thence northeast through Mashpee to the Bay at Sandwich) consists of
the rubbish of earth, gravel, and boulders that was pushed east by the
eastern edge of the Buzzards Bay Glacier, and west by the western edge
of the Cape Cod Glacier. In the same way the north shore of the Cape
was formed by deposits of earth that were scooped up in front of the
southern edge of the Cape Cod Glacier, while the eastward motion of its
ice pushed into place the section of the Cape from Orleans north to
Truro.

But the process was only begun. No sooner had these glaciers come to
rest than they began to melt, and a thousand streams appeared flowing
out from under them, carrying more soil with them. These rivers forced
their way through the earthy deposits already piled up in front of the
glaciers, and carrying the lighter material along, spread it out in the
broad gentle slope that forms the southern shore of the Cape, all the
territory, in fact, from the high ridge that runs east and west along
its axis, south to the beaches that border it from Cotuit to Chatham.
Similar rivers flowed out from under the eastern edge of the glacier
and gave breadth to the plains of Nauset.

In connection with this part of the Cape--to be more explicit,
the Ocean side from Chatham to Highland Light--another geological
conjecture must be mentioned. The existence of Nantucket Shoals and
Georges Bank is best explained by the theory that they are respectively
the southern and southeastern moraines deposited by a third glacier
called the South Channel Glacier. If such an ice field existed, the
westward spreading of its pack certainly contributed to the creation of
the region between Chatham and Highland Light, dividing the honors for
this achievement with the Cape Cod Glacier on the west. This hypothesis
is supported by the presence, in Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro, of a
series of parallel valleys, the floors of which slope from east to
west. Such valleys may have been formed by glacial rivers flowing out
from the west edge of the South Channel Glacier. In fact, it is hard to
account for them in any other way.

In brief, then, the Cape is composed of earth piled up by glaciers on
top of a preglacial foundation of clay, and then spread out and added
to by rivers of melting ice flowing out from under them. This process
was doubtless repeated. The quality of the ice varied greatly; it was
harder in some spots than in others, and melted more slowly. So it
happened that the rivers sometimes encountered in their course isolated
blocks of very hard ice from which the glacier itself had melted away.
These abandoned glacial fragments were often several acres in extent.
In time they were buried under the earth that was washed over them by
the rivers, and presented what was to all appearances solid land. But
when its ice foundation finally melted, this land sank, forming pockets
into which the ground water promptly seeped. These water pockets are
to-day the ponds that are found scattered thickly over the whole length
and breadth of the Cape.

Of course the retreating glaciers did not leave anything like the
smooth and regular shore line that the maps show to-day from
Provincetown to Monomoy Point. The coast was ragged and notched with
a hundred shapeless coves and spits, most of them composed of loose
gravel, just the sort of shore that the sea likes to fall upon and
trim smooth. Two of these irregularities, unlike the rest, were of
sufficient size to be classed as headlands and had enough rock in their
composition to present an obstinate front to the waves. Naturally,
therefore, they lasted long after the rest of the coast had been
swept smooth. The existence of the first of these, known as Webb’s
Island Point, is conjectural, but there is a stubborn local tradition,
supported by a certain amount of evidence, that such a body of land
once stretched southeast from Chatham several miles into the sea.
If it ever did exist, it had certainly been washed away before the
first European arrived on the coast. [See notes to Chapter I.] Of the
existence of the other headland, called ‘Île Nauset,’ there is no
doubt. It projected seaward from Eastham, and remained undemolished
long enough to play an important part in New England history, for it
was the surf breaking on this promontory that caused the Mayflower to
turn back to Provincetown, instead of continuing her voyage to the
Hudson. With the exception of these two tongues of land, however, the
sea made short work of the irregularities along the outer beach and
used the material it dislodged to lengthen the Cape by making the land
that is now Provincetown and the miles of barren sand hills that lie
behind it.

The process was simple. Every northeaster sent a tremendous surf
breaking against the new and loosely packed outer shore of the Cape all
the way from Chatham to its original limit at North Truro. The power of
these waves bit great pieces out of the invitingly irregular bluffs and
sent whole sections of them sliding down to be swept away by the next
roller.

‘Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink--’

Once dislodged, this loose sand and gravel was swept in both
directions, north and south, and as winter followed winter and century
followed century, that which was carried north formed shoals beyond
High Head in North Truro. By degrees these shoals were piled higher,
attached themselves to the mainland, and finally became dry land. In
this way the whole end of the Cape beyond North Truro was built by the
sea out of material that it had sliced away from the shores of Truro,
Wellfleet, and Eastham. The process still goes on. Every winter sees
more gravel and sand torn away from the sea front of these towns, and
carried north until it comes to anchor on Peaked Hill Bars. These
bars will eventually rise from the sea as a low island; the wind will
blow its sand into dunes; a beach will form along its outer edge; and
our great-grandchildren will see a neck of sand hills and beach grass
projecting northeast from the present shore line. Such, at any rate,
was the process that built Race Point, and left Race Run as a salt
creek splitting it from the mainland. Little by little this creek is
being filled with sand blown into it by the northeasters that howl over
Race Point. By and by the Run will be entirely obliterated, and Race
Point will have become throughout its whole length an integral part of
the mainland. And the same end, we may safely assume, awaits Peaked
Hill Bars, that embryonic strip of dune and beach that lies still
unborn beneath the sea.

Monomoy Point and the whole stretch of Nauset Beach were formed in
the same way by loose material washed from the coast of Chatham and
Orleans and swept south. Prophets delight in foretelling how long it
will take at this rate for the Cape to be demolished. One guess is
as good or as bad as another. A recent authority predicts that five
thousand years will suffice for the waves to eat through from the Clay
Pounds at Highland Light to the Bay. He may be right. But the accuracy
of such forecasts is interfered with by the whimsical way in which
the elements, though they rob Paul one winter, turn the plunder over
to Peter the next. Mr. Isaac Morton Small, who has watched the sea’s
activity at North Truro for seventy years, makes a statement that
should shake the assurance of the most robust seer: ‘Three years ago,’
he writes, ‘the ocean waves were pounding into the base of the cliffs
one half mile south of Highland Light, and tearing away great patches
of earth. To-day the beach is one hundred yards wide at that point, and
the highest tides do not reach to the foot of the bank.’ The British
vessel Somerset, which came ashore not far from this spot during the
Revolution, has been buried, unburied, and buried again in the century
and a half since she was wrecked.

[Illustration: EASTHAM, ORLEANS, AND NAUSET BEACH
Sketch showing how Nauset Beach protects the old irregular glacial
shore front of Eastham and Orleans. Nauset Harbor, so called, is
filled with marshes; so is Pochet Inlet; but they are not shown in
the sketch, because they did not appear until after the beaches had
formed.]

Another geological phenomenon should give the prophets pause. The old
glacial shore line of Eastham, which lies well inland from the present
beach, has been perfectly protected, and the town has been given a
harbor of sorts, by the gradual formation of Nauset Beach, a low-lying
barrier of sand dunes built up from material washed away from the
bluffs to the north and swept south in perfect conformity with the
whole outer shore. Monomoy Point is in fact a prolongation of this
beach. The harbor with which Eastham was thus unexpectedly furnished
has had many entrances; the sea will break through the beach during a
storm, and sweep a channel into existence that in time is washed wide
and deep enough to serve small craft. The next storm will completely
block this entrance and open a new one somewhere else. In this way
the entrance to Nauset Harbor has been shifting from point to point,
usually in a southerly direction, until to-day it is not in Eastham at
all, but lies well south of it in Orleans. But through all the rains
and ruins of a thousand winters, the old original seacoast has lain
far inland, in unbattered serenity. In the same way the east shore
of Orleans has been protected by a continuation of Nauset Beach that
stretches south from the entrance of Nauset Harbor and continues all
alongshore.

The Bay shore has seen changes, too, though of a less spectacular
nature than those on the exposed Ocean side of the Cape. The most
important of these is Long Point, the long and incredibly narrow
sand spit that protects Provincetown Harbor on the west and south.
The material for this frail barrier was washed into place by waves
and currents set in motion by the northerly and northwesterly winds.
The powerful allies could not have done a better piece of work if
their sole object had been the creation of a perfect harbor. The same
southerly wash of sand and gravel appears at other points along the Bay
shore. To-day three large islands (Bound Brook, Griffith’s, and Great
Islands) stretch out in a northeast and southwest line to form the
western boundary of Wellfleet Bay. Originally these were true islands,
completely surrounded by the waters of Cape Cod Bay; but now, though
still called islands, they are joined with each other and with the
mainland by narrow strips of beach that have been washed up in the same
way as Long Point. Lest the process become too uniform, however, and
tempt us into laying down laws for wind and wave, the northwesters have
cut off Billingsgate from this chain of islands, leaving a wide stretch
of shoal water between it and Great Island, with which it was formerly
connected. By the same token, the waves first chopped off and then
obliterated a small island that was once a part of Billingsgate.

Proceeding farther south, we come to Sandy Neck--a seven-mile strip of
high and very old dunes that stretch east from the mainland at West
Barnstable and make Barnstable Harbor. Sandy Neck is a prolongation of
Spring Hill Beach, just as Monomoy is a prolongation of Nauset Beach,
and it protects the old glacial shore line of Barnstable in the same
way that Nauset Beach protects the high shore of Eastham. Though much
older than Monomoy and generously sprinkled with patches of trees, it
was formed in the same way from débris washed south and east from the
bluffs of Manomet. Like Monomoy it is growing longer year by year,
reaching out easterly across the entrance to the harbor toward the
Dennis shore; whether or not it will ever reach this goal no one can
say. It is true, however, that while the Neck is stretching farther and
farther east, the bar across the mouth of Barnstable Harbor is at the
same time growing wider and higher, and the channel through it is fast
silting up. There is nothing to counteract this combination of forces
except the tide, which, as the channel narrows, sweeps in and out of
the harbor with terrific and annually increasing force. Perhaps this
tremendous scour will be sufficient to keep a channel of some sort open
forever; perhaps not. Another thousand years will write the answer.

The marshes which invariably lie between these barrier beaches and the
mainland are comparatively recent additions to the Cape scenery. As
soon as a beach has grown long enough to provide calm water inside,
marshes begin to make their appearance and spread fast or slowly,
depending on the proportions of mud and sand that are washed into the
embryonic harbor: the more mud, the faster the growth. So it happens
that there are as many salt marshes on the Cape as there are sandy
necks.

In brief, Cape Cod was created rough-hewn in something like its present
shape when the continent emerged out of chaos; later, two or three
glaciers gave it a covering of gravel and sand; and wind and tide have
been busy ever since putting on the finishing touches--some of them
rather extensive and none of them yet complete.

Inland, changes equally extensive but less varied have taken place.
One great transformation, indeed, covers them all: to-day no timber of
any account grows on the Cape. Formerly it was heavily wooded from end
to end with a wide variety of trees. The old records are unanimous on
this point. Provincetown itself--the most barren region of all--was
once covered with a thick mantle of woods. Mourt’s ‘Relation’ describes
the shore front as it looked to the Pilgrims when they saw it for the
first time from the deck of the Mayflower: ‘It is comaspsed about,
to the very sea with oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras and other sweet
woods.’ Bradford says ‘the whole countrie full of woods and thickets,
represented a wild and savage heiw.’ Even the sand hills of Long Point
were covered with a layer of good soil that supported considerable
vegetation: ‘They found ... the ground or earth sand hills much like
the Downes in Holland, but much better all wooded with oaks, pines,
sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, some ash, walnut, the wood for the
most part open and without underwood, fit to go or ride in.’ Obviously
the name ‘Wood End,’ given to a part of this Point, used to mean
something.

Not content with these bits of indisputable testimony,
tradition--persistent as tradition will always be while men remain
greedy for marvels--tradition perseveres in the assertion that large
trees once stood well out in what is now Provincetown Harbor, and
vanished when the shore line of those days was washed back to its
present position. Stranger things have happened in the history of Cape
Cod; but the evidence for this theory, consisting of the stumps of a
few trees that formerly appeared on the flats in front of Provincetown
at low tide, is hardly convincing, particularly when we reflect that
the tide--the only agent that could have performed this feat--has acted
in quite a different way only a mile or so up the shore, and, instead
of washing anything away, has built up a solid bar in front of the
entrance to East Harbor. However, tides have ways past finding out, and
anything is possible on a sea coast. Furthermore, the local historians
of Eastham and Dennis, not to be outdone, have reported similar stumps
on the flats off the Bay side of their towns.

There were trees enough on the Cape, anyhow, without going to sea for
them. Kendall in his travels took a trip down the Cape in 1807-08,
and, on reaching Truro, was sufficiently impressed with its forests to
call them ‘lofty.’ It was in Truro, too, that the Pilgrims became lost
in one stretch of woods and were torn to pieces by briars in another.
Clearly, then, its trees in those times bore small resemblance to the
scrub pine and oak that to-day comprise Truro’s ‘lofty’ forests.

The same story is repeated a little farther up the Cape at Wellfleet,
where, until the middle of the nineteenth century, the local
shipbuilder found plenty of oak and pine growing ready to hand. Many
of the fishing vessels and whalers that hailed from this town were
made of timber that once covered its present scrubby barrens. Bound
Brook Island, which now boasts hardly a tree, was well wooded a hundred
years ago. Eastham had all the woods its inhabitants could use for both
building and fuel until the end of the seventeenth century, when the
town fathers began to show signs of uneasiness at the dwindling supply.
It is in Eastham too that the crumbling outer shore has laid bare the
edge of a peat bog which for years supplemented its inhabitants’ supply
of fuel. There must have been woods enough there once, then.

Champlain reports that Chatham, except for the clearings where the
Indians had their villages, was overgrown with walnut, oak, and cedar.
Some fifty years later, when William Nickerson arrived there as its
first white settler, he found its hills still covered with forests of
oak, and the swamps filled with gigantic cedars. Dennis and Yarmouth,
like Wellfleet, built their own fishing vessels and packets, as well
as some crafts for neighboring towns, from lumber produced on the
premises. When the first settlers arrived in Barnstable in 1639, they
found, in the words of Amos Otis, ‘almost an unbroken wilderness’;
and more than a century later, in 1762, Deacon John Hinckley cut
timber for the East Parish Meeting-House at Barnstable in the woods
behind the village. Until 1711 there were enough pines on the common
lands to allow them to be boxed and milked. The surplus wood from the
Shootflying Hill region was exported to Boston by water. The Reverend
Timothy Dwight, traveling down the Cape about 1820, makes the startling
assertion that thirty vessels in Sandwich were likewise engaged in
this traffic. These items, covering most of the early settlements from
Provincetown to Sandwich, are enough to show that in its day the Cape
boasted a fair share of forests. But with a wanton extravagance that
ill accords with their frugality in other respects, the first settlers
demolished the timber wholesale. This ruthless conduct, strangely
enough, turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for by ruining the
soil, it drove the Cape Cod farmer to sea for a livelihood; and
there he won fame such as no farmer can ever hope for. But this is
trespassing on topics that belong to other chapters.

CHAPTER II

THE EXPLORERS

Like every other part of the Atlantic Coast from Newfoundland to the
Delaware Capes, Cape Cod is said to have been one of the ports of
call of the Norsemen in their coastwise tour about the year 1000. Of
evidence there is none. To identify the places described in their sagas
is like trying to identify the particular vintage that Homer had in
mind when he sang of the wine-dark sea. Human nature is too frail for
such a task, and too readily bends the large phrases of the sagas to
fit the contours of any desired landscape. We read, for example, that
Thorwald, an Icelandic Viking, younger brother of Leif the Lucky, was
shipwrecked at Provincetown, landed and built a house, and later was
buried there. An ancient stone cellar is the foundation of this theory.
Another authority asserts that his grave was in Plymouth. Somewhat
later, we are told, the Icelandic navigator Thorfinn Karlsefne was
so struck with the dazzling whiteness of the Monomoy Sands that he
called them the ‘Marvellous Strands,’ and then sailed up Buzzards Bay
and spent the winter near Woods Hole. But the wisest men and the best
authorities unite in their skepticism regarding all such alleged Norse
itineraries, and are content to leave the Cape shores unmolested by
white men for another six centuries, when Bartholomew Gosnold dropped
anchor off Provincetown.

Visitors there were, no doubt, before him--men who either sailed
past the Cape or landed on its shores, sometimes inadvertently, like
many a good mariner since. Doubtless John and Sebastian Cabot took a
look at Cape Cod on their way from Labrador to Virginia in 1498, but
their glances have not altered its history. Sailing in the opposite
direction, the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano rounded it on his way
north to the coast of Maine in 1524, but there is no evidence that
either of these navigators ever landed on the Cape. In 1609, Henry
Hudson, on the way to the discovery of the great river that bears
his name, may have allowed some of his men to land not far from
Provincetown and pick grapes, before sailing on past the Chatham
shore to New York. In 1611, Edward Harlow, an Englishman, raided the
Cape shores at various points and after several skirmishes carried
off two Indians. George Weymouth, another Englishman, after a narrow
escape from the Monomoy shoals in 1605, prudently decided to explore
some other region. His countryman, Thomas Dermer, who had formerly
been a captain on the New England coast under John Smith, came again
in 1619, and, even more restless than most explorers, paid flying
visits to the Cape with bewildering frequency, darting back and forth
between its shores and Monhegan Island, rescuing two Frenchmen who had
been shipwrecked three years before, getting himself captured by the
Indians, and finally sailing away for good to Virginia, where he died
of wounds received from the natives of Cape Cod. Other random visitors
there were, whom in the words of Captain John Smith ‘I must entreat to
pardon me for omitting,’ for their visits were of no consequence.

With Gosnold, however, the case was different, for he was the first
European whose voyage gives us any real information about the
appearance of the Cape at this early date. He sailed from Falmouth
early in the spring of 1602 in the ship Concord, with the object of
founding a colony in some agreeable spot, preferably one where gold was
abundant. After a voyage of a little over six weeks, his men ‘smelled
the land’ (they were real sailors), and the next day, May 14, they
sighted a spot on the Massachusetts coast somewhere near Bass Rock.
This place Gosnold named Savage Rock because some Indians sailed out in
a Biscay shallop to meet him there and paid a short visit on board the
Concord. He then sheared off Southwest and, sailing across the mouth
of Cape Cod Bay, sighted the end of the Cape. He called the Bay Shoal
Hope, and supposed, not unnaturally, that it cut off the end of the
Cape from the mainland. He did not investigate, however, but anchored
off the outer Beach behind Provincetown and, excited by the numbers
of codfish that surrounded his vessel, caught as many as he wanted
and named the land Cape Cod. This happy accident has been worthily
celebrated in a poem by Benjamin Drew, whose lively fancy justifies him
in taking certain liberties with the facts.

Gosnold went ashore, cut some firewood, made sure that the pebbles
on the beach were not nuggets of gold, had a friendly though
unilluminating encounter with a genial young Indian, and rowed back to
the Concord. So far things had gone well; but his troubles were about
to begin. He weighed anchor and headed south along the outside of the
Cape. After sailing about thirty-five miles, he was alarmed by surf
breaking on a point of land that projected across his course. In trying
to double this point, he narrowly escaped running aground on shoals
that stretched out from it, but finally, by a smart bit of seamanship,
he got safely into deep water and rounded the point. He called the
surf Tucker’s Terror and the point Point Care. Tucker’s Terror is best
identified as Île Nauset, a point of considerable size which once
stretched seaward from Eastham. Point Care was Gosnold’s name for the
northeast extremity of this point. Once around it, he breathed more
freely and, coming up under the mainland, anchored for the night. The
next day, May 17, a fresh breeze kicked up enough sea to show him that
he was not yet out of trouble, for it broke white on shoals that lay
off a sandy point to the south’ard.

The next morning the weather moderated, and Gosnold sent a boat to
test the depth of water off this point, which he called Point Gilbert,
now Monomoy Point. [See notes to Chapter II.] Next day he brought his
vessel safely round Monomoy and anchored well inside it. The following
morning he weighed anchor and coasted along westerly, passing an
opening which he judged to be the other end of Shoal Hope. This may
have been Lewis Bay in Hyannis, or possibly Cotuit Harbor. Because of
shallow water, Gosnold sailed by without investigating it and arrived
the same day at one of the Elizabeth Islands which he called Martha’s
Vineyard--not to be confused with the present large island of the same
name. Here he spent a day fishing and exploring. He sailed on past
another of the Elizabeth Islands, naming it Dover Cliff (perhaps a part
of the present island of Naushon) to the ‘stateliest Sound I ever was
in’--Buzzards Bay itself, which he named Gosnold’s Hope. He decided
to settle on an island that lay about ten miles off shore, which he
named Elizabeth’s Isle. But the crew were better sailors than they were
pioneers; and all wanted to go home. After a short sojourn, therefore,
during which they built a house and a fort and cut a cargo of cedar and
sassafras, the Concord set sail for Exmouth, June 17, and arrived in
the remarkably good time of thirty-six days.

The next explorer to visit the Cape was Champlain, an extremely
intelligent young Frenchman, a good cartographer, and a man whose
lively interest in anything new made him a keen observer. He made,
in fact, two expeditions to the Cape. The first one sailed early in
the summer of 1605, from the French colony on the St. Croix River, in
search of a warmer climate. He coasted along for a month, was hooked
in by the end of the Cape, took a look at Wellfleet with its harbor,
though he did not land, named it St. Suzanne de Cap Blanc, as being a
sort of adjunct to Provincetown (which he called Cap Blanc), rounded
the Cape, and, late in July, sailed into Nauset Harbor. He had to
hurry back for lack of provisions and so spent only three or four days
in Eastham. But he had seen enough to tempt him to come again the
following year.

Accordingly in the fall of 1606 Champlain again left the St. Croix
River, this time with Poutrincourt in command of the expedition, to
reëxplore the regions around Eastham and Chatham, still with a view,
albeit a somewhat vague one, of establishing a colony there. They were
a little out of their reckoning, and, instead of raising Provincetown,
as they intended, they dropped anchor an hour before daylight somewhere
inside Cape Cod Bay, two or three miles from land. As soon as it was
light, they went ashore in their tender and explored a harbor which
they called Port aux Huitres because of the abundance of oysters.
It has been thought that this was Wellfleet, but, as Champlain had
visited Wellfleet the year before and named it, he could hardly have
failed--accurate observer that he was--to recognize it now. Barnstable
Harbor is a better guess, for although there are no oysters there
to-day, huge oyster shells of great age are sometimes picked up on
the flats, and they may have been abundant in 1606. But before they
could land, a favorable slant of wind sprang up and proved a stronger
temptation than the lure of an unknown shore. They therefore sailed
fifteen miles northeast, rounded Provincetown, and arrived off Eastham,
which they named Mallebarre.

Here a southerly blow compelled them to anchor and Poutrincourt went
ashore, where he was greeted by a hundred and fifty inquisitive
Indians. When the weather moderated, they skirted the coast southerly,
got in trouble among the Monomoy shoals (which Champlain called Cape
Batturier), smashed their rudder, and, despairing of ever extricating
themselves without aid, anchored and went ashore in the shallop. They
found an Indian who consented to act as pilot, and brought him off to
the vessel, which he took safely round Monomoy Point into Stage Harbor,
Chatham. Some of the ship’s company stayed there to mend the rudder,
while others in the shallop coasted along southerly with an Indian as
guide. The strain of being alone among white men proved too great for
the Indian, and he took to the woods somewhere in the neighborhood of
Point Gammon. The Frenchmen were afraid to proceed without him, and
made their way back to Chatham.

The anchorage was so good that Poutrincourt was reluctant to leave,
and the explorers made themselves very much at home, taking frequent
excursions inland, inspecting the Indian villages, and doubtless
bringing back with them whatever of interest or value the country
yielded. They also built baking ovens on the shore, where they made
their bread. After this had gone on for a fortnight, the Indians
began to wonder what the end would be. A friendly visit was one
thing; a permanent settlement quite another; so they decided to speed
their guests into departure. Accordingly one afternoon they began to
take down their lodges and send the women and children off into the
woods. The French rightly interpreted these demonstrations as the
preliminaries of an attack, and toward evening Poutrincourt sent the
shallop ashore to bring off the men, for some of them always slept on
the beach near the ovens. But they found the shore more comfortable
than the ship, and refused to leave. The shallop returned without
them. Early in the morning, the Indians crept up on the shore party,
found all but one of them asleep, and let fly four hundred arrows,
such a volley that ‘to rise up was death.’ The Frenchmen fled in
bewildered disorder and with some losses, the Indians meanwhile making
a ‘desperate noise with roaring which it was terrible to hear.’ To add
to the confusion, the shallop, which started from the vessel to help
the fleeing Frenchmen, stuck on a sand bar, and the rescuers had to
jump overboard and plough their way ashore through the water. On their
arrival, the Indians fled, and the explorers, prudently concluding not
to follow them, buried their dead, erected a cross over the grave, and
returned to the bark.

No sooner were they aboard than the Indians emerged from the woods,
dug up the corpses and threw down the cross. The French went ashore
again, reburied the dead, replaced the cross, returned to their vessel,
and the next morning sailed away south, naming the place Port Fortuné
because of their disastrous experience there. They sighted what may
have been Martha’s Vineyard and perhaps saw Buzzards Bay, but head
winds made progress too slow with winter at hand. Discouraged and in an
ill frame of mind, they returned to vent their spleen on the Chatham
Indians. Their object was to carry off some of them as slaves, and to
accomplish their design they hatched a plot that would have done credit
to Machiavelli. This was the scheme: they would land and approach the
natives with a string of beads in one hand and a fathom of rope in the
other, and thus try to lure them into the shallop. If they refused to
be lured, the plan was to put the string of beads around the Indian’s
neck and at the same time lasso him with the rope; then he could be
dragged to the shallop. If, even though snared, the Indians proved ‘too
boisterous,’ they were to be held by the rope and stabbed to death. If,
by any chance, the stabbing failed, there were to be men standing by
with swords. Meanwhile cannon on the bark should be ready to fire on
any Indian reënforcements, and under this barrage the shallop was to
row out with its captives. This plot helps to explain, perhaps, why the
French were indifferent colonizers. It failed to bag any slaves, but a
few Indians were murdered according to schedule.

It is interesting, and not without significance, to contrast the
attitude of these Frenchmen toward Indian thieving with Gosnold’s.
One day after the latter had landed on the Elizabeth Islands, he
was visited by a party of inquisitive Indians. After they had been
parleying in friendly fashion for some time, the English saw an Indian
take a shield from the shallop and put it into a canoe. Gosnold called
the attention of the chief to the procedure, being curious to see what
authority he had over his subjects. Instantly the chief gave orders;
the shield was returned, and the day ended as genially as it had begun.
Truly with nations, as with individuals, there are diversities of
talents.

The next explorer of importance is the celebrated Captain John
Smith, who came in 1614. He is in one respect unique among the early
navigators of the New England coast; he thoroughly enjoyed the
business, and his accounts of his discoveries and of the beauties
and excellences of the country for any purpose, from mining gold to
raising corn, are full of the ardor of the enthusiast. His catalogue
of the abundance and variety of fish and game reads like ‘Swiss Family
Robinson,’ but it was substantially true. He had no doubt that gold
and copper were to be found with a little patience. Corn, he declared,
sprang into ripeness with unexampled speed. The climate was that of
Devonshire. But Smith did more than rhapsodize over New England; he
made an amazingly accurate map of its coast as far south as Cape Cod,
and he was honest enough to stop drawing where his own knowledge ended.
Thus we have a first-rate outline of the Bay side of the Cape, the best
sketch of Provincetown Harbor that had been done up to that date, and
the beginning of the back side about as far along as Truro. Farther
than that the Captain does not commit himself, but says that the
Indians tell him there are shoals beyond. Because of his candor here,
it is safe to conclude that what else he tells us of his coasting is
also true; that he skirted alongshore in a small boat, past Plymouth,
Sandwich, Barnstable, and so on out of the Bay and past Provincetown.
He stopped short of Île Nauset and it does not appear that he landed at
any of these places for more than an hour or so, here and there. Fish
and furs comprise the burden of his song, and, loading his vessel with
these and a little whale oil, he returned to England, leaving Captain
Thomas Hunt in command of the second ship to load with fish for Malaga.
The only foolish thing that Smith did was to try to alter Gosnold’s
name, Cape Cod, to Cape James. Happily this change never spread beyond
his own writings. Smith started another voyage to New England in 1615,
but fell in with pirates, and eventually returned home without reaching
our coast.

Hunt, realizing that he might never again have such a chance, seized
twenty-four Indians, some of them Nausets, and carried them to Spain
along with a cargo of fish. There he ‘sold those silly savages for
rials of eight,’ and thereby burned his bridges so far as New England
was concerned. Much pious indignation has been hurled at Hunt for this
transaction, and certainly Hunt was a villain. But his performance
differed from that of many generations of the descendants of his
critics merely in geography and in degree. He stole two dozen natives
from New England; they stole thousands from Africa. Yet they were men
who read their Bibles and were doubtless familiar with the parable of
the mote and the beam.

So far, all the men who visited the Cape were frankly explorers; love
of adventure and desire for gold tempted them to come, and when they
had had enough excitement and had looked in vain for the gold, they
sailed back again. Quite different from these irresponsible gentlemen
were the next arrivals on Cape soil--the Pilgrims in the Mayflower.

After a series of disappointments and deceptions that would have
utterly discouraged any mere explorers and would have killed any motive
but a stubborn desire to worship God as they chose--deceptions, too,
which so delayed their departure that they landed at the beginning of
a New England winter instead of in May or June--the Pilgrims, battered
and exhausted, sighted the end of Cape Cod and identified it with
rejoicing. They shaped their course so as to bring them outside it, and
began the last leg of their voyage, which was to land them somewhere
near the mouth of the Hudson River; but after half a day, they
encountered, as Gosnold had encountered before them, the white breakers
on Île Nauset, and despairing of finding a passage through them,
returned to the shelter of Provincetown Harbor, where they dropped
anchor on November 11, 1620. Provincetown was not the destination they
had had in mind, but after more than two months in the cramped quarters
of the Mayflower, any port and any land looked like the Garden of
Eden to these sea-weary voyagers. Not knowing how soon now they might
find themselves established on shore, and having, along with their
idealism, a good share of sturdy common sense, they decided to draw
up a constitution for their new government before they landed. This
measure was the more necessary as some adventurers, who, in spite of
precautions, had secured passage on the Mayflower, had been overheard
during the voyage in seditious boasts as to what they would do when
they got ashore; furthermore, the Pilgrims’ patent, being for Virginia,
was worthless in New England. They therefore assembled in the cabin and
composed the famous Mayflower Compact, the text of which follows:

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal
subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, by the grace of God,
of Great Britain, France, Ireland, King, defender of the faith, etc.

Having undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the
Christian Faith, and honor of our King and country, a voyage to plant
the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these
presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one
another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body
politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furthermore
of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute,
and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions,
offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and
convenient for the general good of the Colony: unto which we promise
all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunto
subscribed our names. Cape Cod, eleventh of November, in the year of
the reign of our sovereign Lord King James of England, France and
Ireland 18, and of Scotland 54. Anno Domini, 1620.

This document has been called the germ of our Declaration of
Independence; but such an interpretation is too sentimental. What the
Pilgrims did in this Compact was to assert the right to modify the
existing laws of England to suit new and unprecedented conditions
which they were sure to encounter in New England. Such right of
interpretation was often expressly granted in the patents given to
colonists, and was in accord with the general policy of the Virginia
Company, under whose ægis the Pilgrims had set sail. In drawing up
this Compact, therefore, they were merely assuming, here in New
England, rights which would have been theirs if they had landed, as
they expected, on territory that was under the Virginia Company’s
jurisdiction. There was nothing revolutionary or unprecedented about it.

After the first flush of gratitude at being safe in harbor had worn
off, sober second thoughts assailed the little band. They had reached
their goal and were face to face with the reality that heretofore they
had idealized. Bradford saw the solemnity of their situation clearly
and has expressed it with eloquence:

they had now no freinds to wellcome them, nor inns to entertiane or
refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes
to repaire too to seek for succoure.... And for the season it was
winter, and they that know the winters of that cuntrie know them to
be sharp and violent, and subjecte to cruell and feirce stormes,
deangerous to travill to known places, much more to search an unknown
coast. Besides, what could they see but a hidious and desolate
wildnes, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes ther
might be of them they knew not.... If they looked behind them,
ther was the mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a
maine barr and goulfe to seperate them from all civill parts of the
world....

From every point of view action was imperative. The shallop had been
damaged during the voyage, and several days would be needed to repair
it; so a number of them took the longboat and rowed ashore at Long
Point. They spent the day tramping about, keeping always a weather eye
open for Indians; but they saw none, and having walked perhaps as far
as what is to-day the west edge of the town, they returned at dusk to
the Mayflower, much refreshed by the excursion.

The next day was Sunday, and, though the shore must have looked to
the cramped voyagers as alluring as the Swiss landscape looked to the
Prisoner of Chillon, they stayed piously on board, thinking about
heaven and to-morrow. This Sunday, beyond a doubt, was the longest day
in the lives of any of them; but it passed, and on Monday morning,
November 13, all hands--Pilgrims, sailors and servants--hurried ashore,
landing in the very middle of the present shore front of Provincetown.
While the women were busy washing the clothes, the men dragged the
damaged shallop up above high-water mark for repairs. Two days later,
under the command of Captain Miles Standish, a party of sixteen,
wearing corselets and armed with swords and muskets, set out to explore
the region. The party proceeded alongshore for a little way, heading
east, in single file and at equal intervals: the Captain was a believer
in military discipline. But before long they forgot their marching
order in the excitement of following a couple of Indians that they saw
running inland. The Pilgrims, hoping to find the Indians’ village, and
guided by the footprints of the natives in the sand, persevered in the
unequal race, until nightfall found them close to the Back Beach and
near Stout’s Creek (a branch of East Harbor). Here they camped for the
night, and the next morning, still following the Indians’ footprints,
they made their way round the head of East Harbor Creek, and lost the
trail in some pines. They had to plough through briars that ‘tore
their very armour in pieces,’ until finally, suffering severely from
thirst and fatigue, they came upon a spring near the edge of the marsh
behind High Head, in Truro. Here they drank their first draughts of
New England water and stopped for a rest. Disappointed in their hope
of finding any Indian settlements, they decided to make for the mouth
of Pamet River, of which they had caught glimpses from the deck of the
Mayflower, on the chance that this region might turn out to be a good
place to settle.

With this goal in mind they headed for the shore of the Bay, and
skirted the water’s edge southeasterly, through the present villages
of North Truro and Truro, where they came upon Indian stubble fields
and graves. They poked round a bit in the graves, but took nothing,
thinking, as they piously expressed it, ‘that it would be odious unto
them to ransack their sepulchres.’ They had no scruples, however, about
helping themselves to some corn that they found a bit farther on,
buried in grass baskets in the sand. They took away as much of this as
they could carry, and also a ship’s kettle which they found with it.

On their way back, the Pilgrims, after spending the night on the shore
of the pond that gives Pond Village its name, lost themselves in the
woods while trying to make their way round the head of East Harbor
Creek, and finally came out on the Back Beach not far from Highland
Light. Here they got their bearings once more and returned to the
Mayflower, where they found their friends enjoying themselves ashore
while the carpenters hammered away on the shallop. This expedition is
known as the First Discovery.

For the next ten days all hands busied themselves pleasantly, cutting
wood, fashioning axe-helves and getting into condition again after
the enforced idleness of the long voyage. At the end of that time the
shallop was ready, and on November 27 a party of thirty-four, including
Captain Jones, set out for Pamet River, Truro. The weather was
bitterly cold, and their boat was driven for shelter into East Harbor;
in getting ashore every one was forced to wade knee deep, and this,
with the subsequent night of exposure, gave them colds from which some
of the party never recovered. Rather than spend the night shivering,
half the group set out alongshore on foot toward Pamet River, and
were picked up next morning by the shallop. They landed on Indian
Neck between the two branches of the river. The ground was frozen and
covered with snow; so after an abortive excursion inland, they returned
to the spot where they had previously found the corn, and helped
themselves to some ten bushels more, naming the place Cornhill. Jones
then returned to the Mayflower, taking with him the corn and a number
of sick men.

The next day those who remained continued their explorations and came
upon some more Indian graves, and one in which the bodies of a child
and a sailor had been buried together. Truly more things than are known
occurred around Provincetown before 1620. They found also a couple
of Indian houses, which had apparently been abandoned in hot haste,
for utensils of all sorts were lying about. ‘Some of the best things
we took away with us,’ says Mourt’s ‘Relation,’ ‘and left the houses
standing still as they were.’ The theft of the corn can be excused,
for hunger is a stern dictator; but how is such filching as this to
be justified? Toward evening they returned to the shallop, which had
arrived to pick them up, and reached the Mayflower the same night.
There they learned of the birth, during their absence, of Peregrine
White, the first English child to be born in New England. This
excursion is known as the Second Discovery.

The third and last Discovery was undertaken only after considerable
discussion. Truro looked so good to some of the Pilgrims that they were
in favor of settling there, believing that they might go farther and
fare worse. But another and more adventurous group was for making wider
explorations before they came to a decision. This party prevailed, and,
on December 6, ten Pilgrims and eight sailors, under command of Miles
Standish, set out in the shallop in freezing weather to examine the
whole Bay shore. Their pilot, one Robert Coppin, told them of a place
where he had once been, ‘on the other headland of this Bay almost
right over against Cape Cod, being a right line not much above eight
leagues distant.’ This, Coppin said, he and his fellow explorers had
named Thievish Harbor because an Indian had stolen a harpoon from them
there. It was of course none other than Plymouth. This place, it was
decided, should be the limit of their explorations, and if they found a
good spot nearer at hand, so much the better.

They had no more than started when the whole party were drenched with
spray which froze as fast as it struck them, but they persevered and
coasted along as far as Billingsgate Point. In sailing across the
mouth of the harbor, they grounded on the Eastham flats and waded
ashore through icy water, a process they were beginning to regard as
inevitable. They spent the night round a fire on the beach, and in
the morning part of them explored Wellfleet Harbor, named it Grampus
Bay from the numbers of stranded blackfish they found, and returned
to their first landing-place at Eastham. Here they were joined by the
rest of the party, who had struck inland and who returned at night with
the report that they had found more elaborate and extensive Indian
burying grounds than any they had yet seen, and had also come upon the
dismantled frames of a few Indian houses. They all camped again on the
beach, barricaded against a possible attack.

In the gray of the dawn, while they were preparing to embark, the
attack came; some shots were exchanged amid great excitement and
confusion on the part of the Pilgrims; but nobody was hurt, and the
Indians soon withdrew. The affair seems to have been a mere flash of
hostility rather than an organized onslaught, but it so impressed the
settlers that they named the spot the First Encounter.

After this lively interruption, they continued coasting along and soon
ran into bad weather with a high wind and such a thick snowstorm that
they sailed past the entrance to Barnstable Harbor without seeing it.
The wind increased until by the middle of the afternoon it was blowing
a gale. Their rudder broke, and their mast snapped in three pieces.
They were in grave danger of swamping at any moment. However, they
found to their joy that they were off Clark’s Island at the mouth of
Plymouth Harbor, and managed to make a landing there. They shivered
through the night in the rain, and spent the next two days thawing out
and resting. On Monday morning, December 11, they made their way into
Plymouth Harbor, where they found cleared land all ready to be occupied
and plenty of fresh water. This they decided was the very place they
had been looking for; they had had enough exploring to last them for a
long time. They, therefore, sailed back straight across the mouth of
Cape Cod Bay, carrying the good news to those who had stayed on the
Mayflower. On the morning of December 15, the Mayflower set sail from
the anchorage where she had lain for more than a month, and the next
day dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor. This was on a Saturday. The
piety of the Pilgrims would allow them to do nothing until Monday; so
they waited within a stone’s throw of the goal they had been seeking
through so many weary months, and did not go ashore until the Sabbath
lay behind them.

CHAPTER III

THE INDIANS

When the Mayflower dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor, and her weary
passengers at last had a chance to stand on a steady deck and look
about them, they saw a shore wooded to the water’s edge as far as the
eye could reach. So, as a matter of fact, was all the rest of the Cape:
a virgin wilderness, with mile on mile of continuous forest. But there
was more than vegetation to be found by one who was explorer enough to
pierce the veil; for the Pilgrims, instead of carving a republic from
a western wilderness, stumbled into an organized community. Behind the
screen of pine and oak were clearings dotted with Indian dwellings and
connected by well-worn paths with other groups of dwellings. These were
villages in the strictest sense: no chance camping grounds of nomadic
savages, but fixed abodes, inhabited by generation after generation of
natives. It was no joke to make a clearing big enough for a village in
such woods as used to cover the Cape; and natural clearings were few
and far between. Once they had hewn out such an area with their stone
axes, the Indians kept it, for they were not adventurous, and preferred
other forms of exercise to wood-chopping.

The trails that connected these villages were established routes
fixed after long and painful experience. That they were indeed paths
of least resistance is shown by the fact that many of the Cape roads
to-day follow these Indian trails. One of them led up the Cape from
Eastham to Yarmouth and was so much used by the settlers that it was
beaten into a dusty bridle-path and then into a wagon-road. To-day it
is substantially the route of the macadamized highway between these
two towns. At Yarmouth this trail was cut diagonally by a famous
thoroughfare that ran across the Cape from Hyannis. Another main artery
of Indian travel was the famous trail from Sandwich off the Cape to
Plymouth. No doubt, too, a path through the woods connected Yarmouth
and Sandwich. At all events, there was a much-used trail across the
Cape at Barnstable that has never ceased its usefulness; it is now
known as Mary Dunn’s Road. In short, the Pilgrims landed, not in a
wilderness, but in a region that had been settled for nobody knows how
many hundred years; a region that had its villages and its roads, its
organization and its traditions. So much is certain, although little
enough is known about its inhabitants.

All Cape Indians belonged nominally to the Wampanoags, but thanks to
the geographical isolation of the Cape, each little tribe--and there
were half a dozen or more of them--was free to go its own gait under
its own sachem. Massasoit had no control over them. King Philip tried
in vain to enlist them as allies. They were independent, peace-loving,
and non-progressive. At Falmouth were the Succonessitts. The tribe
that lived in and near Sandwich called themselves Manomets; those at
Barnstable and Yarmouth were Mattakees and Cummaquids; the Monomoyicks
occupied what is now Chatham; the Nausets controlled Eastham, and the
northernmost group, who lived in the neighborhood of Truro, were called
Pamets.

The notion that Indians lived only in wigwams receives a blow when one
begins to read what the early explorers have to say on the subject.
Wigwams existed, it is true, on the Cape as elsewhere, but the early
accounts say little about them and a good deal about a different sort
of structure, with a skeleton of sapling-poles bent into the shape of
horseshoes about seven feet high, with both ends stuck into the ground.
For greater stability a ridgepole was sometimes fastened along the top.
Over these ribs the builder stretched heavy mats, woven from the long
thatch that bordered every creek in the marshes. The door was another
mat hung over an opening so small that it was necessary to crawl to
get through it. These dwellings usually had an inner lining of mats of
finer texture, embroidered with colored grass and porcupine quills. The
floor consisted of mats spread on the ground.

All the houses were small, only big enough for a single family. In
the middle of the floor a circle of stones served as a fireplace, and
directly above, a hole in the roof let out the smoke. Beds were the
most conspicuous items of furniture, and consisted of three or four
thicknesses of mats. Sometimes these were raised a little off the
ground on stakes.

Such houses were almost never found isolated, for Indians were more
gregarious than whites. The remote New England farmhouse, standing a
mile or two from its nearest neighbor and ten miles from a town, had
no prototype among the Cape Cod Indians. Sometimes, to be sure, the
number of dwellings was small. Bradford and his band, for example,
came upon a group of only two, but probably these were what was left
of a larger number that had been moved away on the arrival of the
Mayflower. Champlain reports ‘large numbers of little houses’ seen on
an expedition inland from Chatham, and describes Nauset Harbor as ‘very
spacious, being perhaps three or four leagues in circuit, entirely
surrounded by little houses, around each one of which there was as much
land as the occupant needed for his support.’

The sites of these settlements could be pretty well determined to-day
by the shell deposits that accumulated beside them, even if we had no
contemporary historians to tell us where they were. Such shell heaps
are found in every town on the Cape from Truro to Buzzards Bay and on
both the north and south shores. For the most part they are close to
salt water, for the Indians, like their white successors, regarded
the inland of the Cape (except for hunting purposes) as merely a
distance to be covered in getting from one shore to the other. The few
settlements that they did make inland lay along the banks of great salt
creeks like Bass River, or beside ponds like the mill ponds behind
North Brewster. But the great permanent villages were alongshore.

Of the tools and weapons found on the sites of these villages little
need be said, for they hardly differ from those used by Indians
throughout the country. The isolation of the Cape, though it increased
the natives’ happiness, retarded their progress. Their implements,
therefore, were less elaborate than those made by Western Indians;
but the same sort of objects are found: stone arrow- and spear-heads;
knives; scrapers; the usual types of stone axes and grooved hammers;
occasionally a finely polished pendant, and more rarely still a
sacramental banner-stone showing fine workmanship. Once in a great
while a stone pipe turns up, but none so elaborate as the Western
specimens. Cape Indians had no need to make pipes out of stone: they
used wooden pipes and lobster claws, and no doubt corncobs. Stone
pestles are common enough, but mortars are very rare and of enormous
size, obviously village property placed at some central point to be
used by any member of the group, like our town pumps. They made pottery
out of a mixture of clay and broken shell, surprisingly thin and light,
and frequently decorated with criss-cross patterns and scalloped
rims. Many implements of all kinds were made of shell--needles, hoes,
arrow-heads, pendants, and the like, but these have nearly all vanished.

A significant fact about all these objects is that they are made almost
without exception from local material. As far as the raw stuff for
manufacture went, the Cape Indians were as self-sufficient as they were
in the matter of food and clothing. One may pick up, for example, a
thousand arrow-heads made from local stone, for one of copper. Gosnold,
to be sure, mentions seeing an Indian off Chatham adorned with a copper
pendant a foot long, but the copper for this, and for the arrow-heads
as well, is more likely to have come from a wrecked French fishing
vessel than from the utterly unknown and remote Michigan Indians.

One exception to this rule must be noted. Fragments of soapstone
pottery are frequently found on the Cape and one soapstone pipe was
picked up in Harwich Port. As no native soapstone exists anywhere
on Cape Cod, this must have been imported from Johnston, Rhode
Island, where quarries exist that are known to have been worked by
the Narragansetts. One clay pipe of an elaboration beyond the powers
of the local Indians has been found near Bourne. But with these two
exceptions, the Cape tribes made their implements from local materials.

Before the arrival of the whites, wampum seems to have been used merely
for ornament, never for money. For this reason there was not much of it
in evidence. The Plymouth men had no idea of its value until Rasière,
on a visit to them from New Amsterdam, explained that the Dutch were
using it in trading with the New York Indians; he sold the Plymouth
settlers a lot of it, but it took Bradford two years to get rid of
it to the Indians. After that, however, it went better. Two kinds of
wampum existed on the Cape--white and black. The white was made from
the stems of periwinkle shell; the black from the purplish part of the
inside of quahaug shells. This was worth twice as much as the white, or
about twopence a bead.

The natives of the Cape were in no proper sense of the word nomadic.
They found living easy where they were, and saw no reason to change.
They were led away by no wandering herds of buffalo--like the Western
tribes--and had no fixed seasons for hunting. Every creek was full
of eels; every flat thick-sown with clams; most harbors had oysters.
The marshes teemed with ducks and geese, snipe and plover. Deer were
abundant in the woods, and to make hunting easier they burned out
the underbrush whenever it grew too thick--a maneuver called ‘firing
the woods.’ They spread nets for fish, and set snares for wolves and
deer, so shrewdly concealed that young William Bradford was caught in
one at Provincetown on his first excursion ashore from the Mayflower.
Beans were sometimes planted in the same hill with corn--a sort of
embryonic succotash. If the ground was poor, they spread herring over
it for fertilizer and spaded it with sea-clam shells. They stored up
their surplus corn by the simple method of burying it in grass baskets
three or four feet deep in the sand, where it kept perfectly. By way
of luxuries they may have raised tobacco, but this is quite as likely
to have been a weed called poke. At all events they smoked poke, but
perhaps they had a little real tobacco too. What wonder that they were
content with their lot, and wisely concluded that their lines were
fallen unto them in pleasant places?

Champlain speaks of the neat appearance of the Nauset girls. It would
be pleasant to lend unqualified endorsement to this view, but sailors
are not always discriminating in matters of feminine beauty. It was a
long time since Champlain had seen any women, and he doubtless looked
on the Nauset maidens with a tolerant eye. The Indians wore no clothes
to speak of until cold weather forced them into a single lower garment
of deerskin that served for both trousers and stockings, with another
deerskin worn loosely over the upper part of the body. Champlain
mentions a short grass garment, open in front, that some of the Nausets
wore when they visited his ship. One woman, he says, had a red deerskin
tunic, the borders of which were ornamented with little shells. Both
sexes frequently painted their faces red, black, and yellow, in
whatever designs they fancied, and indulged at times in elaborate
hairdressing that involved feathers, foxtails, and similar adornments.
But these, like their clothes, appeared only on state occasions.

But we have already spent more time on his costume than ever an Indian
did! Let us turn to the baffling question of his character. Certain of
the traditional Indian traits are too well known to need more than the
briefest mention. Such qualities as stoicism in pain and remembrance
of injuries may be taken for granted. But quiet endurance of torture
seems to be about the only sort of restraint the Indians practiced;
in most respects they were like children, and restraint is not in the
nature of children or of primitive man. It is no surprise, therefore,
to learn that even the best of them were gluttons in the presence of
food. They ate as much as they could whenever they had it. No less
a dignitary than Massasoit himself--though just recovering from an
almost fatal attack of indigestion--was powerless before the savor of
a fat wild duck, and nearly killed himself by devouring it against
the excellent Puritanical advice of Winslow. An incident that further
illustrates their childishness occurred when some of Iyanough’s men had
stolen certain trinkets from Miles Standish on one of his excursions
from Plymouth to Yarmouth for food. The Captain, with characteristic
brusqueness, demanded their instant return. The Indians gathered round
with wide-eyed protestations of innocence, while the culprit slipped
down to the boat and placed the stolen articles on board. He then
returned with the glad tidings that they hadn’t been stolen after all,
but had been overlooked by the impetuous Standish.

A good deal of discussion has been indulged in, first and last, on
this question of Indian honesty, and wise men have raised their voices
on both sides. It would be foolish to try to show that the Cape Cod
Indians--or any other Indians--were not ready thieves. But if they
stole oftener than civilized men, so did they more often return the
stolen goods; and it is doubtful whether at any period of Cape Cod
history the permanent losses suffered by the whites at the hands of the
Indians have been more numerous than those suffered by the Indians at
the hands of the whites.

The Indians were frequently dishonorable. It may be, indeed, that they
cared nothing for honor. Thomas Dermer would have said so, for one.
It was his misfortune in 1619 to be captured by the Monomoyicks near
Chatham. They demanded a ransom from his crew. It was paid. ‘But,’ says
Dermer bitterly, ‘I was [then] as far from liberty as before.’ Such
perfidy would be shocking enough but for the cheering reflection that
Lord Bacon himself, at about this time, was profiting by the same sort
of ethics in the High Courts of Justice in England. It would be prudent
to preface all criticisms of aboriginal honor with Addison’s dictum,
‘None but men of fine parts deserve to be hanged.’

Of their utter savagery at times there can be no doubt. Not even the
graves of dead enemies were sacred. Champlain was horrified when the
natives dug up the bodies which he had buried and threw down the cross
he had erected over their graves. He had not the gift of prophecy and
could not foresee that when another century and a half had wheeled
round, purging the gentle weal as it revolved, a London sexton would
exhume from the graveyard the body of a child and leave it on the
parents’ doorstep because they were slow with the burial fee. Indian
atrocities were in fact no more than manifestations of the same cruelty
that has existed in all human beings, in all countries, in all ages.

A pleasanter characteristic of the Cape Cod Indians was their amazing
friendliness to the white men--at first to those fleeting voyagers to
the Cape shores, and afterwards to the permanent settlers there. This
friendliness is strongly marked among the Cape Indians. It singles them
out from among all the other tribes of the New World. It made enemies
for them among their own kind. Why they were friendly is a mystery.
Many considerations help to explain it; none of them--nor all of them
together--quite succeeds. But a few instances when their friendliness
appeared may furnish a hint of the answer.

In the spring of 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold anchored off the south
shore of the Cape somewhere between Eastham and Monomoy. The
apprehension which he felt when he saw his vessel surrounded by a
fleet of canoes full of Indians quickly vanished before their friendly
gestures, and he bore no malice for the loss of a few articles to which
they inconspicuously helped themselves. When he landed on one of the
Elizabeth Islands, he was cheered to find that there too the Indians
were on the whole friendly and helpful. His decision to abandon his
purpose of settlement was in no way attributable to their attitude.

The Indian who did more than any one else to keep his fellow tribesmen
amicable to the whites was Squanto (sometimes called Tisquantum).
He appeared at Plymouth very soon after the Mayflower, with the
great Massasoit, and acted as interpreter in drawing up a treaty of
peace which that chief made with the colonists. When Massasoit left
Plymouth, Squanto stayed behind, perhaps because Plymouth was his
native place; perhaps because he fared better with the whites than
with his own people; perhaps, as Bradford devoutly declared, ‘because
he was a special instrument sent of God for their good beyond their
expectation’; perhaps, as Winslow asserts, because he ‘wished to make
himself great in the eyes of his countrymen ... not caring who fell, so
he stood.’ At all events, he stayed with them, showed them how to plant
corn and catch fish, and took them ‘to unknown places for their profit.’

One of his first helpful exploits was in connection with a worthless
youngster named John Billington, who was always in trouble and who this
time got lost in the woods. Less rigorous consciences than the Plymouth
men’s would have ascribed this happy accident to God’s will and would
have persuaded them that they were well rid of the young pest. But the
stern daughter of the voice of God sent them off in search of him, and
ten men, with Squanto as their guide, set out by water for the Bay side
of Eastham. They spent the night in their boat, which had grounded
at low tide on the Yarmouth flats, and in the morning were cordially
greeted by some Indians who were lobstering alongshore, and who told
them that the boy was safe at Nauset. They accepted an invitation to
land and take breakfast with the savages, and were warmly received by
the young chief Iyanough, whose ‘cheare was plentiful and various.’

The white men were chagrined to find here an old woman who wept
and wailed at the sight of them--the first Englishmen she had ever
seen--because her three sons had been sold into slavery by the
unscrupulous Captain Hunt. Notwithstanding this untoward incident,
the visit passed off in friendly style, and Iyanough himself escorted
them in their shallop to Nauset, and on arriving, went off inland with
Squanto to tell Aspinet, the sachem, what they had come for. Here again
the sins of the settlers rose up to confound them, for they met the
owner of some corn they had helped themselves to when first they had
landed at Provincetown. They satisfied him, however, with promises of
payment, and this incident, too, was amicably closed.

Soon a great number of Indians arrived with Aspinet, bringing the lost
boy. They waded out to the shallop, carrying him in their arms lest
he wet his feet, and returned him bedecked with beads. The settlers
bestowed two knives on the Indians and sailed away. They stopped again
at Yarmouth on the way back, where Iyanough supplied them with fresh
water and a necklace, and then they squared away for Plymouth.

The friendliness of the Indians throughout this expedition is of
capital significance. If they had wished to wipe out the Plymouth
Colony, this was their chance, for by killing the ten men who comprised
the crew of the shallop, they would have reduced the number of
able-bodied settlers by more than half, thereby delivering what would
probably have been a fatal blow. But the Englishmen, instead of getting
arrows between their ribs or knives in the back, received food, water,
information, guidance, and presents. The next year the Monomoyicks
of Chatham supplied Bradford with eight hogsheads of corn and beans,
thereby pulling the Colony through a severe shortage of food.

In the winter of 1626, the Nausets had another chance to help the
settlers. An English vessel, probably the Sparrowhawk, bound for
Virginia with prospective colonists, came ashore near Eastham. She
was not much damaged, and could be made seaworthy again if materials
could be had. The shipwrecked men had hardly got ashore when they
were approached by a group of Indians who asked if they were Governor
Bradford’s men and offered to carry the news of the disaster to
Plymouth. This offer, as a matter of fact, was made out of friendship
to Bradford rather than from any special desire to help the new
arrivals, for the Indians on the Cape had agreed to notify the Governor
of any ‘roving ships upon the coast.’ However, the offer was eagerly
accepted, Indian runners were dispatched over the forest trails to
Plymouth, and in due time Bradford himself arrived, bringing spikes and
oakum. The vessel was repaired, but was again smashed by a storm before
she could set sail, this time beyond hope of repair. So with Indians
as guides, the newcomers betook themselves bag and baggage overland
to Plymouth, having received Bradford’s permission to sojourn there
temporarily.

Five years later, in the winter of 1631, occurred an instance of Indian
humanity worthy of the good Samaritan himself. Richard Garrett, a
Boston cobbler, set sail in January for Plymouth with his daughter and
a crew of four men. They were blown by a northerly gale across Cape Cod
Bay and came ashore somewhere near Barnstable. Two of the men started
out on foot for Plymouth and on the way met two Indians, one of whom
went along with them, while the other went back to help those who had
stayed with the boat. He found them almost frozen, built a shelter
over them and started a fire to thaw them out. Garrett died very soon,
whereupon the Indian with his tomahawk chopped a grave in the frozen
ground and laid him in it, covering the spot with a pile of brush to
protect it from wolves. Garrett’s daughter and one of the men survived.
The two who had started for Plymouth died--one at the Manomet trading
post, and the other on arriving at Plymouth.

It is true that two or three instances of hostility occurred between
the Cape tribes and various explorers who visited its shores from time
to time. At first glance, these skirmishes seem to contradict the
thesis of Indian friendliness, but a little consideration will show
that they were the result of panic, or else were acts of justified
retaliation for wanton aggressions of the whites.

The first of them was Champlain’s unpleasant experience with the
Nausets in 1605. The trouble started with a tactless performance on the
part of one of Champlain’s men. Some of his sailors had gone ashore for
water near Eastham, and a group of Indians had returned the compliment
by going aboard the vessel for a friendly visit. As one of the shore
party was filling a copper kettle from a brook, an Indian snatched it
from his hand and made off into the woods. The French, with all their
virtues, are an impulsive folk. One of them instantly pursued the
fugitive, while the rest shouted to the men on the vessel to shoot.
The Frenchmen fired muskets, and the Indians who were aboard, seeing
that something was amiss, dived over the side and headed for shore--all
but one, whom the sailors seized and bound. Panic is contagious. The
Indians who were ashore, hearing the shouts and seeing their comrades
take to the water, killed the Frenchman who had had the kettle. Some
more shots were fired from the ship, and a landing party went ashore
to bury the dead man. The whole affair was unfortunate and quite
unnecessary. If, instead of flying off the handle and beginning to
shout and shoot the minute the kettle was stolen, the French had kept
calm and demanded its return from the chief, the chances are they
would have got it with apologies. At worst they would have lost only a
kettle instead of a kettle and a man. A few hours later, a delegation
of Indians came to apologize. Champlain bore no malice and released the
prisoner that had been held on board.

His encounter with the Chatham Indians the next year was more serious,
and no amount of sentimentality can interpret it as friendly. One
thing, however, is clear. A fortnight’s association with the Frenchmen
turned the Indians from friends into enemies. If they had wished to
destroy the newcomers at the outset, they need only have stood on the
shore and watched the vessel pound her bottom out on the worst shoals
on the Atlantic Coast. Instead, they piloted her into the harbor. They
could even have piloted her wrong and led the explorers into certain
destruction. There was something, clearly, in the attitude of the
Frenchmen--in particular in the aspect of their excursions inland--that
offended or alarmed the Indians so seriously that they tried to kill
the same men whom two weeks before they had saved from the Monomoy
breakers. It is unfortunate that our only account of the affair is from
the French angle.

[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S DRAWING OF THE FIGHT WITH THE INDIANS AT
CHATHAM]

The Indians were slow to forget injuries. Fourteen years later,
the Nausets, remembering the experience that their neighbors, the
Monomoyicks, had had with Champlain, attacked the Pilgrims who landed
at Eastham in the course of the Third Discovery. Obviously the Indians
supposed that these white men were the same sort of people as the
French. But as soon as they learned their mistake, they changed their
attitude, and on more than one occasion saved these very men from
starvation.

[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S MAP OF NAUSET HARBOR]

[Illustration: CHAMPLAIN’S MAP OF CHATHAM, SHOWING INDIAN HOUSES AND
MONOMOY]

The rumor of one more war must be silenced before the road is clear
for pleasanter topics. In March, 1623--in the midst of genial passages
between the Cape Indians and their white neighbors at Plymouth--Winslow
refers to a proposed insurrection of the Massachusetts Indians against
Weston’s colony of demoralized Londoners at Wessagussett. It is no
wonder that they wanted to destroy these persons, whose actions filled
the Plymouth men with pious horror and the Indians with scorn. The
plot would not have come within the scope of this volume had not
these Massachusetts Indians induced their brothers on the Cape to
plan an attack on Plymouth at the same time. Such, at any rate, was
the story that Massasoit told to Hobbamock--a staunch friend of the
Plymouth settlers--with instructions that he should report it to
Winslow. Massasoit’s motive was gratitude to Winslow for having cured
him of indigestion. According to him, all the Cape tribes except the
Monomoyicks were involved in the conspiracy.

Here, then, is a fine state of affairs, coming as it does in the midst
of our protestations of Indian friendliness. But there is no reason
for becoming any more exercised about it than the settlers did. They
ordered Miles Standish to take as many men as he needed and march
off north to annihilate the Indians of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
By this procedure they deliberately deprived their town of its chief
military officer and an important fraction of its fighting men. To
be sure, Standish, always fond of the spectacular, took only eight
men with him, but eight men were a good many in the condition of the
Colony. Remember that two years before, ten men had comprised more
than half of its fighting force. Furthermore, the Governor and Council
were themselves surprised that the Captain took so few; they had been
ready to part with more.

This action when rightly interpreted, is significant. If the Plymouth
Colony had felt that there was real danger of an attack from the Cape
Indians from the south, they would hardly have sent off Standish and
his men to the north; for though blood is indeed thicker than water,
and the Pilgrims were ready to help Weston’s colony if they could, yet
the blood in our own veins is thicker than that in our neighbors’, and
not even the New England consciences of the Plymouth settlers would
have jeopardized their own hard-won existence for the sake of saving
profligate countrymen from a fate that they richly deserved. If, then,
the men most immediately threatened by this alleged conspiracy of
the Cape took such a cavalier attitude toward it, there is no reason
to regard it as more than a rumor. Furthermore, the event justified
their nonchalance. No attack materialized; the strength of their newly
completed fort was never put to the test; and though they were stern
believers in punishment where punishment was deserved, they never made
the slightest move to punish the Indians of Cape Cod. It looks very
much as if Winslow, through the alchemy of a close perspective, raised
a dense cloud of smoke from a very small spark.

So much for the question of Indian friendliness. For the next fifty
years all was quiet among them. Then came the formidable war declared
by King Philip--and what the Cape Indians did at that critical
period will appear in due time. These fifty years, however, formed
an important epoch in their history; for it brought them their first
lessons in the rudiments of civilized life. By 1644 the first four
permanent settlements on the Cape had been made--at Sandwich, Yarmouth,
Barnstable, and Eastham; and as time went on, the pious citizens
of these towns felt moved to spread the gospel among their heathen
neighbors and so were brought for the first time in contact with the
primitive but in some ways beautiful religion of the Cape Indians.

This is a tantalizing subject because our information is so meager.
Our ancestors felt small interest in what they regarded as the bizarre
paganism of the aborigines and were at small pains to leave exact
information about it. The following facts are taken from Winslow’s
somewhat sketchy observations among the Indians just off the Cape in
the neighborhood of Buzzards Bay.

Two major gods, it seems, presided over the Indian destinies. The
greater of these they called Kiehtan. He was their creator and the
creator of all else besides, earth and sea, sky and stars. The
naturalness of the Adam and Eve story as an explanation for man’s
existence on the earth is strikingly illustrated by the Indian idea
that Kiehtan had first created one man and one woman from whom they all
were descended. Kiehtan lived in heaven, and to him went the spirits
of all the dead; to be admitted if they had been good; otherwise to be
sentenced to a wretched and restless existence of aimless wandering
in a sort of Cimmerian fog. They prayed to Kiehtan for good crops and
good weather and offered him sacrifices if their prayers were answered.
Apparently they ran no risk of wasting a sacrifice before the event.
Kiehtan seems to have been a somewhat remote deity. That he was at
least partly analogous to the Christian God appears from a conversation
which Winslow had with an Indian named Combatant, who, observing that
he asked a blessing before meat and returned thanks after it, asked
what the significance of the ceremony was. Winslow explained as simply
as he could, and Combatant, nodding his comprehension, remarked that
the Indians held much the same belief, but called the god Kiehtan. It
is prudent to suggest, however, that this remark was probably born of
the childish desire of all primitive peoples not to be outdone.

The other great divinity of the Indians was Habbamock. He was less
powerful than Kiehtan, but more active, and held particular sway over
the realm of disease. He disclaimed all connection with fatal diseases,
however, ascribing them to Kiehtan and asserting that he himself dealt
only in curable ailments, and was always ready to cure them if properly
approached. This approach could be made by only two classes of Indians,
the _powahs_, or medicine-men, and the _pnieses_. Obviously Habbamock’s
reluctance to associate himself with fatal illness was a canny
invention of these medicine-men to cover their retreat when their cures
failed. He appeared to them, so they declared, sometimes as a man, but
more often in the form of a bird or other animal--usually a snake.

The powahs, in effecting their cures, worked themselves into a state
of frenzy with loud cries and wails and other antics of so strenuous a
nature that the sweat stood out on their bodies and foam on their lips.
Clearly an Indian sick-bed was not a couch of roses. Winslow remarks
that when he visited Massasoit in his illness, these medicine-men
were ‘in the midst of their charms, making such a hellish noise as
it distempered us that were well, and therefore unlike to ease him
that was sick.’ It need hardly be observed that the office of Powah
furnished a fine chance for hypocrisy and false practice.

The pnieses were quite different from the powahs, and were the finest
specimens, both mentally and physically, in the tribe--a combination
of priest and warrior and statesman. To become a pniese a man had to
undergo a rigorous and savage training that would have discouraged or
killed any but the sturdiest. They had little to do with religion, but
were constantly summoned to councils of state. They were the chosen
advisers of the sachem and the most powerful fighters in war. A sort of
divinity hedged them in battle, the prestige of which enabled them, we
are told, to put a hundred of the enemy to flight single-handed. There
is a Homeric quality about these pnieses that suggests the prowess of
Achilles and the wisdom of Nestor. But since their religious activities
received only a small part of their attention, no more need be said
about them here.

Religion among the Cape Indians was falling upon evil days as early
as 1623. They told the settlers--perhaps with more evasiveness than
truth--that the forms of their worship varied widely between village
and village, and they added gloomily that in the olden days their
ancestors had been more religious than they. Kiehtan, they asserted,
was no longer worshiped as he had been. Such doleful sentiments have a
familiar ring. Even the Indian, it would seem, sighed for the good old
days!

Their legends were to Indian religion what the story of Adam and Eve
or of Samson and Delilah is to our own. They would surely have found
a place in an Indian Old Testament. Most of them were invented to
account for the existence of natural objects, and show a pretty highly
developed imagination. Like all legends, they might serve as fanciful
answers to children’s questions.

A good example is the Yarmouth Indians’ explanation of fog. Long years
before, they said, a huge bird used to visit the shores of Yarmouth and
carry off the children in its talons, flying with them to the south out
over Vineyard Sound. Maushop, a benevolent giant of Yarmouth, at last
grew tired of this procedure and decided to pursue the bird and kill
it. So, on its next appearance, he followed it out across the Sound,
wading along as fast as he could, until finally, pretty well exhausted,
he reached an unknown island on the other side, where he found a huge
tree piled about with the bones of children. ‘It is time for a smoke,’
said Maushop to himself, and reached for his tobacco. But he had
forgotten to bring any with him and was obliged to use poke instead--a
plant which he found growing plentifully on the island. This poke he
puffed with such effect that the whole Sound and the shores on both
sides of it were enveloped with the smoke; and forever after when a fog
settled down over the south shore of the Cape, the Indians would nod
wisely and say, ‘There’s old Maushop smoking his pipe.’

The Indians on Nantucket made up a fine story to explain the existence
of their island. Like the Yarmouth legend, it involves a giant--a
monster who used the Cape for his bed, covering the whole length of it
with his huge body, and fitting himself comfortably into its curves.
One morning he awoke after a restless night, in the course of which
his thrashings and rollings had ploughed the sand into hollows and
dunes that have remained ever since, and struggled to his feet. To his
annoyance he found that his moccasins were full of sand; so he took
them off and threw the contents far into the sea, where they formed
Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

The Cotuit Indians had a local legend to account for Santuit River and
a knoll near by. A great trout, that lived in the South Sea, wanted to
get into Santuit Pond to rest. So he ploughed his way overland, leaving
behind him a deep, crooked furrow that was promptly filled with salt
water. Finally he arrived at the pond, but was so exhausted that he
had not the strength for the return trip, and died there. His path
became Santuit River. The Indians covered his remains with a mound of
earth that still exists and is called Trout Grave by the inhabitants.

Each of these legends, it will be observed, has something to say about
fatigue, rest, or sleep. This may be chance, or it may be significant;
but it is idle to try to guess what the significance may be--if there
is any. It was with men who were thinking such thoughts and repeating
such tales as these that the early Cape preachers had to deal when they
turned missionaries in their spare time. Two or three of them, indeed,
finding the virgin soil of the savage mind more fruitful than the
stubborn clay of the enlightened Christian, gave their best efforts to
the Indians.

The pioneer among these was Richard Bourne, who was in fact not a
minister at all, but a layman of substance who moved to Sandwich early
and was established there by 1641. He soon became interested in the
Indians and determined to improve their condition. They could have had
no better advocate. Bourne was experienced in legislative matters,
having been representative to the General Court, and was a man of
sound judgment and common sense. His voice carried weight in high
places, and the energy of his nature made his theories work. He wisely
concluded that the first step in converting the Indians was to awaken
their self-respect by establishing them in a community on land of their
own, and then teaching them the rudiments of self-government. It took
him twenty years to accomplish this, but in 1665 the act was recorded
authorizing the Indians to hold their own courts, try criminals, and
pass judgments. Five years earlier they had received title to fifty
square miles of ideal territory at Mashpee--shore, woods, rivers, and
ponds--everything best suited to an Indian’s existence.

Naturally enough, their first experiments at governing themselves often
failed. The jump from a primitive tribal organization to the complex
machinery of civilized government was too great. Frequently the General
Court was obliged to step in and extricate them from legal tangles in
which they had become enmeshed. Yet Bourne’s scheme, with all its
failures, was a great help in increasing the natives’ self-respect; and
this was the cornerstone of Bourne’s structure.

Meanwhile, he kept preaching Christianity to them with considerable
success, for it would be a churlish Indian, indeed, that allowed
himself to be cured by Bourne’s medicine, accept Bourne’s land,
preside over a court which Bourne had given him, and then rejected
the religion that came hand in hand with these blessings. Bourne had
four Indian preachers as his assistants, and reports that the whole
population of Mashpee--numbering between four and five hundred--were
converted. Although this district was nearest his heart, Bourne assumed
responsibility for the spiritual welfare of all the Indians on the
Cape, and did what he could to convert the tribes as far away as Truro.
In 1670 he was regularly ordained as minister of the Mashpee church--a
mere official recognition of the work he had been doing there for
years. Here he continued to preach until his death in 1685.

During the last dozen years of his life, Bourne’s territory was reduced
to something like manageable dimensions, for in 1672 Samuel Treat, an
energetic young minister who graduated from Harvard in 1669, was called
to the parish of Eastham. He immediately relieved Bourne of all the
territory below Yarmouth, and divided his efforts about evenly between
the Indians and the whites. Treat had a genial and sociable nature with
a marked vein of humor not always found in our early preachers; but
there was nothing genial or humorous about his doctrine. It was the
most virulent form of undiluted Calvinism, and the detailed description
of the torments of hell-fire that he roared at the natives in a voice
which, in the language of Dr. Freeman, drowned out ‘even the winds that
howled over the plains of Nauset,’ were well calculated to rouse the
savage instinct of even the most phlegmatic Indian.

Treat, like Bourne, was a firm believer in self-government for the
natives, and was able, thanks to his proximity, to put into execution
schemes that Bourne had been trying to work out at arm’s length. The
result was very much what it had been at Mashpee. In 1693, Treat was
able to report that there were five hundred praying Indians in his
district, which included Eastham, Harwich, Chatham, Wellfleet, and
Truro. Twenty years earlier there had been only three hundred in all
the territory below Sandwich. This improvement shows what could be done
by an enthusiast like young Treat. Four native preachers operated under
his supervision, and four native schoolmasters taught the Indians to
read and write their own language. The difficulties of this tongue had
no terrors for Treat. He mastered it in a short time, translated the
Confession of Faith, and frequently wrote sermons in Indian for his
assistants to deliver.

The finest specimen of a praying Indian, however, lived neither in
Eastham nor in Mashpee, but in Yarmouth. His name was Elisha Nauhaught,
but he is better known as Nauhaught the Deacon, the man who stood his
ground when attacked by a large number of black snakes and let them
surround him. One climbed up his body and tried to put its head into
Nauhaught’s mouth. The Deacon opened his jaws and brought them together
on the snake’s neck with such vigor that the reptile was decapitated.
Alarmed by the blood that flowed down in streams, the rest of the
snakes fled, and Nauhaught strolled home. On another occasion he showed
an interesting combination of superstition and honesty. He had found a
purse full of money, but refused to open it except in the presence of
witnesses, ‘for if I did,’ said he, ‘all the trees in the woods would
see me and witness against me.’ This remarkable Indian died peacefully
at the age of eighty-nine, and viewed the approach of death without a
tremor--calm in the assurance of salvation, or, as he himself expressed
it to the Reverend Mr. Alden, who was at the bedside, ‘I have always
had a pretty good notion about death.’

Unfortunately not all the praying Indians were of Nauhaught’s caliber,
nor was Nauhaught himself exempt from an occasional fall. Sometimes
they found unorthodox uses for their newly acquired religion. There
is, for example, the yarn of Deacon Ryder and the stolen turkeys. The
language of the Reverend Timothy Alden, who tells the tale in his
‘Collection of American Epitaphs,’ cannot be improved upon:

The village [i.e., the Indian village near the mouth of Bass River]
contained many praying Indians as well as some of a different
character. Deacon Ryder, an old gentleman, had lost some turkeys on
a certain time, and not being well acquainted with the character of
his aboriginal neighbors, fixed his suspicions upon them. He rode
into the [Indian] village very early in the morning, fastened his
horse in the woods, and walked in silence to the door of one of the
wigwams, where he stopped for a moment and found that the Indian was
at prayer. He then, without disturbing the pious occupant in his
devotions, passed on to another wigwam. The head of the family was
solemnly engaged in the same manner. He felt ashamed of himself but
thought he would go to one wigwam more. He did so, and it happened
to be Nauhaught’s. To his astonishment he found him also offering
his morning sacrifice in the midst of his little family. What a
delightful scene! While the groves resounded with the melodious notes
of the feathered choir, the whole village seemed to echo with the
prayers and praises which rose from every quarter. Deacon Ryder was
extremely mortified that he should have suspected the poor Indians
of theft, when he found them before sunrise pouring forth their
petitions to Almighty God in such a commendable manner, while many of
his whiter brethren were sleeping like the sluggard and never called
upon that sacred name unless to profane and blaspheme it!

On the whole, however, Bourne and Treat ought to have been satisfied
with their results even in the ticklish realm of religious conversions;
and their temporal accomplishments may have saved Massachusetts,
for in 1675, fifteen years after Bourne secured Mashpee for the
Sandwich Indians, and three years after Treat had begun his work
among the Nausets, King Philip declared war on all the white settlers
in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The condition of the Cape during
this war, though actually a very happy one, was potentially critical.
As long as the Cape Indians refused to join Philip or listen to his
anti-white propaganda, the settlers there were in a far better position
than the other colonists. King Philip was not in their vicinity, and
it was unlikely that any fighting would take place on Cape soil.
Nevertheless, the Cape men had a very real cause for anxiety. They
had to furnish their quota for the colonial army, and every man who
departed weakened the town. In the midst of them lived some five
hundred braves who might at any moment leap up with a whoop and attack
them in their own houses.

The alarm was universal and led to the absurd measure of seizing some
of the squaws as hostages. But the settlers soon realized the folly
of this and then became doubly excited for fear the Indians would
attack them in retribution. The Reverend Mr. Walley, of Barnstable,
writes: ‘I am greatly afflicted in my spirit to see the danger we are
in and the confusion and sad disorder we are fallen into.... Some fear
we have paid dearly for former acts of severity; and how dear we may
yet pay, God knoweth.’ It seems that his apprehension had so far gained
ascendancy that he was living not in the present, but in a future of
his own imagining; for the Cape Indians stood firm. Some of them even
enlisted with the settlers and fought against their own people, thereby
helping the white cause by their activity as well as by their inaction.
The commanders of the colonial units soon discovered the wisdom of
following the advice of their dusky allies. ‘Set an Indian to catch
an Indian’ became the watchword of the wisest of them. Before long,
the Cape was inviting the citizens of less fortunate communities, like
Rehoboth, Bridgewater, and Taunton, to seek safety for their families
on its peaceful shores; and though the invitations were not accepted,
the incident shows strikingly what confidence Cape men put in their
Indian neighbors before the end of the war.

The reasons for the fidelity of the Cape tribes during these months
were many. In the first place, they were isolated from their warring
brethren and so did not catch the contagion of war. Furthermore, they
were of a peaceful--even a submissive--nature. But beyond a doubt a
large factor in their friendliness was gratitude for the work that
Bourne and Treat had done for them. Without these two men, a fire
might have broken out in the rear and consumed the Cape settlements.
Religious teaching alone would not have sufficed, for Christianity so
far has failed to prevent wars. It would be hard to point to a finer
instance of virtue receiving its reward than the staunchness which the
Cape Cod Indians maintained, in considerable measure out of gratitude
to Bourne and Treat.

But there was another reason why the tribes on the Cape held aloof
from Philip’s War. They no longer had the energy or the desire to
fight with any one. Their race was run; their pride and dignity were
little more than memories. Degeneration had begun as far back as 1616,
when a plague swept over the Massachusetts coast from Penobscot to
Provincetown and wiped out whole villages. This disease was apparently
a kind of malignant typhus caused by filthy living conditions. The Cape
suffered less than the rest of the State, perhaps because its sandy
soil provided perfect natural drainage. But a good many Indians died
even there, as is shown by the number of graves that Bradford found at
Truro and Eastham.

Treading the shadow of this disaster came the white men, whose arrival
was the beginning of a long uneasiness among the natives. In the modern
jargon, they began to suffer from an inferiority complex. What was the
meaning of this new race whose weapons belched fire and roared like the
thunder? Vague dread lay beneath the Indians’ acts of friendliness, and
dread is a poor companion for those who are trying to swing back into
stride after a pestilence. This surely is an important reason why the
Indians of Cape Cod were so friendly to the Englishmen. Their attitude
sprang from no unnatural desire to help foreign intruders, but rather
from an underlying apprehension that tinged their generosity with fear;
and the white man, though he, too, was afraid, was shrewd enough, as he
accepted their hogsheads of corn, to smile loftily at his benefactors--

‘... as one great lord of fate
Might smile upon another half as great.’

It is not hard to deceive children, and the Indians supposed that these
white strangers felt as fearless as they looked.

When, in 1639, the settlers came and built towns close beside them,
choosing the best places from Sandwich to Eastham, this vague
uneasiness began to crystallize into despair. The Indians saw that the
whites grew and prospered, while their own strength ebbed from year to
year. Their new neighbors assumed charge of all things in a masterful
way. ‘This land,’ they said, ‘we will buy from you for five axes; that
land you may keep.’ ‘We will tell you what God to worship, and will
show you how to govern yourselves.’ But the new God seemed remoter even
than Kiehtan, and the government that the white men gave them was an
unwieldy tool in their hands. They grew more discouraged than ever. Rum
found its way among them. What was the use of struggling? The whites
were invincible and knew everything. Blasted by such apprehensions,
their native virtues withered and died. This was the effect, on these
reduced and plague-ridden tribes, of the arrival of a superior race.
It is not a new story. It has been the result wherever civilization
has camped beside primitive man; only in the present case the end was
hastened by the epidemic.

The speed with which the Indians vanished was frightful. Before the
plague, there had been upwards of two thousand adult Indians on the
Cape. [See notes to Chapter III.] Eighty years or so later (in 1690)
there were probably not more than a thousand. A little before the
outbreak of the Revolution there were five hundred and fifteen. Town
after town saw its Indian population dwindle to a half-dozen wretched
families in an isolated cluster of huts. In 1764, only four Indians
remained in Eastham and eleven in Wellfleet. Five or six families of
Monomoyicks were left at Chatham. Harwich was better off with a total
of ninety-one. Nauhaught reported six wigwams in Yarmouth, near the
mouth of Bass River, as late as 1767, but ten years later smallpox
carried away most of their occupants, and their lands were sold soon
after the war. A few years later, all that remained of this village was
a single wigwam occupied by a Negro and a squaw.

Mashpee, meanwhile, was in a serious condition. Numerically, to be
sure, the district seemed to be holding its own much better than any
other Indian community. In 1802, for example, there were three hundred
and eighty inhabitants, including children, and in 1820 the number
was three hundred and twenty, a very slight shrinkage compared to the
death-rate elsewhere. But these figures are misleading; they do not
indicate either health or prosperity in the district, for the original
Mashpees were dying off as fast as any Indians on the Cape. What kept
the numbers up was not a healthy birth-rate, but the fact that Mashpee
was a Utopia where no inhabitant was taxed. This halcyon state of
affairs brought the scum of the Indian and Negro population from all
over the State drifting to Mashpee like weeds to the Sargasso Sea.
These worthless immigrants--many of whom had little or no Indian blood
in their veins--intermarried with the remains of the Mashpees, until,
as early as 1792, at least two thirds of the inhabitants were of mixed
blood. The fact that the population was kept up by these unwelcome
additions deceived some into believing that the district was a model
Indian community, happy and prosperous, under the wise, paternal
eye of intelligent overseers. A few industrious and self-respecting
families there were, no doubt, like the Pocknets and the Attaquins,
but on the whole the inhabitants were a lazy, improvident lot. Well
into the nineteenth century many of them still lived in sedge wigwams
that crawled with vermin; and the few houses that they did build were
‘dirty, unfinished huts.’

The State tried various schemes for improving their condition. Before
1763, the Governor had appointed two overseers and two guardians for
Mashpee, who should watch over the Indians’ affairs, and in particular
should see to it that the entailment on their real estate, a protection
which Richard Bourne’s son Shearsjushub had obtained for them, was
respected, and that no white man should be allowed to buy away their
land. Good men had been provided to preach the Gospel to them: after
Shearsjushub’s death, his son Joseph had been their minister; and after
him came the Reverend Gideon Hawley and John Freeman, the half-breed.
But the Mashpees remained degenerate and degraded. In 1763, the
authorities, thinking that perhaps a little more self-government might
increase their self-respect, answered the Indians’ constant petitions
for more liberty by making Mashpee a district, and allowing the
inhabitants to elect for themselves five overseers and various minor
officials. But all was in vain; no form of government, no amount of
preaching, could make the Indians religious, virtuous, or happy; so
after twenty-five years of prolonged discontent, the old order was
reëstablished, and in 1788, the Governor once more appointed Mashpee’s
overseers and guardians. As the various committees that labored for
the Indians’ welfare ‘could not give them temperance and industry, they
still remained poor, abject and discontented.’ The committees were
discouraged; in the words of James Freeman, ‘the melancholy reflection
that they have labored in vain obtrudes itself upon the mind.’ Again
he writes, ‘Last year (1801) their meeting house resembled a cage of
unclean birds. The situation of it proved that they could take no
delight in the worship of God, as the house which is dedicated to
him was more offensive to the senses than even their filthy huts....
The term “Praying Indian” cannot with propriety be applied to the
inhabitants of Mashpee.’

Twenty years later, the situation had not changed. Their missionary,
Mr. Fish, writing in 1820, says: ‘Their descent cannot be traced at
this day and they have altogether adopted the habits of civilized life.
They have forgotten their ancient names and languages, except a very
few who retain a slight knowledge of the old tongue and can converse in
it a little. The number of pure-blooded Indians is very small, perhaps
fifty or sixty, and is decreasing. There is more negro blood than
white in the mixture. About fifty profess religion, a few of whom are
eminently pious, considerable numbers decent in their lives, and not a
few shockingly profligate.’

Fifty years later, in 1869, we learn from the lips of a Mashpee Indian,
Mr. Pocknet, that the foreign strain in the Mashpee blood was still
more marked. Addressing the legislative committee on Indians that
visited the Mashpees in their meetinghouse to discuss once more the
question of removing the entailment on their real estate, he made this
striking statement: ‘There are some Indians here two-thirds blooded,
and some nigher.’ The next year, 1870, the district was incorporated as
the Town of Mashpee.

About this time a new ingredient was added to the already miscellaneous
nationality of the Mashpees. Every returning New Bedford whaler
brought home a few _bravas_, or black Portuguese, among its crew.
These Cape Verde savages--a cross between exiled Portuguese criminals
and the aborigines of the Islands--began to drift into Mashpee and
marry into the hybrid of Indian and African Negro that they found
there. This vicious mixture caused what Mr. Pocknet called ‘a drift of
disgust against Mashpee,’ and has resulted in such a mixture of blood
that the Indian strain is to-day almost lost. Only now and then, as
one makes one’s way through the village, is the eye caught by some
leather-skinned veteran whose high cheekbones, thin lips, and straight
hair suggest that his ancestors once chipped arrow-heads from the
pebbles on the shores of the Cape and shot deer with them in the woods.

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST SETTLERS

After they were settled at Plymouth, the Pilgrims found the Cape both
a blessing and a nuisance. It was a blessing as a granary, from which
friendly Indians supplied them with corn; but geographically it was a
nuisance because it lay across the water route to New York and trade
with the Dutch. The voyage around the Cape was too dangerous; was there
no easy way across it?

On one of his voyages to the Cape for corn, Bradford had landed at
Bourne and had seen how nearly the Cape was cut in two at that point by
Scusset Creek on the north and Manomet River, emptying into Buzzards
Bay, on the south. The idea of avoiding the passage round the Cape by
using these streams, with the short carry overland from the one to the
other, now occurred to him, and by 1627 the settlers were employing
this channel as an established trade route and had erected a house and
a palisade near the headwaters of the Manomet River. Here they kept
two men, and built a shallop large enough to navigate the waters of
Nantucket Sound. This new passage was so successful that in a few years
Plymouth was trading with the Connecticut River and New York.

The colonists now ceased to think of the Cape as a hindrance to their
voyages, and by degrees began to realize that it was a good place to
live in. The Plymouth men were not the only ones, however, who had this
idea. Enthusiasts in Scituate and Lynn and Ipswich were also turning
their backs on their hardly completed cabins and heading for newer
pastures on the Cape. Furthermore, in 1630, Bradford at last received
his patent from the Earl of Warwick, President of the Council for New
England. In this document the whole Cape was annexed to the territory
of the Plymouth Colony, and settlements could now be made on it with
perfect legality.

Naturally Sandwich was the first site that was selected. For one thing,
it was far up the Cape and close to the Manomet trading post; but more
important was the extent of salt marsh that bordered it on the north.
The problem of fodder for their cattle was always an urgent one with
the settlers. They had no time for turning forests into meadows green
with English hay. They had enough to do in building their houses and
clearing land for their corn. The acres of Sandwich marshes, therefore,
which yielded more salt hay than they could possibly use, to be had for
the cutting, were in themselves reason enough for choosing this spot.
Here, too, was a stream with herring and water-power enough for a mill.
Wood in prodigious quantities was at hand whichever way they turned.
There was no harbor, to be sure, but a creek navigable for small
vessels served well enough instead. So Sandwich it was.

Edward Freeman, of Lynn, was the father of the new town. He had the
pioneer’s restlessness to an exaggerated degree. He arrived from
England in 1635, lived a year at Lynn, made his way to Plymouth in
1637, and, staying there only long enough to obtain the Governor’s
consent to start a new settlement at Sandwich, set out with ten others,
most of them like himself from Lynn, and, making his way over the old
Indian trail through the woods, arrived at his goal with his axes and
his cattle and began to clear land and build houses. The Governor
had authorized him and his companions to take enough land for sixty
families, and almost immediately recruits began to arrive, swelling
the numbers of the ‘ten men of Saugus.’ Twenty or thirty families from
Lynn, Duxbury, and Plymouth came straggling in during the year that
followed Freeman’s arrival. Their purpose was ‘to worship God and to
make money.’

As the numbers in the new town grew, the question of dividing the
land became acute. Not everybody, by any means, was entitled to hold
land. The old order had not changed, and as yet freedom and equality
were not even theories of government. But even among the potential
landholders, disputes--or at least problems that bade fair to become
disputes--frequently arose. They therefore wisely shifted the
responsibility to the Plymouth Court, and the Court with equal wisdom
ordered Captain Miles Standish to go to Sandwich and arrange the matter
in an equitable fashion. John Alden went with the Captain, and between
them they did the job to the satisfaction of all hands--doubtless by
the usual method of drawing lots. Sandwich grew and prospered, and in
1639, two years after Edward Freeman and his little band of followers
arrived, the settlement was regularly incorporated, and named Sandwich
after the old town in Kent.

The story of Yarmouth, which was the next town to be established on the
Cape, begins with an heroic failure. The Reverend Stephen Bachiler had
for several years prior to 1638 been leading a stormy life in Lynn.
He was one of those fiery malcontents whose utter unwillingness to
compromise with authority defeats the very progress it strives for.
He had been dissatisfied with the Church in England; he was still
dissatisfied with the Church in Lynn, and tried, with the support of
a handful of followers, to start a new one. He was warned to confine
his preaching to the satellites he already had and to accept no new
converts. He refused, and decided to move away to some spot where he
would be left alone with his doctrine. Such was the man who at the age
of seventy-five set out on foot for Yarmouth at the beginning of the
winter of 1637-38. With him went a few of his unregenerate flock.

Such an enterprise was foredoomed to failure. Yarmouth was a
wilderness, relieved only by a few Indian clearings. The flats and
forests were the only possible sources of food. A wise man would have
waited for spring, but wise men are never guilty of dramatic rebellion.
Bachiler and his friends would certainly have starved or frozen that
winter but for the Indians. As it was, their sufferings were such
that they departed in the spring--just when they might have begun to
be comfortable; and this admirable madman spent the last years of his
life in continual religious hot water in various parts of New England.
His frantic effort to settle at Yarmouth has no bearing on the town’s
history, but as an heroic gesture it deserves mention.

Bachiler had hardly departed when the first real settlers made their
appearance. These were Anthony Thacher, John Crow, and Thomas Howes,
who arrived in the late winter of 1639. Stephen Hopkins, one of the
Mayflower band, also built a house that same year, but soon sold it and
returned to Plymouth. Within a year other recruits arrived from various
parts of the Bay Colony and built houses on the shores of the millpond.
The town was incorporated almost as soon as the first settlers arrived
in 1639, the same year as the incorporation of Sandwich and Barnstable,
and the Indian name of Mattacheese was officially changed to Yarmouth.
The new name was given, like the names of so many other Cape towns,
as a reminder of the port from which a number of its citizens had
doubtless embarked when leaving the old country.

Except for a few clearings that the Indians had made, and the marshes
alongshore, the Yarmouth pioneers were confronted by an unbroken
expanse of woods; their first labor, therefore, was with the axe. As
soon as their houses were built, there arose, as there had arisen at
Sandwich, the troublesome question of dividing the land. Thacher, Crow,
and Howes had received somewhat embarrassing instructions in this
regard from the Plymouth Court; they had been told to divide the land
on the ‘to-him-that-hath’ principle, which was easy enough, but they
were also to take into consideration each man’s ‘quality.’ Here was a
problem to daunt the most dogmatic. A committee was formed, however,
and the land was divided; but nobody was satisfied. Captain Miles
Standish was added to the committee, and another division was made;
the citizens were no better content than before. In desperation the
Court ordered the fiery Captain to act alone and gave him autocratic
power. Thus armed, he proceeded to cut the Gordian knot. Half of the
landholders were ejected, the claims of the others went unheeded, and
Standish began again, making a complete redistribution of all the real
estate. Still nobody was happy, naturally enough, but their grumbling
could not pierce the armor of the Captain’s plenipotentiary powers, and
the landholders settled down resentfully on their new estates, while
Standish made his way back to Plymouth.

It was natural enough that the troubles over land should have been
greater in Yarmouth than they had been at Sandwich, for the men who
settled Yarmouth were not in any department of life a unit. They had
come from various parts of the Bay Colony, and for various reasons.
Thacher was the only one who, after the departure of Hopkins, could be
called a Pilgrim. The rest were of miscellaneous doctrines and belonged
to different walks of life. A few were restless spirits from Sandwich.
The one bond that could hold them together was their common interest
in their new town, a bond which, as has been seen, had to be forged on
the anvil of fiery misunderstanding; and Miles Standish was no gentle
blacksmith.

In spite of an early restriction forbidding any man to own two house
lots unless they were both occupied; in spite, too, of the alliterative
dictum that the first settlements were compact in order to bring the
inhabitants near the ‘mill, the market, and the meeting,’ it is certain
that the town straggled over a large area. Richard Sears, and some
friends who came about 1640, lived several miles from the rest of the
settlers, and some adventurous spirits built their houses on the shore
of Bass Pond, some distance off in the woods. This wide geographical
distribution reflects in a striking, though perhaps accidental, fashion
the divergence of interests and opinions that long kept the Yarmouth
men disunited.

Their lack of unanimity was made the more conspicuous by the harmony
that reigned throughout the first years of the history of Barnstable.
This town, like Yarmouth, had a forerunner who arrived before the main
body of settlers and played an almost lone hand against the wilderness.
The Barnstable pioneer was the Reverend Joseph Hull, with whom was
associated Thomas Dimock. Hull came from England in 1635 and took up
his ministry in Weymouth, where he eked out his salary by trading
in cattle. Whether it was his activity in this field of endeavor or
his doctrine that offended the Weymouth church does not appear; very
likely both. At all events, they decided that he was ‘contentious’ and
dismissed him. Nowhere in Massachusetts are there more extensive salt
marshes than at Barnstable; these ‘hay grounds,’ as they were called,
acted as a magnet to the cattle-raising pastor, and to Barnstable Hull
came with a small number of followers. The precise date of his arrival
is not known, but he was well established there in the fall of 1639.
The lease which the Plymouth Colony gave him and Dimock was dated June
4, 1639 (old style), and in the following December his settlement was
incorporated as a town. But he probably did not wait to receive this
grant before occupying; he occupied first and got permission afterwards.

Hull was happy in his new location, and divided his time between his
cattle and the souls of his diminutive congregation, some of whom were
Indians. Then there arrived, on October 11, 1639, the Reverend John
Lothrop and a large part of his church from Scituate. Mr. Hull welcomed
them with enthusiasm and invited the whole band to dinner--some at Mr.
Mayo’s, some at Mr. Lombard’s, and some at his own house. The newcomers
far outnumbered Hull’s little band, and were united in their affection
and loyalty to Lothrop. Inevitably they took charge, and little by
little Hull found himself a nonentity. It was nobody’s fault. There was
no room for two preachers--even if the Court had allowed it--and Hull’s
congregation--ever eager, like the Athenians, for some new thing--began
to listen to Lothrop’s sermons. Hull stood this neglect for a year or
so and then moved to Yarmouth, where he began preaching to a few loyal
friends from Barnstable and a group of malcontents from the Yarmouth
church. For this act the Barnstable church excommunicated him, and the
civil authorities supported the church by issuing a warrant for his
arrest. He moved to Dover and later to the Isles of Shoals, where he
died.

Meanwhile, Barnstable was flourishing under the wise and competent
leadership of Mr. Lothrop. The remarkable thing about Lothrop--and the
highest tribute to his character as a pastor--is the way in which his
church followed him from point to point throughout his wanderings. Many
of his original London congregation had sat under him in Scituate,
and with him left Scituate for Barnstable. History can show few more
perfect examples of the Shepherd and his flock. It is not without
reason that the present Congregational Church in West Barnstable,
which is the same organization that Lothrop brought down with him
three hundred years ago, assert that their church has the longest
uninterrupted history of any church of that denomination in the world.
This statement would be true were it not that Henry Jacob’s church in
London, the first Congregational church ever founded, continued for a
few years after Lothrop’s departure from it.

The propriety of naming the new town after the English Barnstaple is
obvious to any one who has seen the shore fronts of the two places
at low tide--miles of sand flats in a long narrow harbor, crooked
channels twisting their way seaward, and low, easy shore lines on both
sides. Such is the aspect of both harbors, and so forcibly did their
new surroundings remind the settlers of the old English town that they
named it Barnstable forthwith.

Eastham, the last of the original four Cape towns to be founded, has
one point in its early history in common with Barnstable; it was
settled by a solidly united group of church members. They came from
Plymouth, and thus was Eastham endowed at birth with a richer strain of
Pilgrim blood than Sandwich, Yarmouth, or Barnstable. By 1640, Plymouth
had begun to suffer from the loss of a handful of her citizens here
and a handful there, as they had emigrated to one or another of the
many new settlements that were everywhere springing up with bewildering
speed. Business in the old town was not what it had been; men began to
grumble, and for want of a better grievance, declared that the trouble
was the poor soil; besides, they said, they were cramped for acreage.
The truth was that they, like the rest of the early New-Englanders,
were still goaded by the gadfly that later sent the prairie schooners
heading westward toward the Rockies. But the soil was a good enough
pretext, and satisfied everybody. It had been used to justify almost
every emigration in Massachusetts so far. The Plymouth men, however,
were more radical and more ambitious than their predecessors. They
decided to move in a body--to transplant the entire population--and
leave Plymouth, as the Indians had left it before them, a prey to the
winds and the wolves. The question was, Where should they go?

It so happened that Bradford, in making over to the Colony the patent
he had received in 1630 from the Earl of Warwick, had reserved for the
use of the Purchasers and the Old Comers three tracts of land, one of
which was Nauset. This region had for twenty years been to the Pilgrims
what the Promised Land was to Moses--a land flowing with milk and
honey. The Nauset soil purported to be the best in the Colony. These
two considerations, therefore--the fact that it was peculiarly their
own land, and that it was very fertile--induced the authorities to send
a small party down the Cape to look the property over and report.

They returned with the discouraging verdict that there was room at
Nauset for only about one half the population of Plymouth. The Governor
and town fathers heard this statement and hoped that the matter was
closed; they could not contemplate without a shudder the prospect of
losing half the already depleted population of their town. A good many
of the older citizens agreed with them; but there was no stopping
the younger element. As Bradford ruefully put it, ‘neither could the
rest hinder them, they having made some beginning,’ and in April,
1644, Plymouth saw, with a heavy heart, the more vigorous half of her
population depart for Nauset. They had made suitable arrangements with
the Purchasers and Old Comers, and their hopes were high as they began
their fifty-mile journey; but they left something very like despair
behind them. As Bradford puts it, ‘Thus was this poore church left,
like an ancient mother, growne olde and forsaken of her children....
Thus she that had made many rich became her selfe poore.’

The pioneers from Plymouth arrived at Nauset in time to plant corn
and beans, and had the spring before them to build their houses. The
soil came up to their expectations, and they were happy in their new
location. But freedom from the immediate vigilance and restraint of the
Old Colony seems to have gone to their heads, for they hacked down the
forests in such a wanton fashion that the generations which followed
found the soil blown bare. The ‘blackish and deep mould’ which Bradford
had seen there twenty years before had become dry and sandy waste,
blown this way and that with no forests to break the force of the wind.
Almost literally, when the Nauset forests were demolished, the surface
of the soil was blown away, and the loose sand which lay below it was
laid bare, an easy prey to every gale.

However, for some years the crops were good and the town prospered. The
land had been ‘legally’ bought from the Indians, as it had been in the
earlier Cape towns, but it is hard to take such transactions seriously
or to see anything but the mere letter of the truth in the proud boast
of Governor Winslow, who proclaimed that ‘The English do not possess
one foot of land in the Colony but was fairly obtained by honest
purchase from the Indian proprietors.’ The traders who give Congo
natives glass beads for ivory have never been lauded for their ethics,
yet their practices differ in no way from the dealings of our ancestors
who gave a hatchet for a square mile of land.

At Nauset the settlers showed themselves even more avaricious than
usual, and the Indians more than usually compliant; for when they were
asked who owned Billingsgate, they replied that it belonged to nobody.
‘In that case,’ said the settlers, ‘it is ours’; and the Indians
believed them. Perhaps the men from Plymouth quieted their consciences
with the reflection that they had paid George and Mattaquason, the
sachems of Nauset and Monomoyick respectively, something (they
prudently refrain from saying how much) for most of the territory that
is now Eastham and Orleans.

When the settlement was two years old, and the watchful eye of the Old
Colony officials saw that it prospered, they consented to its being
incorporated. Five years later, in 1651, its name was changed from
Nauset to Eastham, though the old name is still used for the beach, the
lighthouse, and the life-saving station.

On these four solid pillars--Sandwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable, and
Nauset--rested the early civilization of the Cape. From these sprang
all the other towns, sometimes by gradual segregation, sometimes by a
deliberate exodus, until, like Plymouth, they had made themselves weak
to make the Cape strong. And by a curious chance, which the devout
Plymouth fathers would have called divine retribution, Eastham, whose
inhabitants had so weakened Plymouth by their departure, was the town
that herself suffered worst from such losses.

What manner of men were these who started civilization on the Cape?
They were, first of all, men to whom Democracy, as a theory of
government or as a way of life, was unheard of. No royal parent ever
scanned the eligibility of the suitors for the hand of his daughter
with greater care than the Plymouth Government scanned the applicants
for admission to its towns. Before any man might own land or build a
house in these new settlements, he must pass inspection by the General
Court or its local representatives. This law was no dead letter in the
statute book--it was vigorously and unceremoniously enforced. Every
town appointed a couple of substantial citizens to the unpleasant duty
of ejecting undesirables. If a newcomer, whether through ignorance,
arrogance, or mere thoughtlessness, failed to consult these officials
and began to build his house unsanctioned, he was promptly ‘warned
out of the town,’ regardless of his desirability, and was obliged to
leave his house unfinished until he should have complied with the law.
[See note 1 to Chapter IV.] Such was the fate of Richard Child, of
Yarmouth--a worthy character who subsequently was admitted and allowed
‘to enjoy his cottage.’ In 1639, the committee on personnel took
exception to ‘Old Worden (dead), Burnell, Wright, and Wat Deville.’
Two early guardians of Barnstable’s exclusiveness--William Crocker
and Thomas Huckins--found themselves called upon to perform the same
ruthless duty. If the town official proved too tolerant in judging
applicants for admission, the watchful eye of Plymouth detected
the weakness and promptly let the town know of its displeasure. In
1639, some recruits slipped by the local authorities in Sandwich and
established themselves as landowners in the town. Instantly Sandwich
was complained of for having admitted men who were ‘unfit for church
society.’ The Colonial Court was entirely arbitrary in making decisions
of this sort. Every man must have the ‘leave and liking’ of the
Governor and his assistants, or out he went.

Such an apparently hostile attitude toward strangers took deep root
in the Cape soil. In fact it never entirely disappeared. As late as
1810, the selectmen and town clerk of Brewster remonstrated against the
appointment of Edward O’Brien as postmaster, ‘he being a foreigner a
catholik and, in the opinion of the town, an alien.’ Even to-day the
old suspicion lives, and appears in the instinctively critical way in
which every newcomer is scanned by the townspeople. The fact that their
ready censure is often justified does not make the phenomenon less
interesting. It is a direct inheritance from the old days--a ghost of
the former vigorous practice of ‘warning out.’

There was nothing democratic, either, in the first assignments of land.
The town of Yarmouth affords a good illustration of the aristocratic
fashion in which this was done. Anthony Thacher and a number of
associates were chosen as a committee to apportion lands there, but the
Colonial Court stipulated that they should assign them in accordance
with each man’s ‘estate and quality.’ This close scrutiny of strangers
and particularly the ‘to-him-that-hath’ principle for dividing land,
were direct inheritances from Plymouth, where lands were apportioned
according to each man’s ability to contribute toward paying off
the Colony’s debt to the Merchant Adventurers who had financed the
Mayflower’s voyage.

There were other good reasons, too, for all the anxiety which the
settlers showed in regard to the quality of the men they admitted as
householders, for the communities were alarmingly small and surrounded
by a wilderness where Indians skulked and wolves howled. Under such
conditions it was imperative for the safety of all hands that the
inhabitants of each town should stand together. Plymouth had already
had in 1624 a bitter experience with newcomers in the persons of John
Lyford and John Oldham, who, as soon as they had established themselves
in the new settlement, set to work to undo the very thing the Pilgrims
had come for; they tried to start a ‘reformation in Church and
Commonwealth.’

Titles on the Cape were bestowed even more charily than citizenship;
and consequently they meant something. Not every Tom, Dick, or Harry
was dignified with a ‘Mr.’ before his name. This was a distinction
reserved for a very few--the minister and perhaps one or two more.
‘Reverend’ was seldom used in the early days of the settlements; John
Lothrop was commonly called ‘Mr.’ Lothrop. ‘Goodman’ or ‘Yeoman’ was
the extent of dignity usually ascribed to ordinary citizens. As for
‘Squire,’ it was a title that carried with it something not very far
removed from the awe with which European vassals used to look up from
their cluster of wretched huts at the castle that crowned the hilltop.
There was never more than one squire in a town. Wealth was the usual
foundation of his glory. Ability and unselfishness, though they were
no obstacle to a man’s achieving the honor, were not in themselves
sufficient. Titles and rank followed men to church, where they were
seated according to their quality. Planning the proper arrangement
was a ticklish business, and the men whose duty it was to allot the
pews gave long and earnest thought to the problem. The method varied
somewhat between town and town. Harwich at one time adopted the prudent
scheme of allowing the richest man to have first choice of pews, the
next richest the second choice, and so on. Truro showed a little more
democracy by placing the town officers in the front row, the military
veterans next, and the highest taxpayers behind them. In the rear
sat the soldiery, the strategic position in case of an Indian raid.
Another method that was suggested at Truro was to allow every man to
build his own pew after whatever fashion and at whatever cost he saw
fit. This was an entertaining scheme, though the results may have been
architecturally unconventional; however, it seems not to have been
practiced widely or for very long. Perhaps, indeed, it remained only a
suggestion.

The women sat by themselves on one side of the meetinghouse, while
across the center aisle were the men, perhaps fortifying themselves
against the hour-long sermon by a glance or two into forbidden
territory. If the year was 1696 or later, and the town was Eastham,
the young bachelors may have thought of the number of blackbirds they
were required to kill annually as long as they remained unmarried,
for by such expedients did the town authorities encourage an increase
in population and at the same time help to save their corn. A man’s
pew in church was as much a part of his real estate as his barn or
his woodlot, and had a pretty definite cash value. Sometimes he sold
it, in which case regular papers were passed and the transaction was
encumbered with as much legal phraseology as if it had been a farm.

An unpleasant sequel to the aristocratic principles of the early Cape
men was their ownership of slaves. This subject may as well be disposed
of now as later, for the settlers brought a belief in slavery with them
from Plymouth and the Bay Colony as part of their social background.
It is no great shock, therefore, to find them cheerfully owning slaves
in such numbers as they could afford. Here again Plymouth, that stern
disciplinarian and pattern for all things good and bad, led the way
by declaring as early as 1646 that it was her intention, as a last
resort, to sell Indians or exchange them for Negroes in punishment
for offenses--real or fancied. The fact that the Governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony some ten years before had sold captives taken
in the Pequot War into slavery in Bermuda is no excuse for Plymouth,
any more than Plymouth’s performances are any excuse for the Cape.
The old adage, ‘the Plymouth saddle is always on the Bay horse,’ seems
to have worked both ways occasionally. At all events, from 1640 until
well after the Revolution, slaves were common in all parts of the Old
Colony, and if there were fewer on the Cape than elsewhere, it was only
because there were fewer rich men or extensive landowners.

Not even white men were safe. In 1640, at the very beginning of the
history of Barnstable, Henry Coggin rented his servant, James Glass, to
a Plymouth man for five years. The price was fifty shillings and twenty
bushels of corn. Obviously Glass was an indentured servant of some
sort who had even less to say about his disposal than a professional
ball-player has to-day. In 1678 three Indians, Canootus, Symon, and
Joel, stole twenty-five pounds from Zachariah Allen, of Sandwich, and
spent the money. The Court immediately decreed that they should be made
perpetual slaves, and empowered Allen to sell them for as much as he
could get. After King Philip’s War, Jonathan Hatch, of Falmouth, bought
an Indian family, father, mother, and son, from Captain Church. The
parents were subsequently ransomed by their native friends for three
pounds apiece, but their boy was to work for his freedom until he was
twenty-four. In 1697, Mr. Cotton, the Yarmouth minister, allowed the
church to employ his Indian slave, Saxuant, as janitor, and pocketed
the proceeds, one pound a year, for himself. At the same time that Mr.
Cotton was profiting by Saxuant’s labors in Yarmouth, the Hinckleys
of Barnstable were dying and leaving slaves and tableware in their
wills, as items of the same list. Joseph Hinckley, who lived at Great
Marshes and died there in 1753, bequeathed to a daughter his slave girl
‘Sarah, bought of Hopkins, and his biggest silver porringer.’ Ebenezer
Hinckley, his brother, who lived in Barnstable, left to his wife all
the property which she brought to him ‘excepting her clock and negro
woman.’

[Illustration: PAGE OF SERMON THAT JOHN COTTON PREACHED TO THE YARMOUTH
INDIANS IN 1712
English above; Indian below]

Wills are, in fact, the most fertile source of our information on this
subject; few of them, however, contain such whimsical disposition
of slaves as John Bacon’s, of Barnstable, who looked far into the
future in his desire to control other people’s destinies. The will was
registered in 1731, and contains among other chattels the following
bequest to Bacon’s wife: ‘... she shall have the whole use of the negro
Dinah and Calash during her life and after her desease, if said Dinah
be living she shall be sold by my executors and all that she is sold
for shall be improved by my executors in buying Bibles and they shall
give them equally alike unto each of my said wives and grandchildren.’
John Gorham, who died at Barnstable in 1769, lists along with sundry
‘indoor moveables and provisions,’ his Negro girl Peg and half the use
of the man ‘Cezer.’

Truro was never a very wealthy community, yet the town records for
February 8, 1753, refer to a bill of sale for ‘Old Moll,’ a Negro woman
about whom ‘there has been so much controversy.’ A few years earlier,
a distinguished citizen of Truro, Jonathan Paine, sold his Negro
Hector to Benjamin Collins for thirty pounds. Hector, we are told,
lived to be an old man and became something of a local celebrity--his
name being given to such places as Hector’s Nook and Hector’s Stubble,
spots which were once well known to Truro men. Paine had a less happy
experience with another slave, a Negro named Pomp, who was kidnapped
from the Congo by the crew of a Truro whaler and sold to Paine at the
end of the voyage. The poor fellow never became reconciled to his new
way of life. The bleak shores of Truro supported no vast plantations
where a hundred darkies worked by day and found solace in singing wild
melodies together at twilight. Pomp suffered silently until loneliness
conquered, and he hanged himself to the limb of a tree.

This tragedy undoubtedly hastened the abolition of slavery on the Cape.
Faint streaks of light had already begun to appear in the east. As
far back as 1719, Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, of Boston, had written
an eloquent letter on the subject to Judge Addington Davenport, who
had asked his advice in regard to a difficult case which he with some
other judges was about to hear in Sandwich. A certain Samuel Smith of
the town had killed his slave and was held for trial, and Davenport,
before rendering a verdict, consulted the Chief Justice. A few lines
of Sewell’s letter will suffice to indicate the tenor of the whole:
‘... the poorest Boys and Girls in this Province, such as are of the
lowest condition; whether they be Indians or English or Ethiopians:
they have the same Right to Religion and Life, that the Richest Heirs
have. And they who go about to deprive them of this Right, they attempt
the bombarding of Heaven, and the shells they throw, will fall down on
their own heads.’

The records that could have told how Smith fared in the trial are
lost. In theory he was punishable by death; but it would have taken a
courageous judge to render such a verdict in 1719. However, a beginning
had been made, and little by little the sentiment against slavery on
the Cape grew. James Otis, the West Barnstable patriot, struck a blow
at slavery in his great Writs-of-Assistance Speech in 1761. In this
oration he included the Negro along with white men in his vehement
assertion that all persons should be free. That Otis was ahead of
his time in this respect, as in all others, is shown by John Adams’s
comment. Adams heard the speech and ‘shuddered at the doctrine he
taught....’

A dozen years later, the town of Sandwich continued the good work by
voting to instruct its representative to work for an act which should
prohibit the importation of slaves to the Colony and should free at the
age of twenty-one the children of those who were already slaves. To be
sure, the act was not passed, but it shows the growing tendency toward
abolition. Sandwich, indeed, has a better record in regard to the
treatment of slaves than many of the New England towns. The Reverend
Abraham Williams offered his slave, Titus Winchester, his freedom, but
Titus was so devoted to his master that he refused to leave him. Not
until Williams’s death in 1784 did his slave depart to become a sailor.
When he died, he left money for a clock in the tower of the First
Parish Church of Sandwich. In Falmouth at about the same time, another
slave named Titus was virtually free, though nominally the property of
the Reverend Samuel Palmer. This clergyman was an enthusiastic though
inexperienced farmer, and showed his wisdom by meekly obeying Titus
in all agricultural activities, just as indoors Titus accepted the
spiritual guidance of his master. Thus the two lived on a coöperative
basis that bore little resemblance to slavery in its accepted sense.

But the evil continued in Massachusetts until well after the
Revolution, and not until March, 1788, was the selling of slaves
in the American market prohibited in Boston. In fact, no records
of the buying or selling of slaves on the Cape are found after the
Revolutionary War, but this is undoubtedly owing to the impoverished
condition of all the towns rather than to any sudden access of
humanitarianism on the part of the citizens. Nothing is more dangerous,
however, than ascribing single motives to the actions of human beings.
It is entirely possible that, with the enjoyment of their own hard-won
liberty, the Cape men saw the indignity of bondage more clearly than
ever before, and were therefore less inclined to enslave others. The
last faint echo of this once common practice died away on the Cape
about 1840 with the vanishing of a few elderly Negroes who were still
vaguely referred to as ‘old slaves.’

Our country has always been given to extremes, even before it became
a separate nation; but only once in their history have our ancestors
tried to embrace simultaneously two ends of social organization so far
removed from each other as Slavery and Communism. The one period when
they did try it came during the early days of Plymouth, and Plymouth’s
experiment was of course forced upon the Cape. By the time it reached
there, it had taken on a greatly modified form, to be sure. Slavery had
won, and Communism had pretty much vanished. Yet there remained enough
of it in certain departments of life to cause an apparent incongruity.
But this, like most of the incongruities in human nature, contained a
certain strange reasonableness, and appears, on examination, to be not
entirely incongruous, after all. The origin of this communism, at any
rate, was sensible, and since it began in Plymouth, it must be examined
there first, before the remnants of it on the Cape are discussed.

Up to April, 1623, no man in Plymouth had owned any land privately--it
had all been held and harvested in common, and the produce justly
divided. But in the spring of this year there was an alarming shortage
of food. The settlers argued that if they were given land of their
own, and each man was allowed to keep all that he raised, the crop
would be greater than it was under the existing arrangement. This was
not the first time that such suggestions had been made. They had been
already so numerous that in 1621 Robert Cushman preached an eloquent
if unconvincing sermon in reply. Bradford, though he heard with concern
the citizens’ complaints, could not help being impressed with the force
of their arguments. Like Winslow, he had begun to realize that even
in this chosen band of pioneers egotism endured. To put it in another
way, the Plymouth men, though they were zealots and idealists, had
not ceased to be human beings; the Governor’s dream of a Utopia was
shattered by ‘that self-love wherewith every man in a measure more
or less, loveth and preferreth his own good before his neighbors.’
He yielded to the importunity of the citizens, and in April, 1623,
assigned to each man his parcel of land for one year to be planted and
reaped for the owner’s own private benefit.

The result was a revelation and a delight to Bradford. At the end of
the year a far larger supply of corn was stored in the houses than any
of them had dared to hope. In view of this success, each man was given
an acre for his own.

Such in brief was Plymouth’s experience with Communism, and such was
the inheritance that the Cape settlers took with them to their new
towns. Thus it happened that a communistic tendency appeared there, but
it manifested itself only in the form of common lands. This does not
mean that private ownership was tabu, but that in addition to every
man’s personal allotment of land, there was in every town a large area
reserved for the benefit of all. Usually this tract included both marsh
and woodland, so that the citizens might cut salt hay for their cattle
and chop wood for the winter hearth. Such an arrangement was natural
enough. It would have been silly for a dozen or twenty men to have
had exclusive titles to the miles of hay grounds in Barnstable, or to
the hundreds of acres of standing timber. Sometimes, too, there were
particular reasons for declaring certain pieces of land to be common
property. At Yarmouth the best place to watch for whales was a strip
of upland along the north shore of the town close to what is now the
Dennis line. This land was therefore quite properly thrown open to the
free use of all citizens, and was called the ‘Whaling Grounds.’ When
the rest of the common lands in Yarmouth were divided, this area was
kept as public property, and has remained so ever since. Shanties were
built there for the use of those who were watching for whales, and men
often lived in them for considerable periods of time.

A similar reservation was made in Barnstable on the outer beach of
Sandy Neck. The whole Neck was common land until 1715; then it was
divided among the heirs of the Proprietors, with reservation of four
spots where any citizen of the town who was engaged in whaling might
erect a try-house and have room enough for his blubber barrels, lumber,
and other gear. A part of Sandy Neck is still called the ‘Try Yard,’
although no one knows exactly where it is. These four ‘spots or pieces’
have never been divided. Neither has a wide strip of the outer beach
running the whole length of the Neck; this strip was reserved at the
same time as the ‘Try Yards’ for the use of any citizen of the town who
wished to put up fish houses there, and it may still be legally used by
them for that purpose.

For two generations the plan of having common lands in each town worked
well. Abuses occurred, but that was to be expected. Cattle were turned
loose ‘to range the Commons’; the minister’s winter supply of wood was
cut on the public woodlot and delivered to him in his own back yard;
salt hay was boated ashore or stacked on staddles in the marshes.
Chatham, about 1670, even had a whaleboat that was common property.
But as the towns grew, complications began to arise. Experiments can
succeed in small communities where the citizens’ interests are largely
the same; but they are doomed as soon as the settlements grow large
enough to include many trades and professions. A cattleman finds common
pasture land very convenient; a miller has small use for it; a lawyer,
none at all.

And so it happened that, beginning about 1700, dissatisfaction with
the arrangement began to be heard. Nobody had any objection to the
division, but the question was, exactly who owned the common land
and was therefore entitled to make allotments. In theory it belonged
to the Proprietors. The Proprietors were originally the men to whom
the Plymouth Government had granted the land in each town to make
settlements on; but by 1700 these dignitaries had two generations
of descendants; many newcomers, besides, had been admitted to full
citizenship and consequently to rights in the commons. The citizens of
Barnstable held a town meeting in 1701 on purpose to solve some of
these conundrums. ‘Does the bare admission of a man to the state of
_townsman_ give him a share in the Commons?’ they asked. ‘Has all the
Common Land been already divided?’ ‘Do rights granted in the Commons
extend to the grantees’ heirs?’ The men who attended this famous
meeting would have grown old in debate (since they could not send to
heaven for Miles Standish) had they not wisely chosen a committee of
fifteen to work out answers to these questions. The committee girded
up their loins and went valiantly to work, with the result that after
another town meeting in 1702, in which it was decided to divide the
commons, a new committee was chosen and the grand division was made in
1703 on as fair a basis as could be devised. In this way town after
town unsnarled the tangle into which the public ownership of land had
involved it and started afresh, each man the richer for the division.
In 1713, after three years of hard work deciding who were the proper
persons, Yarmouth handed over to the heirs of the Proprietors and other
qualified persons most of its common lands except the whaling grounds.
The Proprietors of Truro, indignant at the wanton way some men cut more
wood than they could use and left it to rot on the commons, put an end
to the practice in 1715 by ordering further division of common land.
Eastham began to divide its common upland the same year.

So vanished the last substantial traces of the Pilgrims’ valiant
experiment with Communism. [See note 2 to Chapter IV.] The name
‘Common Fields’ is still used for a good-sized tract of land bordering
Barnstable Harbor, though it has been in private hands for generations,
and a few barren regions that the towns have forgotten remain still
undivided--a strip of sand hills somewhere in Barnstable and the still
unclaimed whaling grounds between Yarmouth and Dennis. In truth we are
a young country!

CHAPTER V

HOW THEY LIVED IN THE EARLY SETTLEMENTS

The first generation or two of settlers on the Cape were no freer to
choose their occupation than they were to choose their religion. They
had to be farmers or starve, even if they came from London and had
never drawn a furrow. It must have been hard for some of them--men
who like Robert Linnel came to Barnstable with Lothrop without ever
having cut down a tree or hauled a stump. But there were compensations;
the land was their own; and there is deep satisfaction in toiling
over one’s own acres. Furthermore, when once cleared, it yielded a
respectable crop; there was no need of cultivating big tracts either,
for hay grew wild on the marshes, and a small cornfield and a patch
of onions sufficed for a good-sized family. Every man had some cattle
and sheep, which were immensely profitable and required no pasturage,
for they were turned loose to roam at will, branded as Western cattle
are to-day. Some of these brands showed originality, but no one had a
saltier device than Jonathan Weekes, Jr., of Falmouth, who marked his
‘creatures’ with a mackerel-tail in the top of each ear. Pigs also were
allowed to root about at large, provided their noses were ringed to
prevent their doing damage.

The large numbers of cattle brought tanners and cobblers at a very
early date, but even these specialists laid aside the tools of their
trade in spring and followed the plough until October. In this way
every family was self-supporting. There were at first no local markets
for food or clothing. The men sheared their sheep, and the women spun
the wool and fashioned it into garments which made up in durability
what they lacked in grace. Our ancestors sometimes eked out their
wardrobes with deerskin coats, after the Indian fashion. Good food
was abundant. If a man grew tired of corn and beans and onions, he
had only to dig a ‘dreener’ of clams or pick up a bushel of lobsters.
Herring were so plentiful that they were spread on the ploughed land
for manure--another practice which the settlers learned from the
natives. Every now and then they killed a pig. There was little time
for hunting, but who can doubt that many a haunch of venison found its
way to a hook in the back shed, where it hung frozen until its duty was
done? It would be strange, too, if the old flintlock in the corner was
not sometimes put to a livelier use than waiting for the Indian raid
that never came, and brought down a backload of ducks or geese in the
course of a windy afternoon. Add to this gamey diet an abundance of
home-grown beef and mutton, and it will appear that there was no need
for the first Cape-Codders to be vegetarians.

Corn was their principal crop. Corn was, indeed, the very backbone of
their existence. It was not only food, but money, and remained for
years the standard measure of value. No one had any money to speak
of--it has been stated that in 1675 there was not five hundred pounds
in the whole Plymouth Colony--but every one had corn, which passed
current in any sort of transaction, from buying a farm to paying the
minister. But the settlers were experimentalists, and tried other
crops, too, with varying success. They planted wheat, which did
tolerably well for a time, but about 1670 it was attacked by a sort of
mildew, and since then has never been raised in any quantity on the
Cape. Rye proved to be a better investment, and there has always been
more or less of it for local consumption. From the very first, the Cape
men set out orchards from seeds imported from the old country; but
it took generations of cultivation to make the apples good for much.
Pears were as poor as apples until years of toil brought them up from
hard and gnarled excrescences to their present mellow excellence. Some
cherry trees were planted as well, but though they were hardy, the
fruit would pucker any but the most robust palate.

As the years passed, the Cape farmers grew more prosperous and more
ambitious. Each season they converted a few more acres of woodland
into arable fields, and thus they began to produce more corn than
they needed. The days of struggling for existence--incomparably less
severe on the Cape than they had been at Plymouth--were over. The
settlements had gained momentum, and steady industry took the place of
heart-breaking toil. By 1700, half the citizens had farms of thirty
acres or more, a pair of oxen for ploughing, a horse or two for
occasional visits to a neighboring town, besides an appropriate number
of cattle and sheep. While the sons of the family were growing, a slave
or two helped the farmer with the heaviest work. The families were
large. One reason that has been suggested for this phenomenon is that,
according to the old idea, every son was worth a hundred pounds to the
family and every daughter fifty pounds! This explanation need not be
taken with undue solemnity.

It was one thing to raise corn, however, and another to grind it.
Except for what little was pounded up at home in hand mortars, all
the corn had to be ground at a mill, and there were no mills nearer
than Plymouth. Even Sandwich had a long haul overland to reach the Old
Colony headquarters, for boats were as scarce as mills. The plight of
the towns farther down the Cape can be imagined. Half the pleasure
of a good crop was spoiled by the difficulty of getting it ground.
The remedy was obvious--to construct local mills; but the art of the
millwright was second only to that of the shipbuilder in difficulty,
and few had mastered it. But the need of mills was so urgent that the
inhabitants spared no pains to find the men who could build them.
The easiest type to construct was that operated by water-power, and,
although there is some truth in the statement that the scarcity of
water-power on the Cape forced the settlers to build windmills, which
were far more intricate and expensive, yet it must not be supposed that
no running water was to be found on the crooked peninsula. Falmouth,
Bourne, Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Brewster, Eastham, and Truro
all had streams which were set to work soon after the towns were
settled, and some of these water-mills were still grinding away within
the memory of men now living. So, even without the aid of wind, the
Cape was not powerless to grind its own corn and full its own homespun.

Useful as these water-mills were, they were not the type that attracted
the eye of early Cape travelers or inspired the pencil of such graceful
artists as Miss Amelia Watson. For picturesqueness, the long-armed old
windmills stand alone; but the difficulty of finding men who could
build them was so great that capitalists who wanted a mill found it
easier to scour the Cape for an old one, and move it to the desired
location, than to hunt up a millwright who could start work on a new
one in less than six months or a year. Half the windmills on the Cape
ended their days on new sites.

The most celebrated millwright was Thomas Paine, of Eastham. This
overworked craftsman was kept traveling from one town to another all
the way from Barnstable to Truro. First, in 1683-84, with proper
loyalty, he put up two windmills for his fellow citizens in Eastham.
Then he was called to Barnstable, where in 1687 he erected the first
windmill that town had ever seen. Not to be outdone, Yarmouth ordered
one from him immediately afterwards, and Paine complied. He returned to
Eastham and appears to have enjoyed a well-earned breather, until the
citizens of Truro assured him that they, too, must have a windmill, and
held out flattering inducements if he would build it for them. ‘A man
must go where his trade calls,’ thought Paine; and he liked Truro so
well that he never left it; subsequently he became one of her leading
citizens. The first mill in Truro was not built so easily as the last
one, however, which appeared about 1800, long after Paine was in his
grave. Every stick of lumber used in it came ashore from wrecks, most
of it landing as a single windfall when a lumber schooner piled up on
the outer beach; it would not have been surprising if the corn ground
at this mill had had a salty flavor--the more so as Freeman Atkins, the
miller, was a retired shipmaster.

Another family of millwrights won such distinction that they were
celebrated in verse; they were Thomas Baxter and his two sons, of West
Yarmouth, who put up two windmills near Parker’s River. Their success
was crowned by the following ballad:

‘The Baxter boys they built a mill;
Sometimes it went; sometimes stood still;
And when it went, it made no noise
Because it was built by the Baxter boys.’

Close behind the builder in prestige, came the miller. His task was
no sinecure, and was so essential to the prosperity of the towns that
great inducements were held out to any man who would undertake it.
Just as the mill itself went untaxed, so was the miller exempt from
military duty, and he was a privileged character in other ways besides;
he need not hold office, his social position was assured, and he was
often given a good-sized piece of land adjacent to the mill. His pay
was in kind; from every bushel of corn he ground he was authorized to
take a stated quantity, known as the miller’s ‘pottle’; and it was well
earned. At the beginning of each day he had to mount to the top of the
mill and scale the long arms to set the sails, which were rigged in
nautical fashion with halliards; at night he must climb out again and
furl them. If it blew hard, he had to shorten sail by twisting up the
lower part of each sail. In a gale the mill scudded under bare poles,
the surface of the slats across the arm offering sufficient resistance
to the wind. Unlike the master of a ship, however, the miller had no
crew of nimble acrobats to carry out his orders aloft. He was his
own crew, and was perpetually short-handed. The clumsy rigging and
primitive mechanism of his command made the work not only hard but
dangerous. But for the fact that many of the millers were retired
seamen who had learned agility at the mastheads of fishing schooners,
casualties would have been more frequent than they were. If Henry Hall,
for example, who at the age of seventy operated a mill in Dennis, had
not been a sailor in his early days, he never could have extricated
himself from the very ticklish position in which he once found himself.
He had stopped his mill to shorten sail, but had neglected to make the
arms fast with the huge iron chain which was used for that purpose.
When he was halfway out on one of the arms, a free flaw caught the
sails, and the arms began to turn. With amazing activity Hall worked
his way back along the revolving arm until he reached the shaft, which,
of course, was also revolving. Here he perched, three stories above
the ground, straddling the shaft and maintaining an upright position
by hitching himself clear of his seat as it turned under him. Luckily
assistance arrived before the old mariner was exhausted.

Blow high, blow low, millers must turn out each man’s corn with
as little delay as possible, for the farmers were impatient
and, if the truth is to be told, not a little envious of this
privileged specialist. Their envy took the form that envy usually
takes--criticism. Sometimes they declared that their corn was only half
ground; sometimes they accused the miller of stretching his pottle
and taking more than the law allowed. There was right and wrong on
both sides, of course. Human nature, alas! is not always proof against
temptation, nor were millers more righteous than other men. One at
least, Philip Dexter of Falmouth, was thought to be a pottle-stretcher,
and the townspeople put up a rival mill. But envy is a commoner sin
than avarice, and the citizens were probably jealous oftener than
millers were dishonest.

Of the scores of windmills that once spread their sails to the Cape
breezes, only a few are standing to-day--sole survivors of a high
art and a dead industry. A few channeled millstones are in use as
doorsteps; a few more may be seen lying abandoned and half buried
beside creeks alongshore. ‘Nothing beside remains.’

The early Cape houses varied greatly, according to men’s means, and
became more elaborate from generation to generation as building
improved. The first hasty structures that some of the pioneers erected
were never intended to be more than makeshifts to provide temporary
shelter until the owner had a chance to draw his breath and contemplate
something better. These early buildings, sometimes called ‘booths,’
were not frame houses at all; the walls consisted of two parallel rows
of saplings stuck in the ground, and the space between was filled with
clay and stones. Slanting poles covered with the longest marsh-grass
formed the roof, and the fireplace, which often backed into the side
of a hill for convenience and support, was crowned by a chimney built
cob-house fashion of green sticks smeared with clay inside. Oiled paper
covered the windows. There was no floor--unless dry thatch spread on
the ground can be called a floor. The only virtue of such structures
was that they could be thrown together in a very short time and without
any expense; but one winter in such quarters was usually enough to
persuade the owner that he must have a real house.

Not all the original settlers lived in such flimsy contrivances, of
course. Some of them had frame houses from the first. Mr. Hull, for
example, was living in one when John Lothrop and his flock arrived in
Barnstable, and some of Hull’s parishioners had followed his example.
These dwellings, though anything but elaborate, were durable and snug.
They were nearly square, one story high, with walls and floors made of
planks sawed by hand and a thatched roof sharply pitched. The cracks
between the boards were daubed with clay.

The ‘great room’ was usually in the southeast corner. Its bare wooden
floor was sanded and thereby scrubbed smooth. One side of the room was
chiefly occupied by a stone fireplace eight feet wide and high enough
for the goodwife to walk into easily and reach the door of the brick
oven, which opened out of one corner of the back. Across the whole
breadth of the fireplace ran an iron bar festooned with trammels for
the pots. The swinging crane is a comparatively modern contrivance.
The whole structure was wide enough to allow for the traditional
seats in the chimney corner, favorite places for the youngsters, who
perched there happily on dye-tubs or empty beer-kegs until bed time.
At one end of the room stood the big dining-table with stools for the
children and chairs for the man of the house and his wife. Near it was
placed the corner cupboard, a tall semicircular piece of furniture
containing shelves for pewter or glassware. A big wooden chest against
one wall held the family valuables--the deed for the farm, what money
the man happened to have on hand, and in summer some of the extra bed
‘furnishings.’ If the children were not all grown up, there would
certainly be a cradle in the room, and near it a loom where the wife
could weave woolen cloth and keep an eye on the baby at the same time.
A few chairs, either home-made or else the product of a local artisan,
a couple of candles in iron candlesticks on the great mantelpiece,
an hourglass, and a brass warming pan hanging beside the chimney
completed the furniture of this room. No paint or paper adorned its
walls (plaster was rarely used except by the rich until after 1700),
but it was homelike and comfortable, and for several generations the
Cape farmer of moderate means wisely regarded it as sufficient for his
needs. The cost of building such a house complete, ‘latched, thatched
and daubed,’ was twenty-five dollars. The inhabitants of the temporary
‘booths’ were therefore very soon able to build one and live in comfort.

Snug as they were, these one-story cottages were beneath the dignity
of the wealthy, who wanted something more elaborate and were willing
to pay as high as one hundred dollars for their ambition. In the
seventeenth century this sum would produce a big two-story house, like
that which Nathaniel Bacon built in Barnstable in 1642. Bacon was a
prosperous tanner and could afford to live in style. His house was set
on enormous hand-hewn oak sills which projected into the rooms and made
convenient ledges for the children to sit on. When, after more than two
hundred years, this structure was torn down, the timbers were still as
hard as iron. Some of the walls may have been plastered. There was a
spacious though low-studded bedroom on the second floor, with a couple
of smaller ones at the rear and plenty of space for the servants in the
garret.

The houses that have been mentioned--either as types or individual
specimens--were built during the fifty years or so after the settlers
arrived. The biggest and most elaborate of them were very plain, and
from the modern point of view unfinished in many ways. The turn of the
century, however, saw the beginning of the era of fine houses, with
more rooms, a wider variety of types, and some handsome interiors.
Skilled artisans began to take pride in their creations and produced
houses whose pleasing proportions and easy lines made them look like
natural objects in the gently rolling landscape. They presented no
high, flat surfaces to challenge the northeasters; the rule was ‘a
short hoist and a long peak’ for one-story houses, and a broad enough
foundation for two-story structures to make them look lower than they
were. The story-and-a-half style, called ‘salt-boxes,’ was always
popular, too, rising to two floors in front with a short slope to
the ridgepole and a long, easy slant down almost to the ground on
the other side. A fine specimen of this type is the Isaac Dillingham
house in Brewster. Gambrel roofs made their appearance, like that of
Captain James Baxter’s house in Barnstable, the most beautiful model
yet devised for applying the virtues of a short hoist to a two-story
house. With it came the well-known hip-roofed type, another scheme for
relieving the boxlike appearance of the second story by slicing down
both ends of the roof on a slant from a short ridgepole.

[Illustration: ISAAC DILLINGHAM HOUSE, BREWSTER]

[Illustration: WALTER DILLINGHAM HOUSE, BREWSTER]

[Illustration: CAPTAIN JAMES BAXTER’S HOUSE, BARNSTABLE
Burned about 1898]

[Illustration: SEARS HOUSE, DENNIS
Built about 1750]

Inside, these eighteenth-century houses were finished with plaster
and paneling, the latter sometimes covering the walls from floor to
ceiling, as in the old Hinckley house in Barnstable. Thus the Cape
builders advanced, adhering in the main to a few approved types, but
ready at any moment to experiment with some new design, until, at the
beginning of the Revolution, Squire Edward Bacon wrote from Barnstable
that he had a mansion with twenty rooms, a striking contrast, indeed,
to the humble booths of 1639.

In addition to their dwelling-houses, our ancestors built two kinds of
fortified structures to defend themselves from attacks by Indians. A
blockhouse of the traditional type, built of hewn timbers placed one on
the other, was put up in Yarmouth very soon after the town was settled.
The upper story of this fort projected over the lower, and the whole
was pierced with narrow loopholes. At Great Marshes--then a part of
Barnstable--two stone forts were built; the first one disappeared very
early, but the second was not taken down until after the War of 1812.
Its lower walls were of rough stone, but the upper story, which was
built with a three-foot overhang like that in Yarmouth, was of wood.
Another method of defense was for a man to build the lower walls of his
house out of broken stone and mortar. This type of construction was
very much like that of the primitive booths. Two rows of holes were
bored in the sills, with saplings stuck into them to serve as studding.
The plate-beams were similarly bored to admit the upper end of these
poles, and the space between the two rows was filled with stone and
mortar--a rudimentary sort of concrete, with saplings taking the place
of modern board ‘forms.’ Houses built in this fashion were almost
indestructible. John Crow’s house in Yarmouth, built about 1650, was of
this type and stood for two hundred years, its stone and mortar walls
being concealed by clapboards that had been nailed on by a subsequent
owner. Some men surrounded their houses with palisades of sharpened
poles; but it was soon obvious that the last thing the Indians wanted
was a fight; the blockhouses were therefore converted into dwellings,
and no more palisades were put up.

It would be a temptation to pursue the history of architecture on the
Cape further, were the prospect not spoiled by the looming horrors of
the Victorian epoch and the serviceable but unsightly bungalows of the
Finns. High courage alone can confront undaunted these dreary examples
of modern taste; it is pleasanter to take comfort from reflecting
that our ancestors built, not for decades, but for centuries, and that
their houses may yet be sound when the amorphous outrages of their
descendants are dust.

The simplicity of life in the early days appears in the importance
which the settlers attached to trifles. Robert Eldridge, of Chatham,
was a prosperous farmer who died in 1682 possessed of an estate
valued at three hundred and sixteen pounds. Yet the inventory of his
possessions mentions such items as a pair of pot hooks, an hourglass,
a gridiron, and a toaster. About a half-century later, the inventory
of Kenelm Winslow, of Harwich, contains among other things two wool
shirts, mittens and garters, a ‘line,’ part of a land compass, two
forks, and a brush and two combs. Yet Mr. Winslow was wealthy enough
to be the owner of several slaves. Almost a hundred years after the
settlement of Barnstable, one of its richest citizens, John Bacon,
left his best hat and wig to his son Nathaniel, and bequeathed to his
youngest son, Judah, the whole family orchard, but with the stipulation
that the other children should have the _fruit of five trees each for
seven years_. Andrew Hallett, of Yarmouth, died in 1684 the wealthiest
man in town; but his executors particularize such trifles as a knife,
a spit, ‘and other small things.’ In 1669, a stolen shirt caused the
Sandwich authorities grave concern, and received the attention of two
sittings of the Court. As for the value of a cow, one could not be
bought in the first years of the settlements for less than the price of
a good-sized farm.

Such painstaking particularity in keeping close track of all
possessions--even the smallest--needs no comment. Our ancestors
found it easier to buy a woodlot than an hourglass. Because all
manufactured articles had to be imported from England, the value
was disproportionately high. Food and land were cheap; tools and
kitchenware were very dear, and were handed down from one generation
to another with the same care that our own age takes in bequeathing
diamonds.

Farmers after a day’s work in the cornfield or onion patch are not
ordinarily inclined to spend the evening in conviviality. They are more
likely to be in bed by nine o’clock. Since most of the Cape men in the
early days were farmers, it is natural that after an April day with
the plough and an hour by the fireside after supper, when they perhaps
received a call from a neighbor, broached a keg of home-made beer,
and smoked a leisurely pipe, they were ready for bed. But in winter
the evenings were longer, and work on the farm was a mere round of
chores. The farmer puttered about, mending his tools and getting ready
for spring. At night he was as fresh as a lark. However exemplary a
husband and father he might be from seedtime to harvest, in winter his
thoughts began to wander from his own fireside to the group gathered at
the tavern. The Cape had its share of cotters, to be sure, who could
spend as pious a Saturday night as the dourest Scotsman, but its shores
produced some Tam O’Shanters as well, and the company and the liquor
both beckoned from the tavern hearth. Home-brewed beer did very well as
a steady diet, but there was a quality in the landlord’s rum that could
not be reproduced on the premises. Innkeepers must live, and away went
the happy farmer.

It was quite right for him to do so. When a man went to the tavern for
an evening, his horizon was broadened, at least enough to include other
farms besides his own, and often so much that he gained a bird’s-eye
view of the policies of the entire Colony. For the group gathered in
the taproom was very different from George Eliot’s assemblages of
ignorant yokels, presided over by a portly host as ignorant as they.
Raveloe and Colonial Cape Cod had nothing in common but the King. The
landlords of all the taverns from Sandwich to Eastham were leading
citizens and had been carefully chosen by the selectmen of the town.
They were intelligent and public-spirited. Well versed in the doings
at Plymouth, they were able to steer town activities in a course
consistent with the grim court there. A glance at a few of them will
show their quality.

About 1700, Ebenezer Hawes was the proprietor of a tavern in Chatham.
He was a man of intelligence and honor, a foe to bigotry, and a
valuable citizen for any town. The esteem in which he was held by
the townspeople was shown by their choosing him as selectman, an
office which he filled with ability, and he was also captain of the
military company. His taproom became the rendezvous for the best men
of the village; many a bushel of corn and barrel of tar was bargained
for over a friendly glass before his fire. His one enemy was Mr.
Adams, the parson. This gentleman took exception to Hawes’s public
house, not because it was improperly run, but because it was a public
house, and he took up arms against Hawes, not because the latter
was an undesirable character, but because he sold rum. Parsons were
formidable men, but when Mr. Adams attacked Hawes, he was opposing a
man who was quite as formidable as he and just as strongly entrenched
in respectability. The battle went through two Courts, with the
tavern-keeper victorious both times. Not until the case was carried
to Plymouth for a third hearing did the minister get the meager
satisfaction of seeing Hawes fined ten shillings. Public sentiment,
however, was too strong for Mr. Adams, and he was forced out of town.
The contest between Adams and Hawes was a contest between mighty
opposites--not a one-sided skirmish in which armed Virtue routed
slinking Vice.

Nor was Chatham any more fortunate than other towns in its selection
of a man to run the tavern. In 1663 and earlier, Thomas Huckins was
bringing rum to Barnstable in his own packet, and selling it to
the citizens from his own tap. And Huckins was seven times chosen
selectman and was for eight years a deputy to the Colonial Court. If
the conversation of such a man failed to lift his patrons out of petty
policies and narrow-mindedness, the case was hopeless. An evening in
his tavern was an evening of liberal education in affairs of state, and
the townsmen who went there returned home better citizens than they had
come.

Another dignitary was the captain of the militia company that every
town was ordered to maintain. Although these companies were very small,
the citizens would certainly have resented having to spend valuable
time in drill had not the fear of Indian attacks hung over them like a
cloud. This fear, as unnecessary as it was natural, kept the townsmen
drilling vigorously. The trouble and expense of maintaining these
military organizations was partly justified in 1675 by the outbreak
of King Philip’s War, to which every town was required to send its
quota of men. No doubt the drill they had received was of some value
to them at this time as discipline, though the tactics which they had
been taught can scarcely have been adapted to fighting Indians. The
great service of these companies, however, was in creating a sense of
security in the minds of the population.

* * * * *

And now it is time to take a look at the government of the Cape towns.
As has already been suggested, the new settlements could not roam far
afield in any direction without being brought up short by a tether that
reached to Plymouth; so in order to form an intelligent conception of
their government, it is necessary to hark back to headquarters, from
which all government was derived, and see how things were done there;
for the Cape, though geographically quite distinct from Plymouth, was
bound to that stern autocrat by ties of kinship, loyalty, and fear.

The highest authority in the Colony was the Governor, who was elected
annually by the ‘freemen’--those who were members of the orthodox
church and whose estate was not less than twenty pounds. With him was
elected one assistant; but it soon appeared that one was not enough,
so in 1624 the number of assistants was increased to five, and in
1633 to seven. At this figure it remained until the Plymouth Colony
merged with Massachusetts Bay in 1692. The Governor and his assistants
comprised the General Court, or Legislature. The first function of the
General Court was to make laws, and this function it performed without
hesitation. As the Colony grew, the General Court grew with it by the
addition of more assistants, and when the Cape was settled as part of
the Colony, the Court was still further enlarged by the addition of two
deputies from each new town.

Sandwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable, and Eastham elected such deputies
as soon as they were incorporated, and the men thus honored went to
Plymouth and became part of the Government, with full right to vote
on new laws. But Plymouth kept matters under her control in two ways:
first, by entitling herself to four deputies besides the Governor
and assistants, and secondly by reserving the right to dismiss the
Cape deputies if she saw fit, and demand new ones in their place.
Each town paid its deputies with money raised by taxing every
householder--whether or not he was a freeman. It seemed only proper,
therefore, to give all these householders a vote in electing them.
This was done, and forms a unique exception to the rule that none but
freemen should vote. It looked like the Cape’s first reluctant step
toward universal suffrage; but it was not, in fact, for this extension
of franchise was withdrawn in 1671.

Such, then, was the composition of that grim abstraction, the General
Court: the Governor and his assistants, four deputies from Plymouth
and two from each of the other towns; its duties were primarily duties
of legislation. Its most startling performance, which it executed in
1636 before the addition of any Cape deputies, was the Declaration of
Rights, which announced to the world that thereafter the colonists
would recognize no laws made for them without their full consent and
approval. This is really something like a declaration of independence,
and it is not without significance that it was made the same year that
the last installment was paid on the debt to the Merchant Adventurers.

The Plymouth law courts at first were composed of the Governor and his
assistants, supported by a jury of all the freemen in the town. But
as the population increased, this rudimentary arrangement gave way to
grand and petty juries--like those of to-day--with the Governor and
assistants as judges. As all cases anywhere in the Colony must be heard
before this tribunal, the Court soon found itself overworked. So in
1641 certain men in the outlying towns were authorized to constitute
themselves as a court for deciding cases that involved not more than
twenty shillings. By this arrangement the citizens of Sandwich,
Yarmouth, and Barnstable could take their minor troubles to a court of
three men--Edmund Freeman, of Sandwich, Thomas Dimock, of Barnstable,
and John Crow, of Yarmouth--who were empowered to settle such disputes.
The fact that Mr. Freeman was one of the Governor’s assistants lent
prestige to the tribunal.

This was the beginning of local courts on the Cape, and they developed
in prestige and power until the establishment of Circuit Courts in
1811. This very early court was also important because it was the
germ from which, twenty years later, developed the now time-honored
custom of choosing selectmen to guide the destinies of each town. As
an interesting step, the Court in 1651 designated four men who were
authorized to call town meetings in Sandwich whenever they thought
it necessary, and a dozen years after this, the regular election of
selectmen for every town was established. These selectmen originally
had powers which, owing to the more intricate organization of modern
government, they no longer retain. They might even act as an impromptu
court and judge cases of debt up to forty shillings. A great part of
their work consisted in settling differences between the townspeople
and the Indians. In short, they were created, to quote the words of
the Plymouth Court, ‘for the better managing of the town’s affairs.’
They were elected by the freemen of their town, subject always to the
approval of Plymouth.

Another factor in local government on the Cape--the Proprietors--were
at first far more important than the selectmen. It is easy to define
the title ‘Proprietor,’ but by no means easy to explain what authority
it carried with it, for the authority varied greatly, diminishing as
the years passed. The Proprietors were in a very literal sense the
fathers of the town, for they were the men to whom the General Court
granted the land on which the earliest settlements were made. This
gave them control of the important question of dividing land and
admitting newcomers as townsmen and owners of property. The committees
formed in each town for this purpose were composed exclusively of
Proprietors--naturally enough, because of their strategic position
as titleholders to the land. The number of Proprietors was at first
small in every case, sometimes no more than three or four; their
first concern was to induce others to join them, and the bait they
offered was land, for they had more of this than they knew what to do
with. They held themselves responsible also for building roads, for
subdividing all land that was suitable for tillage, and for seeing to
it that, for the time being at least, woodland and marsh were held as
common property for the benefit of all.

Their heirs and assigns, together with others whom for one reason
or another they chose to admit, became Proprietors as well, so that
their numbers grew rapidly. At first they held the reins of all the
town’s activities, both political and economic; a town meeting
was a Proprietors’ meeting. But later, when town governments were
organized, the Proprietors’ duties were restricted to apportioning
land to newcomers--for they still held title to the hundreds of acres
that they had not been able to give away. When finally everything had
been divided--even the public woodland and marsh--the usefulness and
prestige of the Proprietors came to an end. Their title vanished,
and they became ordinary citizens. The dates of their disappearance
depended, of course, on the speed with which they divided the land in
their town. The Proprietors of some towns got rid of their commons very
promptly. Others never quite got rid of it.

But in spite of selectmen, Proprietors, and local courts, no town
was allowed to forget that Plymouth was in command. To enumerate all
the little privileges which Plymouth forbade the Cape to enjoy, and
which to-day we regard as the inalienable rights of freemen, would be
too discouraging altogether; it is pleasanter to let a few of them
indicate the nature of the rest. Smoking on Sunday within two miles
of the meetinghouse was an offense that could be expiated only by
paying twelve pence to the General Court. Jurors might not smoke while
trying to reach a verdict. Stocks, a pound, and military drill were
all required for the welfare of the citizens, and any towns which were
delinquent in these respects were ‘presented,’ reprimanded, and fined.
If a youth, be he never so respectable, paid court to a maid without
first asking her parents’ permission, he was punished by a fine or
corporal punishment or both. The Court did not approve of driving sharp
bargains except when its own members wished to buy Indian land, and the
records are full of cases where men were fined for charging too much
either for their work or for their wares. Swearing was punished by a
three-hour sojourn in the stocks, and when the supply of specific human
errors gave out, the Court in desperation passed an act in 1640 ‘to
prevent idleness and other evils.’ Whatever charges may be laid at the
door of the Plymouth legislators, lack of ambition cannot in fairness
be included among them.

Annoying as these edicts must have been, none of them so far has struck
deep at the roots of self-government in the towns. But Plymouth had
no hesitation about interfering with even this important privilege.
Some of the people whom the Sandwich committee on personnel had allowed
to settle there were displeasing to the General Court; the committee
was therefore promptly taken to task and ‘forbidden to dispose of
any more land.’ This was in 1639, and it must have very thoroughly
shattered any hopes that the citizens had of being allowed to decide
town matters for themselves. To be sure, the Cape sent representatives
to this Court, as we have seen, and it may therefore be said that this
strict surveillance was practiced on each town, in part at least, by
its own citizens. But it should be remembered that the Governor and his
assistants reserved the right to reject the representatives that the
town elected--and thereby kept the control of the Colony in their own
hands. If the representatives were courageous and tried to oppose the
Plymouth faction, they were replaced. If they were weak, they voted as
Plymouth voted, and kept their positions.

Such, at least, was the autocratic theory on which the General Court
based its government. In practice, however, things might have been much
worse, because, though the principle had no virtue, the men themselves
had a great deal. Such a scheme in the hands of modern politicians
would result in a corrupt oligarchy. In the hands of our ancestors,
it was an oligarchy, but it was not corrupt. The real trouble with
Plymouth was that she had not learned the great secret of leadership,
which is to refrain from meddling with subordinates when they are
making the mistakes of inexperience in carrying out general principles
which you have laid down for them.

Whatever suffering the Cape towns endured, therefore, came not so much
from any actual restrictions that Plymouth placed on them, as from hurt
feelings when the General Court interfered with their honest attempts
to manage their own affairs. As far as restrictions went, their own
town meetings abounded in them. The local authorities in Eastham fined
a man for ‘lying about a whale,’ and Sandwich punished two maidens for
laughing in church at the attempts of the tithing man to chase a dog
out of the building.

CHAPTER VI

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.

CHAPTER VII

THE REVOLUTION

Cape-Codders were not exempt from the limitations that an All-Wise
Providence has seen fit to place on human nature. Like the rest of
mankind, they had their frailties and went to their graves with all
their imperfections on their heads. But though there was no alchemy
in the Cape soil to make its sons infallible, there was much in its
geographical situation to explain their conduct during the Revolution.
And though some Cape-Codders, by their loyalty to the King, helped to
prolong the war, another Cape-Codder hastened its coming by a speech
made fifteen years before the Declaration of Independence. He was James
Otis, Jr., the West Barnstable Patriot. Since he was the first man to
plant the seed of Independence, not only in the minds of Cape-Codders,
but in the minds of all the northern colonists as well, and since
nothing that had been said or done on the Cape before his time has any
immediate bearing on the Revolution, he becomes a proper person to be
discovered as the curtain rises.

Otis is no local figure; his influence was not confined to Cape Cod,
or for that matter to Massachusetts. His words were heeded in New
York and New Jersey as well as in Watertown and Barnstable, and his
doctrine was the doctrine of patriotism in a sense that it had never
had before; for with him patriotism, for the first time in our history,
meant, not loyalty to the British Crown but separation from it. Otis’s
eloquence was based on a self-confidence and intolerance that were
almost sublime. Anger is as frequently an incentive to eloquence as
it is an impediment to it, and Otis, in the course of his speeches,
always became angry. He was clear in his views, sure that he was right,
and consequently impatient of stupidity or chicanery. On such sure
foundations was his eloquence based. He fetched his doctrine from the
first principles of the rights of mankind--the right of the individual
to hold property; from this sure hypothesis, he developed and proved
the theorem of his statesmanship, and justified the liberation of the
Colonies from unjust taxation by Great Britain.

But he did more than justify Colonial Independence; he created the
idea of it--sowed the first seed that was to grow, through the thorns
of Toryism and the barren ground of selfishness, into Revolution. The
power of his mind reduced complex problems to their simplest terms, and
then solved them. On one occasion he sent to a member of Parliament a
message Byronic in its impudence: ‘I shall transmit to your lordship
by the next mail,’ he wrote, ‘a simple, easy plan for perpetuating the
British Empire in all parts of the world.’ Otis was a Cape-Codder and
had a sense of humor. Though he could have fulfilled the promise of
this letter at least as well as the British Parliament, his tongue was
certainly in his cheek when he wrote the lines and a twinkle in his eye
as he fancied the noble lord’s outraged sense of importance when he
read them.

Otis sprang into political prominence in 1761, when he delivered his
celebrated speech against the Writs of Assistance--those extraordinary
documents--universal search warrants that authorized any official
to enter any house for any goods at any time. But the ultimate
significance of this speech stretched far beyond the blocking of any
particular measure. It created a permanently suspicious state of mind
in the colonists, that caused them, from 1761 until the outbreak of
the war, to scrutinize every act of Parliament with the greatest care;
to ‘snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze’ and to
challenge much legislation that would previously have passed without
suspicion. It was by creating this state of mind in the Colonies that
Otis engendered the germ of Revolution. He opened their eyes not so
much to particular outrages as to the outrageous point of view in
Parliament that gave birth to them; and herein lies his contribution to
our Independence.

The effect of Otis’s Writs-of-Assistance speeches on the Cape was
immediate and violent. Not every one there, by any means, was ready to
declare himself for Independence, and the citizens found themselves
divided into two camps--Loyalist and Patriot. Not content with this,
each camp split into two factions, moderate and extreme. Thus four
clearly defined political parties can be distinguished. There were the
extreme Loyalists, ‘peace-at-any-pricers,’ who, from whatever motives,
regarded war with England as equivalent to suicide or treason. There
were the moderate Loyalists, who wished to avoid war, not because
they believed Revolution was treason, but because they thought it
unnecessary and continued to hope, or to pretend to hope, that the
unhappy state of affairs was only temporary and would be remedied
by Parliament. The Patriots were similarly divided into two wings,
the firebrands and the calmer spirits. The extreme Patriots regarded
the moderates as hardly less evil than Tories; and the feeling was
reciprocal and lasted throughout the war. This furious animosity
appeared with startling intensity in the course of an evening’s
conversation in a Barnstable tavern between Colonel Nathaniel Freeman,
of Sandwich, one of the leaders of the extreme Patriots, and Captain
Samuel Crocker, a dignified and intelligent member of the conservative
branch of the Patriotic Party. Captain Crocker declared that routing
out tea from old women’s larders was a procedure unworthy of a high
cause. Freeman replied that such a statement was toryism. Others of the
violent Patriots agreed with Freeman and showed their patriotism by
pulling up the fence in front of Crocker’s house.

Another incident that shows the heights which political hatred reached
at this restless period occurred when the Barnstable militia were
parading on the village green. Colonel Nathaniel Freeman and Colonel
Joseph Otis, brother of the Patriot, were present, and Captain Samuel
Crocker was putting the company through its drill. As the two Colonels
passed the lines, the soldiers instead of presenting arms, clubbed
their muskets. Otis, like a flash, turned on Captain Crocker and
accused him of being the instigator of the insult. Crocker hotly, and
probably truthfully, denied the charge, whereupon Otis struck him with
his cane. Crocker retaliated, and there followed the spectacle of two
distinguished citizens and officers--both Patriots--both espousing the
same great cause--engaged in something very like a street brawl. The
gentlemen were pulled apart, and their differences were eventually
reconciled. The incident was closed, but remains a clear indication of
the violence of the feeling between factions of the same party.

Some sensitive souls have catalogued the next patriotic demonstration
that took place on the Cape, among the villainies of the Tories.
But there is small doubt that its authors were Patriots, though,
fortunately for their memory, their names are not recorded. A widow
named Abigail Freeman kept a little grocery store in Barnstable. This
lady, like many of her kind, was outspoken; she was an ardent Loyalist
and took no pains to conceal her views. She said quite frankly what
she thought about Colonel Freeman and his friends, and flatly refused
to allow her stock of tea to be confiscated. For these reasons a band
of Patriots waited upon her one night, dragged her from bed to the
center of the village, smeared her with tar and feathers, and rode
her on a rail until, beside herself with terror, she promised to keep
her political views to herself. She was then allowed to make her way
home. Not even the tension of the times or the justice of the cause can
excuse such a performance as this. If the truth were known, it would
doubtless appear that Medford rum, not patriotism, was at the bottom of
the outrage, and this hypothesis does not add to its respectability. It
was another of those unfortunate incidents which, as President Adams
remarks, ‘were more lamented by the Patriots than by their enemies.’

It is pleasant to turn from such atrocities to the legitimate and
laudable activities of our ancestors in their fight for freedom;
the first of these was a demonstration which, quite as truly as the
battle of Lexington or Concord, represents one of the first bold
steps that any of the Colonies took toward freedom. Its immediate
cause was a change which King George saw fit to make in the method of
selecting juries for the superior courts. Instead of being drawn from
the box by the selectmen, as formerly, they were now to be appointed
arbitrarily by the sheriff. Such a manifestation of absolute authority
was intolerable to men who were determined to govern themselves and
had learned by experience that they were able to do so successfully.
The question was, what should they do? Very deliberately, with a full
realization of the seriousness of the step, they decided on direct
action. They would prevent the King’s courts from sitting; they would
prevent it by force if necessary; they would begin at Barnstable.

They well knew that this was treason, and they were ready to take the
consequences. Accordingly, in September, 1774, six months before the
Concord fight, the leading citizens of Rochester, Wareham, and other
towns near by, assembled and started an orderly march down the Cape to
Sandwich. There was no blowing of bugles or flashing of muskets, but
in spirit this ‘Body of the People,’ as they called themselves, was as
truly an army as the grim patriots who a little later faced the British
regulars on the slopes of Bunker Hill. Perfect orderliness and absolute
decorum marked their progress. They had drawn up rules and regulations
for their conduct, and the keynote of these regulations is worth
quoting. ‘We are,’ they said, ‘neither friends to mobs nor riots.’

They spent the night at Sandwich, where they were joined by a
considerable number of the male population, and early the next morning,
under the leadership of Colonel Nathaniel Freeman, they set out down
the Cape for the Barnstable Courthouse. Patriotic citizens joined them
on the march at various stages of its advance, falling in at the rear
of the column, while at its head rode Freeman, a superb figure in
his snow-white wig, wearing his hat tilted jauntily to one side. In
Barnstable they were joined, as at Sandwich, by patriotic citizens, and
by the time they had drawn up in front of the Courthouse door, they
were fifteen hundred strong.

They were in plenty of time. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and
the Court had not yet arrived for its opening session. A committee was
chosen, with Freeman as its spokesman, to state to the Court, when it
should appear, the purpose of the gathering. They had not long to wait.
The bell was rung, announcing the opening of Court, and along the road
came the Chief Justice (the venerable Colonel James Otis, father of
the Patriot) and the other dignitaries, among them, as clerk, Joseph
Otis, his son. They halted close to the outskirts of the crowd, and
Colonel Otis demanded the purpose of the assemblage. Freeman, from his
position on the steps of the building, answered him over the heads of
the crowd. His words are recorded by an eye-witness; ‘May it please
your Honor,’ he said, ‘we have directed this movement to prevent the
Court from sitting or from doing any business. We have taken all the
consequences into consideration. We have weighed them well and formed
this resolution, which we shall not rescind.’

The Chief Justice was a wise man and a good patriot. He was merely
doing his duty by conducting His Majesty’s Court until the war,
for which he fervently hoped, should break out. The old gentleman
continued, even now, to do his duty, and pointed out to Freeman and his
associates that this was not a Superior Court and that its jury had
been drawn from the box in the traditional manner by the selectmen of
the town. But another son of the venerable Chief Justice, James Otis
the Patriot, had taught the colonists to see through such statements
as this, even as the old gentleman had known they would when he spoke
the words. Freeman replied without a moment’s hesitation: ‘We do not
apprehend,’ said he, ‘that if you proceed to business you will do
anything that we could censure. But, sir, from all decisions of this
Court an appeal lies. An appeal to what? To a Court over which we have
no control or influence. And _there_ the jury will be appointed by the
sheriff. For this reason we have adopted this method of stopping the
avenue through which business may otherwise pass to that tribunal.’

Judge Otis must have chuckled at this reply. His conscience was clear.
He had done his duty in trying to open the King’s Court, and had met
with determined and intelligent opposition. After withdrawing for
consultation, he returned a statement to the Body of the People, saying
that the Court consented not to sit. So far the success of the Patriots
was complete, and they might well congratulate themselves not only on
the outcome of their bold move, but quite as much on the dignity and
propriety with which they had carried it out.

But the Patriots’ duty was not yet done. Though the Court had agreed not
to sit this time, there was no guaranty that it would not resume its
activities on a more propitious occasion. Committees were therefore
chosen from the Body of the People to extract written promises from
the various officers of the Court to discontinue all anti-colonial
activities in the future. One of the justices that signed such an
agreement was Edward Bacon, Esq., an eminent Loyalist, whose exertions
in the King’s cause will be mentioned later. Another Court official
was his bitter enemy and one of the most energetic Patriots the Cape
ever produced, Joseph Otis, son of the old Chief Justice and brother
of James the Patriot. Clearly the Body of the People were taking no
chances and were forcing Patriots to sign as well as Loyalists. Other
Loyalists were then routed out from among the crowd, and various
promises and recantations were obtained from them. Committees were
chosen for towns farther down the Cape, ‘to desire of the militia
officers that they would no longer hold commissions under the present
Capt. General, who is appointed to reduce us to obedience to the late
unconstitutional acts.’ In Barnstable, the Edward Bacon aforesaid was
thus obliged to resign his militia commission.

At about this point in the proceedings, Colonel Freeman resigned as
leader of the movement. The Body of the People promptly elected Joseph
Otis in his place, and from this moment forward Otis was unsparing in
his exertions in the cause of Independence. So, although this great
demonstration did not originate on the Cape, a large percentage of its
members were Cape men, the entire scene of its activity was on Cape
soil, and both its leaders were Cape-Codders, one from Sandwich, the
other from Barnstable.

The assemblage next erected a liberty pole in Barnstable and marched
back to Sandwich, where they found that the Tories had taken advantage
of their absence to cut down the Liberty pole there. Before disbanding,
the Body of the People extracted from these enthusiasts apologies for
their behavior, and the price of the pole. These Liberty poles, by the
way, were a picturesque feature of the pre-Revolutionary landscape, and
one of the favorite pastimes was for the Patriots to set them up in the
daytime and for the Tories to cut them down by night. Most of the Cape
towns had them; some had two, and lively scenes were enacted around
them. Whether any unfortunate Tories on the Cape were ever hoisted to
the top of the poles amid the derisive hoots of the Sons of Liberty, is
doubtful; but a bit of doggerel from Trumbull’s ‘McFingal’ describes
such a performance so whimsically that it would be pleasant to believe
it had been practiced once or twice. The poet sings as follows:

‘There from the pole’s sublimest top
The active crew let down a rope;
At once its other end in haste bind
And make it fast upon his waistband;
Till like the earth, as stretched on tenter,
He hung, self-balanced, on his center.
Then upwards, all hands hoisting sail,
They swung him like a keg of ale,
Where looking forth in prospect wide
His tory errors he espied.’

The Tories bided their time and waited for revenge. The most
spectacular instance of this revenge took place at Sandwich a few days
after the proceedings of the Body of the People just described, and was
directed against Colonel Freeman.

This gentleman’s patriotic activities had not prevented him from
continuing his medical practice, and late one night he was aroused
by a call to the bedside of a sick friend. Freeman promptly set out,
though he felt little confidence in the authenticity of the summons,
and was not surprised as he passed Newcomb’s Tavern, a favorite resort
for Sandwich Loyalists, to be accosted by a small group, who came
out and announced in ironic tones that they were a Committee from
the Body of the People, and that they had orders to bring him before
that assemblage to answer for his conduct as leader of the recent
demonstration at Barnstable. Freeman replied that he would have nothing
to do with them or their tavern. They then fell upon the Doctor,
knocked him down, and might have killed him but for the arrival of some
Patriots who came running to his support. He was carried home, his
wounds were bandaged, and a warrant for the arrest of his assailants
was immediately issued. This was a lucky thing for them, for it alone
prevented what would have looked very much like a lynching party with
the Patriots on the lower end of the rope. But the law took its course,
and the Court, which was convened at West Barnstable with the venerable
James Otis as Chief Justice, fined the ruffians £100 and forced them
to give bonds for their good behavior in the future. The fury of
the Patriots was partially allayed by this action, but it was not
satisfied. They erected a platform in Sandwich, marched the Tories from
the Courthouse to it, and compelled them to subscribe to the following
apology and recantation:

Whereas the subscribers did attack and cruelly beat Dr. Nathaniel
Freeman with such unparalleled cowardice and barbarity as would
disgrace grace the character of a ruffian or a Hottentot, for no
other reason or provocation than that he, uninfluenced by hope or
fear, has dared to stem the tide of tyranny and corruption ... we
sincerely and heartily ask forgiveness of Heaven, whose sacred laws
we have so shamefully violated, and of Dr. Freeman, a gentleman
to whom we are indebted for the most important services done this
Country.... And we do solemnly engage for the future religiously to
regard the laws of God and man and conduct ourselves in all respects
as becometh friends to society and good government.

Sandwich, Oct. 10, 1774.

But the Loyalists were not all conciliatory, nor would they always
recant. Benjamin Percival, of South Sandwich, has this pithy entry
in his diary for February 25, 1778: ‘Went to town to see the tories
take the oath of Allegiance but they all refused it.’ Even those who
grudgingly apologized for their behavior were by no means convinced of
the error of their ways, any more than a Fiji Islander, who, for the
sake of expediency, assures the missionary that the Christian religion
is the only religion, becomes thereby a pillar of the Church.

Sandwich and Barnstable were not the only Cape towns that were troubled
by Loyalists. There were enough of them in Truro to make things very
uncomfortable, personally and professionally, for Dr. Adams, the town
physician and a staunch patriot. They contemplated storming his house,
but were prevented by some of the cooler heads among their number.
They did succeed, however, in seriously curtailing his practice by
establishing a tabu on consulting him professionally. They preferred
to remain sick, or to go elsewhere for a physician whose political
sentiments were closer to their own. Misery loves company, and Dr.
Adams found a congenial spirit in the Reverend Mr. Upham, the patriotic
clergyman of Truro. This gentleman entertained at his house a group of
citizens whose patriotism, like his own, burned hot and strong, and Dr.
Adams, in a letter dated December 5, 1774, says that the minister was
slandered outrageously by certain Loyalist members of the parish, and
was refused admission to their houses.

Nowadays, when it is the fashion to point complacently to a pirate
or two or a witch among the branches of the family tree, there is
no need of repeating the stock justification for Loyalists. But
Loyalists on the Cape had more than the stock justification. In the
first place, the British navy was the best and largest in the world,
and the Cape consisted entirely of unprotected shore line, with the
crooked finger of Long Point beckoning the British fleet into the
shelter of Provincetown Harbor. Most of the Cape money was by this
time invested in shipping of one kind or another, and many of the
inhabitants were sailors. In case of war, the former would be ruined
and the latter idle. The only chance of protecting the shores was by
a large and well-equipped home guard for every town. Instead of being
allowed to maintain such home guards, the Cape towns would certainly
be called upon to furnish their full quota of men and material for
the Continental armies. Their families and homes would thus be left
defenseless.

Here, then, was a situation that might well give pause to the stoutest
Patriot and lend color to the pretexts of the most craven Loyalist.
Brave men who were willing to fight for freedom might well think twice
if they lived on the Cape; and cowards in search of escape from the
thunder of the guns that sounded closer and closer in their ears, found
in these reflections a highly respectable refuge. Remember, then, in
considering the question of the Cape’s patriotism, that every one of
her citizens who first voted for Independence and then marched off to
fight, knew that, though a committee would try to see to it that his
family did not starve, his house stood on a shore that was unprotected
against landing parties, and his family had only an insignificant home
guard to protect them.

Events showed that these fears were prophetic. The British were quick
to realize the strategic value of Provincetown Harbor as a base for
naval operations, and promptly sailed in with a fleet of frigates--the
celebrated Somerset among them--and dropped anchor just off the town.
This gave them control, not only of Provincetown, which, consisting
of only a score or so of dwelling-houses, was of itself of no great
importance, but of Truro as well, and Truro was a far more considerable
settlement. That the enemy never attacked either town is explained
quite simply by the fact that no attack was necessary. So completely
defenseless were the shores, and so inadequate was Truro’s home guard,
that the Britishers were free to go ashore as they pleased and help
themselves to fresh water and provisions. They did, it is true,
indulge in a little minor raiding alongshore, in small boats, but
for the most part their coming and going was peaceable, and as month
followed month, their relations with the townspeople became almost
friendly. Before the end of the war, a chaplain from one of the British
frigates was preaching in the Truro church, though the record does
not add that he was entertained after the service at the homes of the
townspeople! That the British officers were not insensible to the
charms of the Cape girls appears from the fact that Dr. William Thayer,
a surgeon on one of His Britannic Majesty’s frigates that was anchored
in Provincetown Harbor, married Lucy Rich, of South Truro, and after
the war settled there with his wife and practiced medicine until he
died.

Such instances of fraternizing and affection were, however,
exceptional. Provincetown and Truro were hostile to the fleet, and
the fleet was hostile to the towns. There is the story of a comic
maneuver executed by the captain of the little Truro home guard. He saw
a raiding party push off from the fleet in small boats and head for
shore. He promptly mustered his handful of recruits, marched them to a
convenient rise of ground at the water’s edge and kept them marching
round and round it until the British from their boats concluded that a
large armed force was at hand to receive them, and returned to their
ships without more ado. This yarn smacks of local jingoism, but is
quite in accord with the Cape Cod sense of humor and with the British
tactics at Truro and Provincetown. They were not looking for a fight,
and doubtless landed somewhere else quite unmolested the next day.

But it was warfare all the same. If the townspeople ventured outside
the harbor for a mess of fish, there was danger of being picked up by
the enemy, as David Snow and his father were. They were fishing off the
back side of Truro in a small boat, were captured by one of the British
vessels, and did not see home again for seven years. Always, too,
the inhabitants had to endure the humiliation of helplessness. They
never forgot that the Englishmen could sack the town at any moment.
With this emergency in view, they had a committee ready to discuss
terms of capitulation if it should be necessary. Exactly what form
this capitulation was to take does not appear from the intentionally
non-committal language of the record. Probably they would have bought
exemptions from bombardment.

The British squadron did not confine its attention to Provincetown and
Truro. Hardly a day passed but the sails of His Majesty’s frigates
cast gray shadows across some Cape town and kept them all in a state
of vigilance and alarm. Militia detachments were detailed to watch
the shore even in villages as well protected by nature as Sandwich.
If these militia companies had been left intact, they would have
furnished considerable security; but they were no sooner formed than
orders came from headquarters directing them to march off to Cambridge
or Providence to join the Continental forces. The staunchest Patriot
resented withdrawing troops from his scantily guarded shores to go to
the aid of towns that were safely tucked away inland among the hills.
Colonel Joseph Otis (now a general) writes in 1778, ‘There is scarcely
a day that the enemy is not within gun shot of some part of our coast,
and they very often anchor in our harbors.’ Again he writes, in reply
to an order for fifty men to go to Providence, ‘As the enemy are around
and threaten danger here, it is like dragging men from home when their
houses are on fire. But I will do my best to comply.’ Once more he
says, ‘Highanos is much exposed; and to draw men off to Falmouth causes
much uneasiness.’ A little later a whole militia company was ordered
from Barnstable to Boston. Colonel Hallett, of Yarmouth, replied, ‘The
general opinion that prevails among the people here is that this county
is so much exposed on both sides to the enemy that it would be very
dangerous to send off those men.’ Again, two months after the signing
of the Declaration of Independence, twenty per cent of all the Cape
militia was ordered to New York, and sixty whaleboats assembled at
Falmouth to transport them.

But the constant demands for men were not all that was required of
the Cape. Boots, beef, and blankets in a steady stream poured out of
its towns until it looked as if nothing would be left. The situation
was desperate. The citizens looked from the rotting hulls of their
fishing schooners to the sails of the British fleet that hung ever
in the offing, and wondered what the end would be. The strain became
too great for some of the weaker spirits. They flew the white flag
and petitioned to be allowed to move their families to Kennebec or
the Provinces, in spite of the embargo that the Government, partly to
forestall this maneuver and partly to prevent their falling into the
hands of the enemy, had placed on outgoing vessels.

But desperation more often engendered reckless and in fact illegal
valor, and for every man who begged to be allowed to go to Kennebec,
there were a dozen who resolved to defy the embargo, run the British
blockade, and trade with New York or Rhode Island. Sometimes these
adventurous traders succeeded for a voyage or two. More often they
failed, as did two little vessels that in October, 1779, set sail from
Hyannis for Stonington. One was captured; the other driven ashore. This
disaster was the harder to bear because it was effected by Loyalist
refugees who had established themselves in considerable numbers on
Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, where their knowledge of Cape waters
proved of great value to the enemy. A more insidious practice of the
British was to issue propaganda encouraging deserters. Notable among
these propagandists was one Leonard, who is picturesquely described
as head ‘of the Loyalist gang in the Sound.’ This worthy suggested to
the desperate Patriots that they were fighting against their will,
and promised protection and comfort to all who would come over to the
enemy. Some no doubt yielded to the temptation, but strange to say
their numbers were offset by a trickle of returning Loyalists, who,
through the dark days of their indecision, had finally seen the light,
and now avowed their allegiance to the cause of Independence.

The skill of the British in holding up blockade-runners led indirectly
to the only real engagement between the local militia and His
Majesty’s troops that occurred on Cape soil--the attack on Falmouth
in the spring of 1779. The situation of Falmouth was in one respect
the most precarious of any of the Cape towns. It was close to the
Elizabeth Islands, and these islands formed a very convenient base for
British naval operations. Tarpaulin Cove in particular was a point
of concentration for the King’s ships, and from this snug anchorage
a series of raids along the Falmouth shore provoked the citizens to
retaliation.

The British in their raids used a type of boat called shaving mills.
These were good-sized sailboats of light construction and shallow
draft. They usually mounted a single gun forward. The largest of them
had three masts which could be easily unstepped and stowed with their
sails, so as not to be in the way. They could carry twenty-five men
and still leave room for as much beef and mutton as they were likely
to capture in a single raid. If they were so lucky as to pick up an
unguarded Yankee schooner moored alongshore, so much the better; they
had men enough to sail her off. Equipped with these craft and sometimes
piloted by renegade Patriots, the British succeeded in diminishing the
food supply of Falmouth until the inhabitants were at their wits’ end.
Their fury was increased when the enemy on one occasion captured a
schooner that had run the blockade and was returning to Falmouth with
a cargo of corn which she had procured on a voyage to the Connecticut
River. This was the last straw, and Major Joseph Dimmock determined to
recapture the schooner. He manned three whaleboats and rowed off by
night to Tarpaulin Cove, where the vessel lay. As soon as it was light
enough to locate the schooner and her captor, Dimmock and his three
boats rowed up to them at top speed, boarded the schooner, retook her,
and sailed out of the Cove. After further adventures and more fighting,
he finally got her safely into Woods Hole.

A few such exploits stung the British into planning an elaborate attack
on Falmouth with the object of burning the town. They assembled a
fleet of about ten vessels, and on April 2, 1779, anchored close to
shore and began to send off landing parties under the protection of a
barrage from their heavy guns. The townspeople had received warning
in time to get reënforcements of two militia companies from Sandwich
to bolster up their own home guard. While they were waiting for these
reënforcements, the Falmouth men improved their time by entrenching
themselves alongshore. The Sandwich companies arrived before daylight
and established themselves beside their Falmouth brethren in the new
trenches, so that the British landing parties, as they rowed toward
shore, were confronted by a force more than twice as large as they
had ever seen there before, and by proportionally brisk volleys of
musketry. This gave the attack a different complexion; so instead of
trying to land, they returned to their vessels--no doubt for further
orders--and they did not again disembark. The cannon balls did some
damage, but as they were aimed chiefly at the breastworks instead of
at the town itself, most of the buildings escaped without injury,
and the fleet soon after sailed away. One result of this repulse was
particularly gratifying--the trickle of returning Loyalists increased
to a stream.

Yet the situation of the Cape was critical. Her shipping was ruined;
the shores infested by hostile warships; the militia ordered inland;
the cattle either requisitioned or taken by the enemy. But though they
foresaw these consequences, most of the Cape towns had voted for war.
One, however, Barnstable, stands out as an exception, and failed to
instruct its Representative to vote in favor of the Declaration of
Independence. The fact is of particular significance, for Barnstable,
as the county seat, should have set the pace for her neighbors up and
down the Cape. That she failed at this critical moment in the Nation’s
history is a serious blot on her patriotism, and was so regarded by
many Barnstable citizens, who protested that the action of the town
failed to represent the wish of the majority of the townspeople.

The meeting at which this unpatriotic decision was reached took place
on June 25, 1776. The language of the resolution is a little guarded,
though its intention is clear enough. It reads: ‘Voted not to give
any instructions to the Representative with regard to Independence.’
Colonel Joseph Otis and twenty-two other indignant Barnstable Patriots
immediately published a protest. Sturgis Gorham, who had been present
at the meeting and had voted with the majority, answered the protest in
language that makes it look as if the phrasing of the resolution had
been made purposely non-committal in order to leave a loophole in case
of just such an attack as Otis’s. Gorham said that there was nothing
in the language of the resolution to indicate that the town _did
absolutely refuse to support the cause of Independence if such a course
seemed necessary_. This kind of hedging reflects no more credit on the
town than the vote itself does. Weathervanes have their uses, however,
and Gorham’s reply at least shows the strength of Otis’s patriotic
blast. What actually happened at this famous town meeting was this.

The Loyalist camp, headed by Edward Bacon, Esq., ably seconded by
Nymphas Marston, the moderator, so intimidated the meaner spirits
that out of a total of one hundred and forty, only sixty-five dared
to vote at all. Of these, thirty voted in favor of instructing their
Representative for Independence; thirty-five voted against it. General
Otis’s contention was that if the silent seventy-five had not been
bullied out of voting, the town would have gone patriotic. Whether
he is right or wrong is a matter of no consequence. The fact remains
that of those who had the courage to vote in spite of Squire Bacon,
five more were against the Declaration of Independence than were for
it; and little confidence can be put in the patriotic zeal of men who
let themselves be beaten into silence on such a question, even by so
impressive a figure as the Squire.

Surely the seed of Independence has flourished mightily in a century
and a half! To-day, if the wealthiest man in a Cape town rises in
meeting and declares that the town should do thus and so, it is
regarded by the citizens as a pretty good reason for voting in the
negative. Feudalism has gone out of style since the days of Caleb
Williams. But it was feudalism, or something very like it, that
prevented Bacon from being arrested and his property sold. Throughout
the Revolution he never wavered in his loyalty to the Crown; yet,
far from being molested or ostracized, he was in 1778 elected a
Representative to the Legislature. Thanks to another protest by Joseph
Otis, however, Bacon was excluded from a seat in the House and returned
to Barnstable. But his political prestige did not suffer from this
rebuff, for in 1780 he was a member of the General Court, a position
which he had already held several times before, notably in 1774, when
he had been forced by the Body of the People to resign his commission
in the militia and abandon his office as justice. He died at his home
in Barnstable in 1783.

The Cape’s best efforts in the war, naturally enough, were on the
sea, where many of the citizens had earned a living before the war
began. Twenty-one vessels--ranging all the way from shaving mills to
ships--were commanded by Cape-Codders, and carried in all one hundred
and twenty-six guns and more than six hundred men--not a bad showing
for an impoverished region. Besides these twenty-one captains, a good
percentage of the crews of other privateers were Cape fishermen or
traders. The General Arnold is a case in point. In December, 1778,
she sailed out of Boston on a cruise to harass Britishers off the
Southern States. In trying to weather the Cape, she was driven back
by a northeast gale, and anchored off Plymouth Harbor in a temporary
lull which Captain Magee mistook for the end of the storm. With the
renewal of the storm, the Arnold dragged, pounded her seams open on
the flats and filled with water almost to the main deck, driving
the men from their shelter below. They stayed on deck, exposed to a
blinding snowstorm and smothered with flying spray, from Saturday
afternoon until Monday morning. Of her crew of one hundred and five,
seventy-eight froze to death. Of these, eleven were Barnstable men and
one came from Falmouth. Another disaster gives us significant figures.
In the fall of 1780, the British captured the American privateer brig
Resolution and sent her crew to the Old Mill Prison. Among them were
sixteen Cape men, chiefly from Wellfleet and Truro.

The Yankees were quick to see the effectiveness of shaving mills for
coastwise raids, and these extraordinary craft, manned by Americans,
cruised along the shores of the British Provinces, plundering towns
exactly as the British plundered the Cape. A party landed in a shaving
mill near Barrington, Nova Scotia, intent on raiding the sheep-pen of
one Hezekiah Smith. Some of them went to the door of the farmhouse and
looked in. Among them was a young Cape-Codder, who, as soon as he got
a good look at the inhabitants of the house, cried ‘Hello, Aunt Nabby!
How are you?’ Aunt Nabby, it appears, was one of those with whom the
Cape air had not agreed, and who had emigrated some years previously
to this secluded spot in search of peace. She must have realized the
futility of her flight when she recognized, in this cheerful Yankee
raider, a nephew whose family had been made of sterner stuff and had
stayed on the Cape. The conclusion of this yarn is the standard one and
has been told of both sides in every war in the world. Aunt Nabby took
a gun from the corner and announced that she would shoot the first man
who stole a sheep. The invaders returned shame-faced to their boats
without any mutton!

Here is a more creditable privateering exploit, and one that was
conceived and carried out entirely by Cape-Codders. In 1779, two
English vessels, one of them the General Leslie of twelve guns,
lay in Old Town Harbor, Martha’s Vineyard, guarding some recent
American prizes. Captain Joseph Dimmock, of Falmouth, whose previous
exploits have been described, determined to attack them. He collected
twenty-five fellow townsmen and fitted out a little sloop with two
three-pounders. Thus equipped, he set sail for Old Town Harbor, boarded
the General Leslie amid a brisk fire of musketry, forced the crew
below, battened down the hatches, and brought her into Hyannis along
with his own little vessel.

Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, Commissioners in France, give in
their communications some important information as to the numbers
of Cape-Codders the British found on the American privateers they
captured. Adams writes, ‘Whenever an English man-o’-war has taken an
American vessel, they have given the whalemen among the crew ... their
choice either to go on board a man-o’-war and fight against their
country or go into the [British] whale fisheries.’ So much by way of
introduction. The joint communication from the Commissioners follows:
‘The English last year (1777) carried on a very valuable whale fishery
... off the River Plate. They have this year about seventeen vessels
in this fishery. _All the officers and almost all the men belonging to
these seventeen vessels, are Americans from Nantucket and Cape Cod_,
... excepting two or three from Rhode Island and perhaps one from Long
Island.’

Sometimes Fate took a hand in the fortunes of the Colonies and
delivered a British ship to them free in their back yards. The outer
shore of the Cape is about the most dangerous spot on the Atlantic
Coast, and it was not to be expected that the Britishers, with all
their skill, could cruise there off and on for seven years with
impunity. The Cape’s long, exposed coast line paid its inhabitants
back from time to time for the anxiety it cost them. One such payment
was the wreck of His Majesty’s transport Friendship, which came ashore
on the back side of Truro late in the winter of 1776, and furnished
General Washington’s army with paint, canvas, and other marine stores,
as well as cannon and small arms. A year or so later, another British
vessel, the Cumberland, found her grave on the Yarmouth flats.

But the enemy’s most serious loss was the ship-of-war Somerset in
November, 1778. The Somerset mounted sixty-four guns and was one of
the vessels that had been sailing in and out of Provincetown Harbor
at will since the beginning of the war. It was, therefore, a happy
day for the townspeople when she struck on the outer bar near Dead
Man’s Hollow, not far from the Highland at North Truro, pounded over
with the rising tide, and hit the beach helpless. The home guard took
four hundred and eighty survivors in charge, and they were marched by
Captain Enoch Hallett through a chain of jubilant villages to Boston.
Two months later, the General Court directed the sheriff to sell the
contents of the ship--a somewhat naïve order, for though Colonel Doane,
of Wellfleet, had been officially put in charge of the wreck, by the
time the sheriff’s sale took place she had been picked clean by local
mooncussers. This, no doubt, is what General Joseph Otis, a master of
racy phraseology, refers to as ‘wicked work at the wreck’; or perhaps
he refers to what was bound to happen if a Truro and a Provincetown man
got hold of the same coil of ratline-stuff at the same moment.

Another wreck--the most picturesque of them all, though important
only for what it shows us of the Provincetowners’ state of mind and
morals--occurred very early in the war. In March, 1776, Jolly Allen, a
prosperous Boston shopkeeper and a staunch Tory, deciding, like many
of his ilk, that a change of scene was indicated, chartered the sloop
Sally and engaged a captain to sail him with his wife and family and
all their possessions to Halifax. The Captain, who did not know one
end of a vessel from the other, soon had the Sally pounding on Peaked
Hill Bars behind Provincetown, with her sails blown to ribbons. He did
not even know how to take them in; a halyard and a bobstay were one
and the same thing to him. Allen was justly indignant, and to add to
his troubles, one of the party, Mrs. Wezzle by name, came down with
smallpox.

It did not take long for news of the Sally’s predicament to reach
Provincetown. A couple of citizens who had had smallpox rowed off and
brought all hands ashore. Allen was put in a wretched hovel, through
which wind and weather blew with perfect freedom; here his wife died.
The Sally was floated high and dry on the beach, and the selectmen
sent a message to the General Court stating that in their opinion her
company were ‘some of those vermin which have been so destructive to
the peace and good order of the Colony,’ and asking what they should do
with them.

Up to this point the Provincetown men had behaved with commendable
propriety. But while they were waiting for a reply from headquarters,
they improved their time by looting the Sally with the thoroughness and
dispatch of which only experienced mooncussers are capable. Under the
pretext of saving the cargo for the colonial authorities, they began
carting it across the sand hills to town; but so small a fraction of
each wagonload ever reached the village that it was laughable. Pious
citizens took pleasure in visiting Allen in his shanty and regaling
him with graphic accounts of how he was being robbed. ‘A gentleman of
veracity came to me,’ he writes, ‘and ... said he had seen one of the
completest battles he ever had in his life, and all on my account.
About fifteen or sixteen men and women was fighting battle royal in the
fields, and condemning one another, and each saying the other had taken
more of my property than they.’

Allen had need of the vein of whimsical philosophy with which he seems
to have been blessed. He saw that there was nothing for him to do but
grin and bear it, and began making friends with some of his callers.
To convince them that he was no stranger to misfortune, he related
how he had been deceived by the pseudo-captain of the Sally. This
tale elicited instant and genuine sympathy from his seagoing captors,
for sympathy was cheap, and Allen’s goods were all safely in their
possession. To quote again from the unhappy merchant’s narrative,
‘the people, as incensed as they was against the government and their
friends, when they heard my case, how I had been used by the Captain,
... they was ready to tear him to pieces. They called him a fresh-water
captain; that they should not choose to hang a salt-water Captain,
but a fresh-water Captain, it would give them all the pleasure
imaginable.’ It looks as though a strain of the old wild blood still
ran in the Provincetown veins! To crown their impertinence, they sent
the General Court a bill for one hundred and fifty pounds for their
exertions in saving the sloop’s cargo. No wonder Allen was glad to be
rid of Cape-Codders and to try his luck, as he soon after did, with the
authorities in Watertown instead.

A few days after the wreck of the Somerset, James Otis, the venerable
Chief Justice, died. This gentleman’s advanced age prevented him from
taking any part in the Revolution that called for great physical
exertion. He was not able, like his son James, to start a war or, like
his son Joseph, to command a brigade; but he had worked himself to high
places in affairs of state. He started life as a mechanic and ended
as Judge of Probate, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and
President of the Council, which meant that he was the chief executive
magistrate in Massachusetts after the departure of General Gage. These
honors he achieved with no education beyond the grammar school. He was
repeatedly elected to the Provincial Legislature and was twice Speaker
of the House. He remained throughout his life a level-headed Patriot,
respected even by his enemies, and the head of a family that has
brought much honor to Cape Cod.

An anecdote will show the extraordinary way in which Otis kept
matters in their proper perspective, even through the trying times
when perspectives were frequently lost. One day as he stood with some
friends in the doorway of his house, a certain Bill Blachford, a
deserter from the army, came hobbling along the road on his way from
camp, bent almost double with rheumatism. As President of the War
Council, it was Otis’s duty to arrest deserters. ‘Hullo!’ said one of
his friends; ‘there’s Bill Blachford!’ Otis instantly turned his back
to the road and entered the house. ‘Where is the rascal?’ he cried. ‘I
can’t see him.’

Far more tragic than the death of the old Chief Justice was the death
of his son James, who was struck by lightning and instantly killed in
the spring of 1783. Though he lived to see the triumphant end of the
war for which he was so largely responsible, it meant nothing to him.
His mind was gone, and the orator, whose eloquence twenty years before
had electrified the colonists, now babbled of green fields and blinked
at the sun. There was mercy in the lightning that killed him.

The condition of the Cape at the end of the Revolution was, in fact,
nothing to cheer any man who contemplated it. The constant calls
for men and material had drained the towns dry. Their commerce was
gone; their fishing vessels were hauled out and the daisies grew rank
between their seams; what little money they had was worthless through
depreciation. The most eloquent proof of their poverty is found in
the bald phrases of the report of a committee sent by the General
Court in 1782 to investigate the condition of the Cape towns: ‘We have
fully and critically attended to the service and are satisfied that
the several towns in said [Barnstable] County have complied with the
utmost of their abilities with the requisitions made upon them by the
General Court for beef and men, and that said towns are incapable of
complying therewith any further.’ The committee further reported that
‘all deficiencies of beef or men due from any of the towns in the
County of Barnstable should be abated to them and that all fines for
said deficiencies should be remitted.’ In the following spring (1783)
the State Treasurer was directed ‘to recall the executions issued for
taxes and to stay in the future, until further ordered, executions for
two-thirds of the taxes.’ This order applied to the towns of Eastham,
Harwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable, Sandwich, and Falmouth.

It is not the custom of governments to excuse requisitions or to remit
taxes. The fact that the General Court of Massachusetts did both these
things is evidence enough of the impoverished condition of the county.
The Cape weathered the storm and emerged, shattered but triumphant,
with plenty of sea-room to refit.

CHAPTER VIII

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.

CHAPTER IX

WHALING

Bold, hardy men, with blooming age,
Our sandy shores produce;
With monstrous fish they dare engage,
And dangerous callings choose.

From a ‘Whaling Song,’ by Dr. John Osborn, of Sandwich

Whenever a man speaks of whaling nowadays, he is pretty sure to mention
New Bedford in the same breath; and naturally enough, because New
Bedford, by almost exclusive devotion to killing whales, brought the
business to a degree of perfection that stands unsurpassed. But New
Bedford learned the art from Nantucket, and Nantucket learned it from
Cape Cod. The fame of the Cape whalemen had reached the ears of the
Islanders and excited their admiration as early as 1672, for they held
out flattering inducements to one James Lopar if he would move from
the Cape to Nantucket and teach them how whales should be killed. For
some reason the scheme fell through; but another Cape-Codder, Ichabod
Paddock, of Yarmouth, answered a second call about 1690, and carried
the light to the Island.

It was a dim and feeble ray, however, compared with the subsequent
science of New Bedford, for never has an art developed more
brilliantly--or for that matter more logically and inevitably--than
the art of whaling. The first Cape-Codders to profit by whales never
left dry land; they were in fact not whalemen at all, but farmers, who,
quite by chance, found dead whales washed up on the beach, and stripped
them of their blubber. Attending to whales of one kind and another that
came ashore on the Cape was a pleasant diversion from clearing woodland
and cutting salt hay; it was a more frequent pastime, too, than one
would suppose, for whales were incredibly abundant. A school of them,
it may be remembered, nearly drove Captain Jones out of his senses by
playing about the Mayflower as she was standing in for Provincetown
Harbor, for he had no harpoons and was in the tantalizing position
of the man without a gun. Fall and winter were the best seasons for
whales, and by a happy chance these were the off months for farmers,
who were able to reap the full benefit of this peculiar crop without
neglecting their farms. After the Cape was settled, few whales, gallied
at finding themselves in the shoal water of either the Sound or the
Bay, ever thrashed themselves to death in vain.

Frequently, instead of a single specimen, a whole school of blackfish
(a species of small whale) was stranded on the beach, and then there
was need of lively work if all the blubber was to be boiled down before
the air became too fragrant for human nostrils. But sanguinary as
the job was, the townspeople looked upon it as a lark, particularly
since the profits were immediate; and before long some began to wish
that whales would come ashore often enough to provide steady work in
trying them out. At this point the seed was sown that was to turn the
Cape-Codders into whalemen.

The disputes that arose over the dead bodies of stranded whales were
many and bitter. Riparian rights at their simplest have always been a
Sargasso Sea for lawyers, and when this intricate question, instead of
being allowed to drift along in the usual state of uncertainty, was
brought to an immediate issue by the arrival of a school of blackfish
on a particular stretch of beach, the fat was in the fire with a
vengeance. The man who found them said, ‘Findings are keepings; if it
hadn’t been for me, nobody would have known they were there.’ The town
authorities said, ‘The oil is the town’s, because the shore where the
fish stranded is within the town limits.’ Plymouth said, ‘The profits
belong to the Colony, for without our consent you would never have had
any town.’ The King said, ‘You are all my subjects;--therefore the
oil is mine.’ [See notes to Chapter IX.] Here, indeed, was work for
lawyers; but there were no lawyers, and there was no time to argue, for
such donations of the tide do not improve with age. If the townspeople
were wise, therefore, they first tried out the oil and then sat down to
see if they could find out whose it was.

The various towns reached different solutions. In 1653, Sandwich,
basing its argument on the fact that the beach was common land, decided
that the proceeds should be divided equally among the householders of
the town. This Utopian solution was too good to last, for Plymouth
soon decided that so much liberty was not good for young towns, and
demanded one hogshead of oil from each whale. There was a vague idea
in the Plymouth brain that this oil was the property of the Crown;
but how much of it ever went to lubricate the wheels of government in
England does not appear. As a matter of fact, the proceeds from almost
every drift whale were disposed of differently. In 1682, for example,
a school of blackfish dotted the Sandwich beach, and Jo Holway and
some others began immediately to strip them and boil down the blubber.
The town then woke up to what was going on and voted to allow Holway
and his friends to buy from the town what oil they had already made;
the rest was to be sold to others for the benefit of the town. The
next year four men were granted a monopoly on all drift whales in
Sandwich for ten years, provided they gave half the oil to the town,
and deducted from their own half the barrel per whale that must go to
Plymouth. Eastham and Truro decided that drift whales were blessings
sent by the grace of God, and so dedicated a part of the proceeds to
help pay the minister. Each town made up its mind for itself what to do
with its share of the proceeds of these valuable carcasses and changed
its decision as often as it saw fit--which was about as often as a
whale was stranded.

As long as whale oil had any market value, and long after the Cape
was sending elaborately equipped whalers to all the seven seas, drift
whales continued to be prized and were welcomed ecstatically by the
amateur whalemen at home. The cry ‘A whale in the Bay!’ was enough to
empty the hall during a town meeting; every able-bodied man rushed to
the beach with the same speed that citizens to-day show in leaving
church at the alarm of a forest fire. There is a story of a Truro
youngster who abandoned some cows he was driving to pasture and,
unaided, captured and killed a porpoise that he saw floundering about
on the flats. The boy held him by the tail to prevent his thrashing
his way into deep water, and then, after dispatching him with a knife,
stripped off the blubber with the skill of a professional. All was
fish that came to the townsmen’s net provided it contained a gallon of
oil, and every chance prize--from the lone porpoise of the Truro boy
to the record school of two thousand blackfish taken at Provincetown
in 1884--was drained to the last drop. By 1850 findings were keepings;
in that year Captain Daniel Rich cut his mark in the sides of a school
of seventy-five blackfish on the beach between Wellfleet and Truro and
thereby established an indisputable claim to them. Within twenty-four
hours he had sold them as they lay for $1900. That the Standard Oil
Company has not altogether changed the Cape-Codder’s attitude toward
drift whales was illustrated in July, 1928, when eighty blackfish
came ashore at Eastham. The lucky man who found them collected twelve
dollars apiece from parties in New Bedford, who hurried to Eastham and
took the ‘melon’ from the head of each blackfish. Since the ‘melon’
contains oil which, when properly tried out, brings upward of sixty
dollars a gallon, it is safe to say that New Bedford lost nothing by
the transaction. On the other hand, a lone dead finback, sixty-five
feet long, which drifted into Barnstable Harbor in the autumn of 1928,
had to be towed to sea at the town’s expense lest he pollute the water
and spoil the clams.

[Illustration: BLACKFISH ASHORE AT PROVINCETOWN]

Not every school of blackfish, however, or every lone whale that was
sighted offshore, was unlucky enough to be stranded on the flats. More
than once the citizens who lined the beach, waiting for the prize
to blunder into shoal water, were chagrined to see it turn seaward
and vanish. One or two such experiences changed the townspeople from
watchful waiters into pursuers. Their tactics at first, at least as
regards blackfish, were not very aggressive, for most of them were
farmers and more dexterous with a pitchfork than with a harpoon. Their
method was to surround the fish in a fleet of small boats and, by
beating the water with the flat of their oar blades, to drive them
ashore in a panic. This maneuver was an exciting one to execute and it
produced good results. It is easy to imagine a fleet of dories half a
mile off shore, spread out fanlike beyond a school of blackfish, and
slowly closing in with yelling and splashing until the fish struck the
sand. Then the fun was over and the work began, the proceeds usually
being divided equally among the boats that had taken part in the
pursuit.

It must be clearly understood that these men were in no sense of the
word whalemen. They were not professionals but amateurs. None of them
owned any whaling gear, or would have known how to use it if he had
owned it. To them a harpoon was a dangerous weapon--not a tool of their
trade. They were no more whalemen than a man who shoots a skunk in
his henyard is a hunter. But some of the youngest had the makings of
whalemen in them. They had tasted the wine of pursuit, and it was an
insidious vintage; it urged them to try a deeper draught by cruising
round the Bay and harpooning whales.

This was called shore-whaling, and though the men who practiced it
never went on long voyages, and though the Cape-Horners who came
afterwards regarded them much as deep-water shipmasters regarded
coasting skippers, they were nevertheless real whalemen, and
experienced the same thrills of pursuit and capture as their successors
who cruised to Davis Straits or the South Pacific. Furthermore, they
had the advantage of being able to operate their farms in spring and
summer. The tactics of the shore whalemen were simple. They watched
from the shore until they saw a spout or the rounded backs of a school
of blackfish. Then they shoved off in clinker-built cedar whaleboats,
and the chase began. If they came up with the monster and succeeded
in planting an iron, they played him in the regular way, paying out
line around a post in the bow of the boat as long as they could,
and, as a last resort, heaving overboard a drag--or heavy buoy--with
the end of the line made fast to it. When finally they came close
enough to the exhausted whale to reach ‘the life’ with a lance, the
excitement was over and the toil began, for the carcass had to be
towed ashore--sometimes a distance of a good many miles. When their
boat grounded, they dragged the carcass up the beach with heavy tackle
rigged to a capstan. There the blubber was boiled in the try-yard near
by, and the bone was scraped and cleaned.

As long as the supply of local whales held out, shore-whaling on the
Cape was profitable and immensely popular. Barnstable, Yarmouth, and
Truro reserved whaling grounds for the use of their citizens. No doubt
other towns made similar provision. Chatham, at any rate, offered to
exempt the Reverend Daniel Greenleaf, of Yarmouth, from all taxation
if he would settle somewhere in Chatham and follow shore-whaling. But
the minister apparently decided that empty souls in Yarmouth were more
important than empty oil casks in Chatham, for he did not move.

Most of the young men, after a taste of this sport, found farm work
dull, forsook the plough for the harpoon and lance, and lived in
whale-houses alongshore. Two hundred Barnstable men were shore-whalers
in 1715 for three months of every year. And no wonder, for sometimes
stranger creatures than blackfish challenged their skill. In 1719, a
sea-monster appeared in Provincetown Harbor and defied the combined
efforts of a whole fleet of shore-whalemen; B. Franklin (uncle of the
celebrated Benjamin) has left a racy account of its appearance:

Boston, Sept 28, 1719. On the 17 Instant there appear’d in Cape-Cod
harbour a strange creature, His head like a Lyons, with very large
Teeth, Ears hanging down, a large Beard, a long beard, with curling
hair on his head, his Body a bout 16 foot Long, a round buttock,
with a short Tayle of a yellowish colour, the Whale boats gave him
chase, he was very fierce and gnashed his teeth with great rage when
they attackt him, he was shot at 3 times and Wounded, when he rose
out of the Water he always faced the boats in that angry maner, the
Harpaniers struck at him, but in vaine, for after 5 hours chase, he
took to sea again. None of the people ever saw his like befor.

Provincetowners, it would seem, were still fond of strong waters!
Captain John Thacher, whose duty it was to draft recruits for the
French and Indian Wars, had great trouble in rounding up the young
bloods who were shore-whaling. In a letter to Governor Stoughton he
says: ‘All our young and strong men are employed in whaling and mostly
have their rendivous remote from the towns, and if they see any man
coming towards them, presently mistrust; make a shout and run into the
thickets.’

So jealous was each town of its whaling rights that trespassers were
instantly detected and either warned off or forced to pay for the
privilege of fishing the local waters. By 1711, the barren stretches
of Sandy Neck in Barnstable had caught the eye of strangers as being
a good base for whaling stations. Some of them squatted there, to
the displeasure of the Proprietors, who promptly voted that ‘every
stranger, both English and Indian, that shall come and settle at Sandy
Neck to go on whaling voyages ... shall pay for their fire wood each
person three shillings, at entry.’ The amount of fuel consumed in
the try-houses must have been enormous, and this was one of the many
factors in the demolition of the Cape forests.

Not content with challenging strangers who came poaching whales, the
authorities of the various towns kept a sharp eye on the activities
of their neighbors. Thus, in 1758, Eastham considered measures for
preventing Harwich enthusiasts from pursuing whales at Billingsgate.
Drift whales, too, were still bones of contention, particularly when
they came ashore near town lines. A contemporary jingle states the
situation exactly:

‘Down on East Harbor bar there lays a cow and a calf;
Provincetowners swear they’ll have the whole;
Truroers swear they shan’t have but half.’

But such difficulties were easy to settle compared with the disputes
that arose over whales that had been wounded in the Bay by men from
one town, had escaped, and had afterwards died and been washed ashore
within the limits of another. Did the oil belong to the boat’s crew
that struck the whale; to the town where the body had been found
stranded; to the man who found it, or to the owner of the strip of
beach where the carcass came ashore? Here, for example, is an affidavit
signed by a Barnstable man who found himself trying to harpoon a whale
off Truro:

Dec. 7th, 1725; The declaration of John Lewis in Barnstable.--I,
being at sea near a place called Hogg’s Back, with the boat’s
company, I then and there struck and wounded a whale fish, she lying
soothing under water;--my iron took her upon the rising of her bulge,
but she drawing my iron made play, and was soon struck and wounded
by James Bearse, and after awhile drawing his iron, she still making
play, was in a few moments struck by Thomas Thatcher, and they and we
soon killed said whale.

JOHN LEWIS
Attest, JOHN SNOW--_Town Clerk_

Clearly this affidavit was connected with a dispute over the ownership
of the whale, and Lewis and his friends were indeed in a dilemma. It
was out of the question to tow the carcass all the way to Barnstable;
if they brought it ashore at Truro, the townsmen would probably warn
them off or charge rent for the beach. And Lewis’s predicament was only
one of many like it. The only solution in such cases was to equip boats
with casks to hold chunks of blubber that could be cut up at sea and
carried home to be tried out in the local try-yards. This practice was
followed for a time, and from then on it was only a step to the last
stage in the development of whaling. Men went farther and farther from
shore in bigger and bigger vessels that carried try-works built into
their decks, until at last cruises of four years were not uncommon.
Scarcity of whales now drove men to sea oftener than disputes. The
constant activity of hundreds of shore-whalemen had chased the monsters
out of the Bay so effectively that by the middle of the eighteenth
century only an occasional whale was sighted. Shore-whaling was a thing
of the past--it was now a question of deep water or nothing. The Cape
chose deep water.

But the vanishing of the shore-whaleman’s livelihood must not be taken
lightly. It was a very real disaster to scores of Cape families, some
of whom had neither the capital nor the courage to follow the whales to
sea. In 1739, only about half a dozen whales were taken in Provincetown
waters, and a number of families decided to move away. Ten years
later, the citizens of Yarmouth were so impoverished by the failure of
the whale-fishery that they were barely able to give the minister an
increase in salary they had promised him. It was only by the titanic
exertions of the wealthiest and most energetic citizens on the Cape
that money was raised in each town and fleets equipped for deep-sea
whaling.

Truro was the pioneer in this hazardous business. In 1758, one of her
citizens, Captain Henry Atkins, cleared from Boston for Davis Straits
in the ship Whale, and filled in the gaps between whales by trading
with the natives. He soon found that this was by far the quickest
and cheapest way to get bone, for in return for ten shillings-worth
of trinkets they gave him whalebone valued at one hundred and twenty
pounds! Other Truro whalemen cruised along the shores of Africa, and
two of them, Captains David Smith and Gamaliel Collins, won fame that
reached the ears of the British Parliament when in 1774 they pursued
whales as far south as the Falkland Islands. Not content with this
bleak outpost, others soon rounded the Horn and pursued sperm whales in
the uncharted waters of the South Pacific.

Wellfleet, during the years preceding the Revolution, devoted
almost her entire energy to whaling. Nearly every man in town was a
whaleman--and the result of thus putting all the eggs in one basket was
that the declaration of war in 1775 and the immediate blockading of the
Cape ports utterly prostrated the town. The citizens could not pay the
Provincial tax and, in a petition to the General Court for exemption,
they declared that nine tenths of the townsmen had been engaged in
whaling and were now left with no source of income. Exaggerated as
this statement may appear, it is borne out by statistics, which show
that four hundred and twenty men and twenty or thirty vessels were
thus employed at Wellfleet up to the beginning of the war. The local
honors were divided about evenly between Captain Jesse Holbrook,
whom the British employed to teach them the art, and Colonel Elisha
Doane, who, having learned in his youth how to handle a harpoon,
spent the latter years of his life financing the voyages of others
and reaping the profits--with such success that he died one of the
richest men in Massachusetts. After the war, Wellfleet tried to launch
her fleet again; but none of the citizens had capital enough to build
new vessels, and the old ones had perished during the seven years of
disuse. In 1802, her fleet had shrunk to five schooners, and these set
sail half-heartedly; they lacked the confidence that is necessary for
success, and were quite as much fishermen as whalers, carrying salt and
fish lines as well as whaling gear.

Taken by and large, Provincetown has done most for Cape whaling.
Provincetown, indeed, ranks with Truro as a pioneer in the business,
and continued it long after the last Truro whaleman was in his
grave. The town was virtually depopulated when, in the middle of the
eighteenth century, twelve whalers were equipped and manned in its
harbor and set out simultaneously on long voyages. The Revolution gave
the Provincetown whalemen pause, but did not stop them altogether, for
after the war, they started out again with a determination unequaled
anywhere else on the Cape, and succeeded in bringing the business back
to a prosperous basis. The Civil War dealt it another blow; several of
the whalers burned by Confederate cruisers were owned in Provincetown.
But even this--a heavy loss for so small a town--did not kill the
business. With high courage, the citizens began once more to sharpen
their harpoons, and in 1876 they had seventeen whaling vessels at sea.
Thanks to the energy of such men as Captain John Cook, the Cape flag
was flying on the whaling grounds until 1916. During the last century
about one hundred and seventy-five whaling vessels have hailed from
Provincetown.

The history of these three towns, Truro, Wellfleet, and Provincetown,
comprises the bulk of the history of the Cape long-voyage
whale-fishery. But no town was immune. Eastham was represented until
the eighties by Captain Edward Penniman, who commanded half a dozen
different barks out of New Bedford, and, on retiring, handed the torch
to his son Eugene, who continued until the business died. Falmouth
has a goodly list of vessels and commanders to her credit, the most
celebrated of whom--Captain Silas Jones of the Awashonks--will demand
further attention presently. Barnstable now and then sent out a whaler,
and was credited with two at the beginning of the Revolution. During
the Civil War, Semmes burned one of Sandwich’s two representatives, the
brig Ocean.

But not even Provincetown and Wellfleet, in their palmiest days, were
in a class with Nantucket in its time. Long before the Revolution the
pupil had far outstripped his teacher, and the men who a century before
had sent to the Cape for a whaling instructor were now in a position
to instruct Cape-Codders. Forty men left Harwich for the new whaling
headquarters in 1760.

Yet the Cape whalemen, before they yielded the palm to Nantucket, and
afterwards as well, were leading lives of adventure in remote seas
that made them something more than mere killers of whales. They were
not always successful, either. Captain Solomon Sturgis, for example,
who sailed his sloop out of Barnstable on a whaling voyage in 1741,
was no match for a Spanish privateer who seized his vessel but let
the chagrined Captain escape. Then there was the question of storms.
As a matter of fact, whalemen were better off in bad weather than
their more aristocratic brethren of the merchant service, for their
barrel-bottomed, apple-cheeked hulls, built for capacity and without a
thought for speed, were as good dirty-weather sailing vessels as have
ever been built. Unlike the clippers, they were not heavily sparred;
the crew had no towering skysails or moonrakers to struggle with, and
the Captain never hesitated to snug down at night, for there was just
as much danger of sailing past a school of whales in the dark as there
was of not coming up with one. So the whalers rode out in comfort many
a storm that would have brought the overcrowded spars of a merchantman
crashing down on the heads of the overdriven crew.

But no ship is safe at sea, and even the stout barks of the
blubber-boilers were sometimes in trouble. In 1881, Captain Caleb
Hamblin, of Sandwich, commander and half-owner of the brig Henry
Trowbridge, was returning from a combination whaling and sealing
voyage below Cape Horn. In the tricky latitudes of the West Indies, a
hurricane tore down on his vessel and swept her decks clean, carrying
both masts over the side. When the storm was over, Captain Hamblin
rigged jury masts, set what sail they could carry, and worked his way
to the Azores--a distance of about a thousand miles. This achievement
is important, not because it is unusual--hundreds of shipmasters have
done as much--but because it answers an accusation that is sometimes
heard, to the effect that whalemen were not sailors. If this means
that they did not spend their time making Flemish eyes or hoisting
coach-whip pennants, the statement is true. But such frills were
refinements of the sailor’s art, not essentials of it. When it came
to sending down a sprung spar, setting up new shrouds, or reeving off
running rigging in a high sea, the whalemen were as good as any British
East-Indiaman. They had to be, in fact, for their cruises took them
for months at a time to unfrequented corners of the world far from any
ports where they could put in for repairs. The best they could hope
for was the shelter of an atoll where the natives were friendly and
would let them work in peace. At worst they could set up new spars and
rigging at sea--as Captain Hamblin’s crew did in the South Atlantic.
Resourcefulness beyond the usual resourcefulness of sailors was the
prerequisite for the captain of a whaler; and it is fair to say that
resourcefulness is as valuable an asset to a sailor as knowing how to
make a Flemish eye.

Like many of the wives of whaling captains, Mrs. Hamblin, herself the
daughter of a shipbuilder, went several voyages with her husband, and
after the two came ashore for good and settled in Falmouth, she had
something more interesting to talk about than the outrageous behavior
of the neighbors. She had been round the world, had had one child born
at sea in the cabin of the Eliza Adams, another in New Zealand, and a
third in Australia. Hers was the horizon that bounds the seven seas;
she liked Falmouth, but she knew that Falmouth was not the world.
Captain Hamblin, too, was more than a seaman. Early in his career,
while second officer of the Congress, he found himself half in and half
out of the mouth of a sperm whale that was fifty feet under water and
headed for the bottom. The whale had a harpoon in his side, and before
the monster had carried out all the line, Hamblin managed to take a
couple of turns with it around his hands. It jerked taut; the whale was
captured; and the young whaleman, half drowned, his arms pulled almost
out of their sockets, and with a wide gash the length of one leg, was
hauled into the boat--ready for the next encounter. It is dangerous to
generalize about human nature, but it is a reasonable guess that such a
man, when he retires and settles down at home, is not likely to go to
law if an overenthusiastic young marksman breaks his henhouse window
with a stone.

Silas Jones, of Falmouth, was twenty-one years old when, in 1835, he
started on a four-year cruise as third mate of the whaler Awashonks.
After the ship had been a year or two at sea, Captain Coffin hove to in
a squall in the lee of Baring’s Island in the South Pacific. It had not
been his intention to trade with the natives of the island; in fact,
according to the chart it was uninhabited. But as soon as the squall
blew over, a number of canoes put off from shore and headed for the
Awashonks. The chief, followed by a group of naked savages, clambered
over the rail, and the crew began to barter with them for cocoanuts and
breadfruit while the Captain and Mr. Gardiner, the first mate, went
below for dinner, leaving Jones in charge. Scrap iron was the currency
the natives chiefly desired; soon they had turned over all their fresh
fruit for some bits of this metal, and with the usual curiosity of
primitive peoples, were nosing about the deck examining everything with
the greatest interest. The gleaming blades of the cutting-in spades,
neatly ranged in their racks, seemed to fascinate them particularly;
they tried the edges with their thumbs, their eyes wide in admiration.

The Captain, who had finished his dinner and come on deck,
good-naturedly showed the natives how they were used on whales. Their
excitement and wonder grew; they began to jabber in their outlandish
dialect and more canoes appeared alongside. Some of the newcomers
were armed, and young Jones, who felt vaguely uneasy, gladly obeyed
the Captain’s orders to disarm them before they came on deck. While
he was thus engaged, he heard a whoop from behind, and turned to see
the natives making a rush for the spades. They got most of them and in
the twinkling of an eye had sliced off the Captain’s head, killed the
first mate, and were starting operations on the crew. The second mate
dived overboard and was never seen again. This left Jones in command.
He jumped into the midst of the fight, grabbed a spade from one of the
islanders and thrust at him with it so hard that the blade was embedded
in the woodwork of the deckhouse, and he was left unarmed. He attacked
one native with his fists, but was confronted by three more, one of
whom had a spear. Realizing that in another second it would be lodged
in his breast, Jones leaped down the open hatchway into the forehold.
Here he picked up one or two recruits, and they made their way aft
below decks and forced an entrance to the cabin.

Here there was a moment’s respite, which was used in loading all the
firearms the ship carried, and from the shelter of the cabin Jones and
his followers, one of whom was desperately wounded and another useless
from fright, directed a musket fire that for a moment silenced the
yells of the savages, who were now masters of the deck, with their
chief standing in childlike pride at the helm, though he knew as little
of its use as a baby at the wheel of a motor-car. He was invisible
from the cabin, but, realizing that some one was monkeying with the
steering-gear, and alarmed lest the ship might go aground, Jones and
one of the crew fired at the same moment through the cabin roof in the
direction of the wheel, and by great luck killed the chief. This was
the turning-point of the fight. Some of the natives took to the canoes;
others stood undecided, their thirst for blood still unquenched. It
was the strategic moment for a sally, and Jones led the way on deck
with a loaded musket. He found that the battle was over. The last of
the savages had gone over the side and was swimming for shore in the
wake of the departing canoes. The vessel was promptly headed away
from this ‘uninhabited’ island, and Jones, keenly aware of his new
responsibility, divided his time between sewing up the gashes of his
men and navigating his ship. After fifty days he dropped anchor in
Honolulu Harbor and turned the Awashonks over to the American Consul.

This bloody experience did not discourage Silas Jones. He continued to
go on whaling voyages and commanded various vessels out of Falmouth
until after the Civil War. One of them was the Commodore Morris, whose
figurehead--a grim representation of this maritime celebrity--at
present occupies a prominent position in Mr. Hutchinson’s bookstore
in New Bedford. Jones himself, after leaving the sea, directed the
fortunes of his native town of Falmouth with the same resolution and
vigor which he had shown as a lad in shooting the Baring’s Island
savages off the deck of the Awashonks.

Another Cape-Codder from the opposite end of the peninsula came within
an ace of having his vessel, the bark Parker Cook, stove and sunk by a
fighting whale. This was Captain Cook, of Provincetown. In 1850, while
cruising in the Atlantic, he lowered for a whale, and two irons were
planted in the monster. Like a flash he turned, rising almost out of
water, and capsizing the boat. In the mêlée, a turn of line caught the
boatsteerer’s leg and almost cut it through. The whale then attacked
the Parker Cook, and rushed straight for her bow, hitting the cutwater
with such violence that it was driven deep into the creature’s head.
The impact knocked the men on deck flat, and the vessel staggered from
stem to stern as if she had struck a derelict. The whale suffered more
than the bark, however, and though he tried another charge, his ardor
was quenched, and Captain Cook dispatched him with three shots from
the bomb-lance. The crew of the wrecked whaleboat were picked up, and
all hands took savage satisfaction in extracting one hundred and three
barrels of oil from this ferocious old bull. The Parker Cook put in to
Fayal for repairs to her cutwater, and here the injured bo’s’n received
more skilled treatment than was to be had on board.

Whaling captains had to turn surgeon oftener than other shipmasters,
for their voyages were measured in months instead of in weeks, and
they spent those months in the most hazardous business that has ever
been followed by man. Irrespective of what injuries whales themselves
might inflict, the constant use of formidable weapons like cutting-in
spades, harpoons and lances in the crowded quarters of pitching boats
and rocking decks, produced frightful wounds with a frequency that even
the unluckiest merchant mariner was spared. And when it came to Arctic
cruises for bowheads and bone, the Captain was obliged to treat frozen
hands or feet so often that it became almost a part of the routine.

Arctic whaling was, in fact, a separate science, and a grimmer calling
it is hard for a steam-heated generation to imagine. It combined all
the dangers of sperm whaling in southern latitudes with the perils of
polar exploration; and it was besides the bitterest test that human
patience can be put to, for the voyages sometimes lasted four years,
and of this time only about six months could be spent in whaling; the
remaining forty-two consisted of living aboard a vessel frozen fast in
an ice-bound harbor and trusting to native hunters to supply venison.
Captain John Atkins Cook, of Provincetown, whose book describing his
northern whaling voyages has been recently published, is the last of
the Cape-Codders who has followed this calling. What can have induced
this indomitable whaleman to make voyage after voyage to the Arctic it
is hard to imagine. Not the hope of riches, certainly, for a man of
Captain Cook’s abilities could have made more money in any one of a
dozen callings at home. The only explanation that suggests itself is
that the love of encountering and overcoming hardships--of succeeding
where many fail--perhaps, too, the lure which the very desolation of
the North exerts on some men, kept Captain Cook’s vessel headed time
and again for the frozen latitudes of Bering Strait. In addition to
his other troubles, the Arctic whalemen had problems of navigation to
solve, of which the merchant sailor knew nothing. Here is what Captain
Cook himself says on this topic:

These voyages in the Arctic seas present to the master some of the
most intricate problems of navigation that the world has ever known.
As the Arctic navigator, leaving San Francisco in February looks to
the eastern horizon and sees the last blink of the Farallone Light
(off Golden Gate) he realizes that in his lonely watch at night or
when steaming along among the loose ice off the coast of Alaska,
and in search of whales in the Far North among the icefields, that
light is the last guide he will have, and that no beacon by night or
buoys by day are to be seen by him to warn of treacherous shoals or
other dangers. No: he must sail without them and depend upon his past
experience to bring him out safely.

Captain Cook had his full share of surgery to perform during his many
Arctic voyages. On one occasion a Provincetown boy, Fred West, sailed
with the Captain and was soon made third mate. During the winter at
Herschel’s Island, West obtained the Captain’s permission to go inland
on a hunting expedition with another member of the ship’s company.
While he was taking a loaded gun from the canoe, the trigger caught,
and young West got both barrels in the upper arm. He was brought back
senseless and almost dead from pain and loss of blood. Captain Cook
and the captains of three other whalers took him to a hut on shore and
gave him a tumblerful of raw whisky and a whiff of chloroform. Then
they amputated the arm so successfully that, in spite of its loss, West
continued to follow the sea in command of coasting schooners until
1923, when he was drowned off the Delaware Capes.

In 1908, Captain Cook turned his attention to sperm whaling in Southern
waters, and had the brigantine Viola built for the purpose. In this
graceful vessel--which looked like a yacht--the Captain and his wife
set sail for a two years’ cruise, and made successful voyages in the
South Atlantic and along the African Coast until 1916. This business,
strenuous though it was, seemed child’s play to Captain Cook after the
rigors of the Northern icefields, and his voyages for sperm were more
like pleasure cruises than work. In 1916 he retired for good--the last
of the Cape Cod whalemen.

It is easy, dazzled by the glamour of far voyages to palm-fringed
islands, to be deceived into false sentimentality toward this
great dead industry. Many an up-state farmer’s boy, lured by the
will-o’-the-wisp of romance, left his plough in the furrow and went
whaling--to end his days a beachcomber, disillusioned and beaten.
It was a grim game, with the dollar always at the helm. But the
financial side of it, with all its ruthlessness and with all that it
led to--hazing men into deserting with money due them; overcharging
for shoddy clothing from the slop chest and underfeeding until the
hungry crew looked greedily on slices of broiled whale meat--all
this was not more destructive to men’s fiber than herding together
in a forecastle, compared to which the forecastles of clippers were
palatial, a miscellaneous crew composed of round-eyed lads from the
Vermont hills and crime-hardened degenerates who ought to have been in
jail. Men were not made to live by themselves; wherever circumstances
force them to do so, they seek, like water, the level of the lowest
and most vicious among them. The forecastles of whaling barks produced
these circumstances as perfectly as they have ever been produced in the
world, and our fresh-cheeked youngster, who embarked on a voyage as
immaculate as a man can be, stood a fine chance of emerging from his
four years’ association with the dregs of the water-front, as hardened a
character as they.

‘She’d a crew of blacks from the Cape Verde Isles
That spoke in Portagee,
With men from Norway, Finland too,
And the shores of the Irish Sea.

‘She’d whites from the rocky Yankee farms
Mixed up with Sandwich brown,
With a skipper who hailed from New Bedford,
And a mate from Westport Town.’

Beside learning vice, the young whalemen learned violence. A three
months’ voyage from New York to San Francisco in a clipper ship, with
a ventilated deckhouse for the crew, was enough to beget frequent
mutinies; what, then, can we expect from a forty months’ cruise in a
bobtailed blubber-boiler? Mutinies there were aplenty, and not without
good reason did whaling captains sometimes sign on five mates to help
them hold the lid on. Cook went through one Arctic winter with a
mutinous crew--the only wonder is that crews in those latitudes ever
refrained from mutiny. The sperm whalemen opened the petcock from time
to time by calling at Honolulu, or Tahiti, or Guam, where men might
desert instead of killing an officer, and where natives could easily
be procured as replacements. But captains often neglected this safety
valve, and stayed at sea as long as there was an unbroached barrel of
salt horse in the hold, or a gallon of ropy water in the butts. Under
such conditions, is it surprising that Captain Nathaniel Burgess, of
Bourne, who made his last voyage with a crew that represented nine
nationalities, called discipline the whaling captain’s most serious
problem?

Time has blurred the sharp and cruel outlines of life on a whaler. In
our enthusiasm over those who returned victorious, we are likely to
forget the many who were left behind, broken and polluted, to drag out
the last years of their lives on the beach of a coral island. To-day
there are those who lament the passing of this undoubtedly picturesque,
though certainly ruinous industry. But the world is a better place
without long-voyage whaling than it ever was with it. Keenly as we
appreciate the skill and self-reliance and valor that it taught some of
the men who practiced it, we cannot forget the merciless malignity with
which it shattered the rest. The wreck of the Wanderer, New Bedford’s
last whaler, in the summer of 1925, was a happy event for the march of
civilization.

CHAPTER X

FISHERIES

The story of the Cape fisheries begins and ends at Provincetown, but
the midships section of it finds Provincetown nowhere. The beginning
came in what, from the point of view of this volume, were prehistoric
days--prior to 1620, that is--when wild European fishermen squatted in
shacks along the Provincetown shore and drank rum with the Indians.
During the early ‘historical’ period, when the rest of the Cape was
farming, Provincetown was hardly in existence: it had not even been
officially settled. A little later, when the other towns were merrily
catching cod, the cluster of shanties on the beach way down below
High Head was wondering whether or not it was ever going to achieve
the dignity of a town. But finally, when the demand came for larger
vessels and longer voyages, the creek harbors of the upper Cape
became worthless, while a fleet of schooners swung easily at anchor
inside Long Point, and fishermen flocked to Provincetown as deer to a
salt-lick. Later still, capital concentrated the fleet at Gloucester
and Boston, and Provincetown was once more abandoned. Such, in a
nutshell, are the stages in the development of fishing on the Cape.

It is pleasant to grope back into the prehistoric age--that dim,
enchanted era of the sixteenth century, where the labored quill of
no town clerk has left records of fact to clip the wings of fancy.
Provincetown had no written records to tell of the comings and goings
of adventurers on her shores; only a ruined wooden fort near Corn
Hill, an iron kettle, and a blond-haired skeleton buried in a sailor’s
cassock beside a papoose. These are her earliest records--isolated
links in a century-long chain of promiscuous freebooting with fish
behind it as a motive. The best we can do is to pick up the story in
the middle, and even there our information is so meager as to be of
little historical value. One thing, however, is certain; phantom ships
of nameless fishermen entered Provincetown Harbor before 1600, and
continued to do so, unrecorded and often unobserved except by Indians,
for the next hundred years.

Then in 1714, the Court, judging that the time had come to snatch
the brand from the burning, put the untamed community under Truro’s
jurisdiction. Here its importance comes to an end for the time being.
A life of captivity seems not to have agreed with it. No longer could
outlandish crews enjoy the license of a wilderness, and so exposed were
its shores to French privateers that all but three families moved away
during the long wars that followed.

Meantime, fish had become an important factor in the lives of the
settlers farther up the Cape. Of course they had always caught fish
enough for their own tables, but they had been too busy farming to
go fishing for a livelihood. The thrift of the Old Colony, however,
could not bear to let great schools of cod and mackerel swim about the
Bay without bringing so much as a shilling into the treasury. But the
Plymouth settlers were such unskillful fishermen that, in spite of the
abundance of fish, they usually returned empty-handed. Realizing the
limitations of its children, the Court frankly surrendered, farmed out
the fishing rights to more expert persons, and used the revenue to
support a school.

Among the first Cape men to hire these rights was Thomas Huckins, of
Barnstable, an enterprising man of business whose manifold activities
had made him amphibious as early as 1660--perhaps earlier. Aside from
various public offices which he held from time to time, Huckins kept
the tavern, whose cellar was well stocked with rum which he brought
from Boston in his own packet. As he was his own rum-carrier, so was
he his own fisherman. In those days men did not hire others to do what
they were able to do themselves. Even if he had wished to employ some
one else to do his fishing, it is doubtful whether he could have found
any one without going far afield, for Huckins was very early for a
Cape-Codder in the fish business. In his day the soil was still good,
and most men were exulting in the ownership of their fields and houses.

By degrees, as the novelty of possession wore off and the soil grew
thin, others began to follow Huckins’s lead and, looking out over the
Bay, decided to try their luck afloat for a season.

Early in the eighteenth century, John Gorham, of Barnstable, a member
of the fighting family that distinguished itself in the French and
Indian Wars, was starting in as a trader with a place of business on
the wharf at the foot of Scudder’s Lane. Before long--perhaps as early
as 1730--he had cod-fishermen making voyages to the Grand Banks for
him and carrying their fares to the West Indies, whence they returned
with cargoes of rum and molasses. Eastham at this time was busy not
only fishing but also taking measures to prevent the destruction of
fish by porpoises--which apparently were as great a pest as the seals
in Barnstable Harbor are to-day. The town offered a bounty on porpoise
tails, and was called upon to pay for a good many of them. Elisha
Young seems to have been the most successful man at the business;
he turned in some five hundred tails between 1740 and 1742, all of
them duly recorded by the town clerk. Other Cape fishermen, notably
Eldad Nickerson, of Chatham, found their way to Nova Scotia waters
well before 1760. Some of them, it will be remembered, were so taken
with the convenient location of Barrington, so encouraged by Governor
Lawrence’s inducements to settlers, and so tired of wars and taxes at
home, that they left the Cape for good and became inhabitants of Nova
Scotia before the Revolution began.

The Cape fishing fleet--for the number of vessels had in the late
colonial period grown large enough to be dignified with this term--by
degrees established a well-fixed routine over the triangular course
which Gorham’s schooners had navigated fifty years before: from Cape
Cod to the Grand Banks, where they filled their holds with cod, which
they salted and dried on whatever beach lay closest at hand; thence
to the West Indies, where they traded their salty cargo for rum and
molasses, and so back home with a handsome potential profit under the
hatches. Those who could not afford large enough vessels for the West
Indian voyage, and for whom the rugged water of the Grand Banks was too
great a risk, fished closer to the Newfoundland shore, salted their
catch just enough to keep it during the run home, finished ‘making’
it on their own beaches, and sold it in Boston. Harwich, Chatham, and
Barnstable were at this time the chief fishing ports of the Cape.

It was a miscellaneous-looking flotilla that went codfishing in the
colonial days from the creeks and harbors of the Cape. Standardization
had not yet produced one-design vessels like the fleet which was owned
in Provincetown a hundred years later, or that which keeps Gloucester
on the map to-day. Men used such boats as they had or could afford to
build. The largest of them were round-bottomed, two-masted schooners,
measuring not more than seventy tons, but able to carry their fares
from the Grand Banks across the Atlantic to Spain, if the West India
prices failed to attract them. But these vessels called for more
capital than most Cape fishermen could raise. The best the majority
could do was to hug the shore in tubby sloops and put in at some
cove at the first sign of weather. Always, too, there were the boat
fishermen--the humblest and poorest of them all, but by no means the
hungriest--who would hoist a spritsail in a whaleboat and spend the
day hand-lining for cod on the ledge off Barnstable, or outside Long
Point if they hailed from Provincetown. These unambitious citizens
kept a supply of fresh fish in town for local consumption while the
Grand-Bankers were away. As often as not they were half-farmers, with a
patch of corn to be hoed if they felt like staying ashore. Altogether
the boat fisherman lived as independent and irresponsible a life as men
are likely to achieve in this existence. He had no money tied up in
large vessels, to send him fishing whether or no; his table was well
supplied with the produce of sea and shore; when northeasters howled in
from the Atlantic, he smoked his pipe beside a six-foot fireplace and
thanked God that he was not shortening sail on the Grand Banks. Wise
men, if not admirable, were these boat fishermen of colonial days.

[Illustration: PART OF PROVINCETOWN’S FISHING FLEET A GENERATION AGO]

Then came the Revolution, sweeping banker and boat fisherman, whaleman
and merchant, from the seas more completely than all the storms of a
generation. Chatham’s experience is typical. When the war began, she
had a fleet of twenty-seven cod-fishermen. In 1783, four or five were
all that remained. It was a costly victory which the citizens had won,
and clearly it was the moment for the government which they had fought
to create to lend them a helping hand.

This the Administration was not slow to do. In 1789, Congress voted
to pay a bounty on all exported codfish; in 1792, another bounty was
granted to cod-fishermen who were busy at their calling four months in
the year. Cape-Codders, like the rest of New England, began to rebuild
their fleet, but they headed more often for new fishing grounds--the
Bay de Chaleur and the Labrador Coast--where small craft were adequate
and where miles of desolate beaches lay close at hand on which they
could salt their catch enough for the voyage home. The Grand Banks
were not abandoned; but the ease of the new waters and the fact that
they could be reached in inexpensive vessels, appealed to all but the
richest and hardiest.

This shifting of the bulk of the tonnage to short-voyage work covered
the shore-front of the Cape villages with fish flakes lying gray to
the sun, for the small size of the new vessels made even a West India
voyage too risky. From now on, the bulk of the catch was cured at home.
The process of making fish which was followed at this early date never
changed, so long as there was a schooner in the business or a quintal
of codfish to be sold. As soon as a homeward-bound vessel dropped
anchor, the fish were boated into shallow water in dories, washed clean
of their salt, and rolled up to the flakes in wheelbarrows. The flakes
were low platforms, with slats instead of planking; on these the fish,
split, washed, and again salted, were laid to dry in the sun--in much
the same manner as one broils a steak. They had to be turned every now
and then, and in rainy weather were stacked and covered with tarpaulins.

[Illustration: PROVINCETOWN FISH-FLAKES WITH SCHOONER FREDDIE W. ALTON
AT THE DOCK]

This trend in business brought Provincetown into her own. She had long
since grown accustomed to law and order, but was still numerically
insignificant. In 1755, ten houses sheltered her entire population.
Apparently discouraged by the long detour around East Harbor Creek,
the census-taker of 1764 ignored the town altogether. But now that the
impoverished condition of the young country was setting the fashion for
home-cured fish, Provincetown began to flourish.

Beaches? She was all beach, with her houses strung along just far
enough from the water’s edge to leave room for sheds and flakes
between. As for her harbor, the whole New England fishing fleet could
have anchored in it with room to spare. Drawn into codfishing by
pre-war habit and government bounties, and to Provincetown by its
facilities for the business, men who up to that time had regarded
Provincetowners with scorn, now migrated eagerly to the sandy tip of
the Cape to share in her growing prosperity. In 1790, Provincetown had
20 vessels that went codfishing to the Grand Banks, the Labrador Coast,
and the Bay de Chaleur. A dozen years later the number had grown to 33.
This branch of the business alone gave employment to 225 Provincetown
men and boys, besides 75 from neighboring towns. They brought home on
the average 33,000 quintals of cod a year, worth $3.50 a quintal. Half
these were salted on Labrador beaches, half at home. But this was not
all. From October to December--off months for the cod-fishermen--they
shipped more than 5000 barrels of herring at $4 a barrel. About
the time that the fleet set sail for the Banks in the spring, boat
fishermen began to catch mackerel in local waters, and it was a poor
season when they did not ship 300 barrels pickled to Boston before the
fish struck off. Some of the mackerel-catchers used seines, of which
there were 50 in the town worth $100 apiece. And five vessels were kept
steadily at work carrying lobsters from both sides of Long Point to New
York.

All this business called for kindred industries ashore. Ten salt
works made 8000 hogsheads of salt a year, every pound of which was
bought by the cod-fishermen and mackerel-catchers; five buildings were
used for smoking herring and ninety for storing fish. The population
jumped from 812 in 1800 to 946 in 1802. All this Provincetown achieved
during the twenty years that followed the Revolution. From being an
inconsequential, half-civilized settlement before the War, and the
headquarters for sea-weary Britishers during the War, Provincetown by
1840 had grown to be a famous fishing port with a larger fleet than any
other town on the Cape.

Meantime, the rest of the Cape had not been idle. The shore-front of
every village was a scene of healthy activity. In 1802, Wellfleet, in
addition to five whalers that went to the Straits of Belle Isle and
Newfoundland waters equipped for codfishing if whales were scarce,
had four vessels engaged in offshore cod- and mackerel-fishing, four
oyster-carriers with a capacity of thirty tons apiece, and a dozen
smaller craft that kept busy hand-lining within sight of Billingsgate.
Orleans had no harbor suitable for a fishing fleet of her own, yet
‘the flower of the people’ from twelve to forty-five years old sailed
on cod-fishermen out of Provincetown, Chatham, Duxbury, and Plymouth.
Eastham, never a great fishing town, had only three vessels in the
business, but Chatham owned twenty-five, half of them Grand-Bankers;
the other half divided their time between the Nantucket Shoals and
Nova Scotian waters. Two hundred men and boys were thus employed, and
their annual catch of cod was some 17,500 quintals--about one half
Provincetown’s average. Harwich had the same number of fishermen, most
of whom went on small vessels of forty tons or so to the Nantucket
Shoals, though four good-sized schooners sailed regularly to the
Straits of Belle Isle. A tidy little fleet of twenty Dennis vessels was
moored in Bass River or tied up alongside the three wharves; but they
were all small--none being over forty tons. On the Bay side of the town
a half-dozen more wintered in the Bass Hole and Quivet Creek. Yarmouth
had ten fishing vessels as well as a good-sized fleet of coasters. One
hundred men in Barnstable pulled a living from the sea. If the reader
is not utterly bewildered by these statistics, he will have gathered
that by 1802 almost every village was baiting a good many hooks once
more.

But the years that followed the Revolution were not plain sailing for
the fishermen of the Cape or anywhere else. England, chagrined by
her defeat, not only closed her doors to American traders, but tried
to keep New-Englanders from fishing Canadian waters as well. By the
treaty of 1818, which grew out of the repeated encounters between
Yankee fishermen and the King’s ships, Labrador, the Bay de Chaleur,
and adjacent waters were--theoretically at least--closed to American
vessels. Though northern cod still found their way to the Boston
market, repeated unpleasantness and occasional confiscation of their
vessels considerably dampened the ardor of Cape fishermen. They began
to look again at the dangerous tide rips that criss-cross each other on
the Georges Banks, only a little more than a day’s sail from home.

These waters had always been held in an almost superstitious terror.
Strange things happened on them. Men said that they had seen the water
run off, leaving the banks bare for gulls to feed on. Fishermen had
visited them for years, but the currents had swept them off so fast
that it was an unsatisfactory business. To anchor in the rips was
held to be suicide--the staunchest vessel would be pulled under like
a buoy in a tide-way. Nobody had ever tried it, though men tantalized
themselves by imagining the fares of fish they could catch there if
they did. Finally, in 1821, a hardy Gloucester skipper, tired of
running the gauntlet of the royal fish patrol, and tired of being
carried out of reach of the fish by the Georges currents, took a
chance. Boldly he sailed to the Georges; boldly he anchored; safely he
sailed home. A new era in New England fishing had begun; Georges Banks,
where the churlish veto of British legislation could not be heard, was
open for business.

To the Cape fishermen this discovery meant as much as striking oil
in his cattle range means to a ranch-owner. It brought the source
of wealth hundreds of miles nearer than it had ever been before.
Provincetown, the closest of all to the Georges, became busier than
ever; but Truro and Wellfleet were not far behind; while Chatham,
Harwich, and later Dennis, were well in the running. Codfish and
halibut were the staples of the Georges fishermen; quick voyages and
quick profits were their reward.

But meanwhile and always--treaties or no treaties, Georges or no
Georges--the Grand Banks, with their inexhaustible supply, furnished
the steady background of drumbeats in the Cape’s piscatorial orchestra.
It must not be supposed, either, that the Grand-Bankers rested content
with the old methods. Hazardous as their calling was, even when all
hands stayed on board and fished over the side, these progressive
fishermen devised a yet more hazardous practice, justified in their own
minds, if not in their families’, because it caught more cod. They began
in the late fifties to carry dories with them and to fish in pairs from
these instead of from the schooner. It was believed that the quick
motion of these little boats kept the bait dancing more conspicuously
than the slower rise and fall of the schooner. Theoretically the dories
did not venture too far away for safety, but fog and wind are unstable
elements; a sudden blow, coming while the fish were biting, would often
go too long unheeded by the dorymen. The schooner could no longer ride
at anchor; the nicest handling could not keep her in sight of all her
scattered dories. Some would get back to the safety of her deck;
others would never be heard of again. Thus did the fearless Bankers add
another hazard to their already hazardous calling.

Not content with running these risks, they employed another new
device which took them still farther from the safety zone around
their vessels. A Cape Cod fisherman conceived the idea of setting
trawls--heavy lines anchored close to the bottom with short lines
carrying baited hooks made fast to them at intervals. Sometimes there
were a thousand hooks on a single trawl. The whole contrivance was
buoyed and left, and the fisherman moved on to set the next one. Trawls
had to be set and hauled from dories. If the men were reluctant to
stop hand-lining when bad weather set in, what must have been their
reluctance to abandon a half-hauled trawl with a codfish or halibut on
every other hook? More fishermen were lost than ever, but there was no
scarcity of volunteers to fill the gaps in their ranks.

What induced them to follow such a laborious, dangerous, and above all
unprofitable business, it is hard to say. The Honorable Zeno Scudder,
of Osterville, has calculated that a fisherman’s earnings for four
months for the decade between 1841 and 1851 were sixty-three dollars.
The Government bonus brought the figure up to seventy-seven dollars
but there is still nothing Crœsan about it, even if a wide margin is
allowed for statistical inaccuracy. The old jingle,

‘Sailor lads have gold and silver,
Fisher lads have nought but brass,’

sums up the situation. The gambling element--which would account for
much--was reduced to a minimum with the Grand-Bankers. They were almost
certain to return with a full fare if they returned at all. The best
explanation is that the life itself appealed to a certain type of man.
Discipline on board a fisherman was as elastic as it could be made
without actually removing the skipper from command. It could hardly
have been otherwise, indeed, for crews were composed for the most part,
not only of men who had been friends from boyhood, but of brothers
and fathers and sons. In 1789, a fishing vessel was lost on Nantucket
Shoals with a crew of eight Yarmouth men, six of whom were named
Hallett. The schooner Primrose of Yarmouth, which was lost in the great
gale of 1841, carried two Brays, two Matthewses, two Halls, and two
Wheldens. Of the twenty Dennis men lost in the same storm, twelve were
named Howes.

These crew lists, selected at random from the scores that sailed from
the Cape, suggest another answer to the question, ‘Why did men spend
their lives fishing?’ It was an hereditary calling. The sons of Cape
Cod fishermen were foreordained to the decks of schooners. It was
taken for granted that a boy would step on board his father’s vessel
as automatically as the son of a business man nowadays steps into
his father’s office. Brothers and fathers fished side by side. The
Dalmatia of Truro carried Gamaliel S. Paine and his fourteen-year-old
son, Henry. The Altair, of the same town, was commanded by Elisha
Rich, aged twenty-six, and sailing under him were his two brothers,
Joseph and William. Boys whose parents to-day would think them too
young to be sent to boarding school went to sea as cooks on fishermen,
and all hands fared accordingly. Joseph Wheat shipped as cook on the
Cincinnatus, of Truro, at the age of thirteen. Thomas White was twelve
when he sailed in the Arrival, another Truro vessel, and he was not
the youngest member of the crew, either. Charles Nott was only eleven,
and Dick Atwood was fourteen. But these lads look like grown men when
compared with Ambrose Snow, Jr., who in 1842 at the age of eight
sailed with his father from Wellfleet for the Bay de Chaleur on the
pink-sterned schooner Mariner.

An important result of this family grouping on board fishermen, where
brother was often in command of brother, was to unfit men for the navy
or merchant service. Fine sailors they were, but savage commands, such
as issued from the brazen throat of the mate of a clipper ship, were
not their style. Discipline disagreed with them. If brother ‘Lisha was
shaving Monomoy too close or was slow in giving the order to shorten
sail in a blow, Joe and William were there to tell him of it--captain
or no captain. More informal, free-and-easy crews never sailed the sea.
The ship’s company of a Cape Cod fisherman was a floating democracy
where freedom of speech was the order of every day, and democracy
sorted ill with the routine of a deep-water merchantman. Coming up with
the fishing fleet off Highland Light and tearing past with skysails
set, the foremast hands of a lordly clipper looked with contempt at
the tiny schooners and wondered how men could live on board them. The
fishermen cocked an eye at the towering canvas of the clipper, spat
over the side, and ejaculated, ‘Monkeys on a stick.’ So each went his
way.

In the thirties and forties, mackerel-catching first assumed the
dignity of a serious business on the Cape. Of course men had caught
mackerel since the earliest days, but these whimsical fish were looked
on as too frivolous to warrant more than an occasional voyage. For
years, while luring the humble, necessary cod from his dark lair in
the crannies of some submerged ledge, skippers had watched the merry
mackerel sporting in schools on top of the water--watched them and
caught them, too, from time to time, as a gamey relaxation from the
monotonous tug of the cod. But men in quest of bread and butter have
small leisure for caviar. They were sure of their cod, whereas the
mackerel would come one day, and the next would be gone like the
swallows in winter. The cod-fishermen were not gamblers, but plodding
sailors who preferred a long voyage with sure returns to the off chance
of filling their holds in a single day without losing sight of the
Hog’s Back meeting-house.

But mackerel-catching was just the game for livelier spirits. It meant
following the fish wherever they led, cruising about with a man at the
masthead, watching for the peculiar shimmer and ripple on the surface
of the water that betrayed the presence of a school. Sometimes the
fleet would cruise for weeks without so much as a smell of fish; but
finally, by the forties, experts believed that they had found the route
which these wily fellows followed. By cruising off the Virginia Coast
in the spring, the fleet usually picked up the mackerel headed north,
and stayed with them, marketing their catch at convenient ports on the
way, until the fish disappeared somewhere off Nova Scotia.

The laws that govern the actions of fish are past finding out. One
season the mackerel vanished completely. The fleet sailed as usual, but
sailed in vain, returning as light as it set out. For ten years the
fish remained lost. Rumor had it they had been seen off the African
Coast. Captain Josiah Chase, of Provincetown, who was responsible
for the report, crossed the Atlantic in pursuit, but died during the
voyage. Then, as suddenly as they had vanished, the fish reappeared and
resumed their old route northward along the coast. If the fancy struck
them, they would play about for weeks in Cape Cod Bay, giving local
fishermen plenty of sport and plenty of profits. In 1861, the schooner
Bloomer, which after a useful career was left to drop to pieces plank
by plank in a mud berth at Barnstable, sailed into port with 5700
mackerel, which her crew of ten men had caught with hand-lines in four
hours.

For years hand-lining was the only way men knew of catching mackerel.
Blithe spirits like mackerel-catchers gave no thought to improved
methods; the old way was too much fun. Every man stood at the rail,
throwing and pulling his lines as fast as he could move his arms, while
the barrel at his elbow was filled with shining fish. No time was
wasted baiting up between throws. The lead jig, scraped until it shone
like silver, served as bait and sinker combined, a far more dazzling
lure than the minced menhaden that had been thrown broadcast on the
water to attract the school within reach. Fun enough in this game, even
without the profits, to make up for weeks of cruising without wetting
a line. There was need of frantic hurry, too, for the fish might stop
biting at a moment’s notice and for no imaginable reason. More than
once tantalized fishermen have been forced to lean idly against the
rigging and watch the mackerel swim about smelling at the jigs without
once offering to take hold--this, too, in the midst of a spell of
furious biting that had kept the men hauling and slatting as fast as
their arms could move.

A few such experiences, combined with the mackerel’s habit of traveling
in schools on top of the water, suggested a bright idea to some
inventive fisherman--tradition says to Captain Isaiah Baker. In 1853,
he went mackerel-catching off Chatham with a purse seine--a huge light
net, the lower edge of which could be pursed up by puckering-lines to
form a pocket. When a school was sighted, a longboat very much like a
whaleboat was lowered with the seine carefully piled amidships. The
crew quietly rowed round the fish, letting out the net as they went.
When the school was completely surrounded, the skipper gave the
command, the bottom edge of the seine was pursed up, and the fish were
trapped. The whole maneuver, from start to finish, was a ticklish one,
demanding the utmost speed, skill, and caution, for at any sudden
noise the fish were off like fleeting shadows. But when it succeeded,
anywhere from one hundred to three hundred barrels of mackerel could be
caught in a single cast of the net.

This method was a marked improvement over an earlier style of net which
had been used with some success in shallow water. No puckering line
was attached to this seine; it was a long straight net, deep enough
to reach from the surface of the water to the bottom; it was dragged
along by dories until the fish were swept into it; then the two ends
were brought together, enclosing the school. Baker’s purse seine was
not only a more artistic contrivance than this, but also a surer way
of getting the fish. Hand-lining, however, was never abandoned; it was
too much fun, and called for no capital to speak of. Boat fishermen
remained true to it; so did some of the schooners that followed the
fish offshore. Wellfleet as late as 1889 had a fleet of thirteen
‘seiners’ and eight ‘hookers,’ which may be taken as a fair proportion
for the other towns.

However they were caught, mackerel all received the same treatment
ashore, a treatment very different from that which was shown the cod.
Instead of being dried on flakes, they were salted and barreled under
the eagle eye of a State inspector, who saw to it that they were
graded as number one, two, or three, according to size and quality.
‘Number ones’ were the finest fish, fair and fat; the ‘number threes’
were small and poor, ‘about as nourishing as a spruce shingle,’ but
good enough for the West India niggers, who would tackle even an oily
menhaden.

What with its fleets of Grand-Bankers, Georges-Bankers,
mackerel-catchers, and boat fishermen, Provincetown Harbor from the
thirties to the fifties came nearer being crowded than ever before
or since. Her cod-fishermen alone numbered one hundred sail, stout
schooners of ninety tons or so that could ride the North Atlantic
graybeards like a flock of ducks. Besides these she had a mackerel
fleet that filled Marblehead Harbor, even when the Marblehead
fishermen were away on the Banks. Nor was there anything deserted in
the appearance of the shore-front. Wharves and packing-houses, salt
works and fish flakes, riggers’ yards and ship chandlers shouldered one
another for a bit of beach. The ‘city in the sand’ had outstripped
the older towns of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth in activity, if
not in wealth and self-esteem, and was growing every year. In 1845,
Provincetown cod-fishermen were catching 20,000 quintals a year, a
little more than a third of the Cape’s total. Ten years later, they
were catching 79,000 quintals, somewhere near double the total of all
the other towns. This increase came with her own growth rather than
with the decrease in the fishing industry on the rest of the Cape, for
though such a decrease is recorded, it was so slight (6000 quintals in
all) as to affect the statistics very little.

Other towns, notably Wellfleet, specialized in mackerel-catching and
barreled more of these fish annually than Provincetown did. Wellfleet’s
three meager harbors were taxed to the utmost to accommodate her
fleet of mackerel schooners (supplemented by a smaller number of
cod-fishermen) that lay gunwale to gunwale in Herring River, Duck Creek
Harbor, and Blackfish Creek, like Ægean melon-carriers in the Piræus.
After the Civil War, a fleet of a hundred vessels slid out round
Billingsgate, most of them in search of mackerel. Caulkers and riggers
had plenty of work the year round; salt-makers found a ready market for
their product. Although in the words of a local historian, ‘the largest
portion of the male inhabitants’ went fishing either for mackerel or
cod, there was no reason why a man who preferred to stay ashore should
not prosper.

The most important of all the establishments alongshore was the
outfitter’s. The proprietors of these emporiums were business men with
broad and elastic ideas. They sold everything from molasses candy to
chain cable, owned shares in many of the vessels, and furnished the
fishermen’s families with provisions on credit while the head of the
family was away. Some of them, notably the Union Wharf Company of
Provincetown, were virtually bankers as well, lending money, receiving
deposits, and paying moderate interest; in short, they coöperated
with the fleet in every way. Without the facilities offered by these
broad-minded men of affairs, the difficulties of making a voyage would
have been enough to discourage half the fishermen on the Cape.

The free-and-easy way in which these establishments were sometimes
run is well illustrated by the crash of the Union Company’s store
in Truro. Throughout the flush times of the fishing business, this
store had been the great business house of the town. Most of the
citizens owned stock in it, and received their ten per cent as
regularly as the years rolled around. The Company was both borrower
and lender, merchant and storekeeper, but never thought it necessary
to incorporate. An earthquake could have been no greater shock to the
complacent shareholders than the announcement, shortly before the Civil
War, that the Company was bankrupt. The town never fully recovered
from this blow. It was the beginning of the end of the busy days
alongshore at Pamet Harbor, where Georges-Bankers and a fleet of more
than sixty mackerel-catchers had huddled between voyages; where the
caulker’s mallet had sounded busily from the local shipyards, while
the ubiquitous State inspector saw to it that no number twos from the
mackerel fleet found their way into the number one barrels.

In the end it was Provincetown’s unrivaled harbor that kept her in
the fishing game long after the upper Cape had coiled its lines for
good. After the Civil War, the genial days when a man could make money
with a single small vessel yielded to the power of concentration. By
degrees the business centered in Gloucester, Boston, and Provincetown,
where big fleets and big vessels could be accommodated. The little
fellows could no more compete with these great fishing centers than an
old-fashioned corner grocery store can compete with the Great Atlantic
and Pacific Tea Company. Little by little they gave up trying, went
into other business, and watched Provincetown and Wellfleet go it alone.

The Yarmouth ‘Register,’ in reporting conditions in its own town in
1857, might have been speaking for a dozen others as well; here in
part is the item. ‘Not more than two or three vessels have been sent
from this port the present season, where formerly 20 or 30 sail were
employed. Our citizens have turned their attention to foreign commerce,
or the coasting and packeting business, which pays altogether better
than with our poor facilities for carrying on the fisheries compared
with Provincetown, Gloucester, Wellfleet and other places on the
coast.’ The same periodical says in 1863, ‘The last of the fishing
fleet has been sold.’

Until the nineties Provincetown was well in the running. Aside from her
fleet of mackerel-catchers and Grand-Bankers, the town had developed
a special type of vessel for the nervous work on the Georges--a
schooner more graceful than the big cod-fishermen, faster than the
mackerel-catcher, long-sparred like a yacht, and able to spread canvas
that set the old-timers’ heads wagging. With clipper bows, clean run,
and tapered sterns, these schooners were, in the opinion of the local
experts, the most beautiful craft that ever entered the harbor. But
beauty, in the minds of designers, was incidental, for the Georges was
as dangerous a fishing ground as ever tempted a crew to destruction.
The water was so shoal in places that it broke in every easterly blow,
and even where there was depth enough to prevent breakers, an ugly
sea could get up in a few minutes. Furthermore, the fleet carried
dories, like the Grand-Bankers, and fished from them instead of over
the side of the vessel. This meant delay in getting off in case of
dirty weather. The only solution of the problem was a schooner that
could sail fast, would go to windward under shortened canvas, and yet
was stiff enough to survive the fearful beatings they sometimes took
while rounding Race Point in a northeaster. Hardy as they were, and
fearless as men who live in danger become, the fishermen had no desire
for another calamity like that which overtook the Georges fleet in ’41.
They wanted something better than the blunt-nosed schooners that had
gone under in that memorable gale; and they got it in the lines of the
new Provincetown fleet.

Another reason for speed in this branch of the business was that fresh
fish had for a long time brought higher prices than salt fish. Halibut
and cod were iced as fast as they were caught, rushed to port under a
cloud of canvas, and transshipped to Boston with nothing but ice and
their native salt to preserve them. The way the lean schooners cut
the water in a fresh breeze, as they raced home with their perishable
cargo, was enough to gladden the heart of the dourest skipper in
Provincetown.

The beauty of these vessels was brought out more sharply by contrast
with some of the other hulks that still thrashed their way alongshore
in pursuit of mackerel or anchored exhausted in a Labrador cove.
A fleet still sailed to the Grand Banks, where sterner stuff was
needed--speed giving way to seaworthiness, beauty to capacity. Labrador
and the Bay of Chaleurs remained popular, too, and anything would do
for these trips. The T. Y. Baker, for example, built in Wellfleet about
the time of the Civil War, is described by one of her crew as being ‘so
blunt at the nose she would butt a sea about twice and then fall back
and go around it.’ Nor was she alone in her class. A small fleet of
Bakers was launched at Duck Creek, with lines like those of the T. Y.

It has been argued that the danger involved in the fisheries is one
reason for their decline, and that ‘the toll of manly life taken in
these dangerous seas was so terrible that young women hesitated to
marry seamen.’ If this is so, it is the only time in history that
danger has prevented men from pursuing excitement, or that the glamour
of a perilous calling has failed to fascinate the fair. The real
reasons why the Cape abandoned deep-sea fishing were economic, not
sentimental. All the villages except Provincetown were pretty much
squeezed out when the demand came for larger vessels that needed good
harbors. Wellfleet hung on for some time, but even there the fleet of
the seventies and eighties was no match for the glory of the hundred
sail that had been hers. As for Provincetown, capitalists were few and
far between, and it took capital to float a fleet of purse seiners.
In the old days of hand-lining, a boy of fifteen could catch as many
fish as his father; but no boy was strong enough to shoot a seine or
pull a trawl; so the rising generation, instead of being headed for
a career with the codfish or mackerel, began to seek their fortunes
somewhere else. After the Civil War the whole drift of Cape enterprise
set shoreward, and fishing took the form of tending traps instead of
sailing to the Banks.

From the middle of the century, when the first local weir was tried as
an experiment at Chatham, until the present, this method of fishing has
been followed persistently, through lean years and fat, all along the
Bay shore. In 1890 a dozen weirs were in operation off Truro alone.
Others appeared in Provincetown waters; at present three are operated
outside Sandy Neck, Barnstable; and so on all alongshore. Like every
other sort of fishing, this business is uncertain. From three hundred
to four hundred barrels of mackerel were taken from one of the Truro
traps soon after it was set out; Captain Ed Pierce made another big
haul in 1897, when he shipped thirty tons of cod and pollock taken from
his weir in one day. But such records are rare; a commoner story is
that told for the season of ’95, when whiting and pollock were thought
hardly worth shipping: ‘The fish weirs that dot the coast from Wood
End to Sandwich have experienced a most disastrous season. The first
part of the year they were full of worthless whiting most of the time,
and when they struck off the pollock struck in and hung on until cold
weather started them southward. Some of the weirs hardly paid expenses.’

Quite recently--within a dozen or fifteen years--cold-storage plants
have been built in a number of towns to handle the hauls of the fish
traps. These fish-freezers are by no means fastidious; all is indeed
fish that comes to their net. Not only the ‘worthless whiting’ but the
still more humble squid are shoveled into the omnivorous maw of the
freezers. The squid have some value as bait and are eaten by certain
of our foreign population. The whiting do well enough for chowders.
Yarmouth erected at great expense a very elaborate cold-storage plant
at the head of a little creek that comes wandering inland through
the marsh. A channel was dug through the flats. A gasoline boat and
attendant dories plied in and out with commendable optimism. To-day
the establishment has been torn down; weeds grow tall between the
planks of the dock. The channel--what there is left of it--is handy for
rum-runners and lobstermen, whose boats are the only ones that follow
it, and whose trucks are the only vehicles that now make their way
through the lane that joins the creek with the highway. It is rumored
that some of the Provincetown freezers are making money. _Gaudeamus
igitur_; that is as it should be. The harbor that sheltered the wild
cod-fishermen from Europe, the Pilgrims in the Mayflower, the British
in the Revolution, and the finest fishing fleet on the coast in the
flush days of the high-liners, that harbor is the one that should still
be making money for the freezers.

A man cannot spend his life catching fish without learning something
about their habits. One citizen of Provincetown, at least, Captain
Nathaniel Atwood, found something interesting about them besides their
market value. Captain Atwood lived in Provincetown all his life and
died there in 1886 at the age of seventy-nine. He thus watched the
fisheries from their infancy, was in the prime of life during the boom,
and passed his declining years abreast of the declining years of this
great industry. Many another man had done the same, but though Atwood
had no more education than any other fisherman, he had marked powers of
observation and inference and a lively curiosity in all that pertained
to fish. He became an authority on his chosen subject--one of the most
intricate and baffling in the whole realm of natural history. His
fame spread to Boston and Cambridge, where such scholars as Agassiz
and Storer were glad to supplement their theoretical knowledge with
first-hand information from a man who had spent his life watching the
fish. During Atwood’s two years as representative in the State House,
the Legislature heard less rhetoric and more truth about the fish
business than at any time before or since. He was a member of the Essex
Institute at Salem and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences;
but the crowning honor came when he was asked to deliver a course of
lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston--an invitation which he
accepted with enthusiasm, to the delight of his audiences, and to the
amusement of his contemporaries in Provincetown, where he was regarded,
as all prophets (and particularly all Cape Cod prophets) are regarded
by their neighbors, with humorous skepticism, not altogether free from
envy nor quite unmixed with pride. The Captain’s achievements form a
picturesque chapter in the long history of Cape Cod fisheries. ‘Let his
name,’ says Dr. Storer, ‘be indelibly associated with the science to
which he is an honor.’

There was hard work but considerable excitement in the deep-sea
fisheries; racing and risk added spice to the Georges;
mackerel-catching, whether with jig or purse seine, was a sporting
business; even the trap fishermen had the fun of an occasional record
haul. But what can be said for the clam-digger, that slave of the
tides, who turns up a living between low water and high and knows
to a peck before he starts out how many clams he will bring home?
Yet there have always been men in every town on the Cape whose chief
occupation was clamming. A hundred years ago, the clam-digger was
usually a veteran of the Banks who had grown too old for livelier work.
But clamming for a livelihood nowadays is no work for old men. Digging
must be hard and fast if a dory is to be filled before the flats are
covered, and the best efforts of the shellbacks of the early days were
no match for the record of ten barrels a tide which was made a few
years ago by a Barnstable expert in the prime of life. Yet taking it
all in all, the old people dug an enormous number of clams. In 1802
more than one hundred men in Orleans were glad to earn seventy-five
cents a day digging clams for the fishermen, and a thousand barrels was
the annual average for the town. Laws were made to protect the Eastham
flats from the inroads of ‘strangers’; and with good reason, for it has
been estimated that a bushel of clams in the shell was worth in those
days about half as much as a bushel of corn, and could be procured much
more easily.

For the past twenty years clamming has been the chief and--except for
the fish traps and a few strings of lobster pots and eel-cars--the only
industry in Barnstable that has taken men off dry land: but it has
taken them by scores. To encourage the business, the selectmen of the
town, about 1906, granted sections of flats for the exclusive use of
any citizen who applied for them. The response was the same as that of
the Plymouth settlers in 1623 when the Court granted them land of their
own. The most enterprising began to propagate clams on their grants,
while the less ambitious citizens, and Finns who had not yet taken out
naturalization papers, found as much work as they wanted digging for
their more energetic or fortunate neighbors. From 1910 to 1925, the
business was in its heyday. Hundreds of acres of flats were dotted
with clam-diggers and dories, to the despair of the duck-hunters.
‘Barnstable cultivated clams’ appeared on the bills of fare in Boston
and New York hotels. Foreign citizens who lived on the South Side and
didn’t know a clam from a quahaug took grants and rented them to those
who did. The peak of the boom was reached in 1925, when an open season
was declared the year round instead of only through the winter. Trucks
backed down to the water’s edge to meet the dories as they returned on
the flood tide loaded to the gunwales. All summer the roads to Boston
were crowded with trucks full of clams. No time was wasted in packing
them in barrels. They reached market in the same ‘dreeners’ in which
they had been dug.

The selectmen, realizing the danger before it was too late, clapped a
closed season on again in 1927, and started a tempest in the harbor by
refusing to renew grants that had expired. The result is, at present,
some hardship to the men with money invested in the business; but
the measure protects the supply, which was melting fast before the
unprecedented ardor of the former grantees.

Quahaugs--hardly inferior to oysters in flavor, euphemistically
styled ‘little necks’ or ‘cherrystones’ on metropolitan menus, and
persistently called clams by untutored inlanders--are well worth the
effort involved in their capture. That this effort is great will be
instantly apparent to any one who watches a Wellfleet quahauger at
work. He chugs out to the west side of the great shallow Bay in a
converted catboat equipped with a gasoline engine. There he anchors,
and drags the bottom with a long-handled rake supplemented by a pouch
made of netting. Beginning well aft, he hitches his way forward,
pulling the heavy drag after him by its twenty-foot handle with a
series of jerks that give him the back and shoulders of a Hercules.
When he has reached the bow, he hauls his rake up and culls out
the quahaugs from the mixture of sand and eel-grass with which its
net-basket is filled. Then he shuffles aft again and repeats the
process for hours on end, coming up a boat’s length on his hawser as
soon as he has exhausted all the bottom within reach of his rake.

In Wellfleet this work is done largely by Finns, who on smooth days
between April and October make as high as ten dollars. Upwards of two
thousand barrels of these shellfish leave Wellfleet every year; a fleet
of about thirty boats is engaged in the business. Nowhere it seems is
there safety for the quahaug. At Orleans he is dredged from apparent
security in sixty feet of water. Eastham shows him no mercy. Twenty
years ago there were plenty of native quahaugs in Cotuit waters. A man
could dredge up thirty or forty bushels a day, and enough of them were
taken to keep Carleton Nickerson and his schooner, Luella Nickerson,
busy carrying them to New London, eight hundred bushels at a time,
as fast as he could make the trips. To-day if a man can rake up two
bushels on a tide he is lucky. In spite of their scarcity, the advance
in price keeps men dredging to the tune of twenty-five hundred barrels
a year--though many of these are quahaugs which wise men have planted
on grants and allowed to grow.

This business in Wellfleet is to-day on a par with the famous oyster
industry, though ten years ago it was of nowhere near the same
importance. And truly the oysterman has a proud history. Native oysters
made life easy for the Billingsgate pioneers as they had for the
Indians before them. Oysters gave Wellfleet its name when the town
grew big enough to be incorporated; oysters were the subject of laws
and restrictions a hundred years before the Revolution, and when a
mysterious epidemic attacked the oysters in 1770, the citizens turned
diseases to commodity and by vigorous protective measures achieved
greater prosperity than ever. Various guesses have been made as to
the cause of the epidemic. Some said it was a ground frost; others
believed that a great school of blackfish, left rotting on the shores
of the bay, so polluted the water that no oyster could live. The
soundest theory is that the oyster shells on which the seed catches
were removed and broken up to make lime, but the superstitious averred
that the Almighty slew them as a punishment for the wicked quarrels
between Wellfleeters and Easthamers. Whatever the cause, most of the
oysters died, and with them went an important fraction of Wellfleet’s
prosperity.

The citizens promptly took measures for protecting and propagating
those that remained. They could do no more for the moment, because the
Revolution was upon them, but after the war they went further and as
early as 1793 had begun to transplant seed oysters from the south. The
change in climate agreed with the imported bivalves so well that not
even the most fastidious could tell them from real Wellfleets.

Wellfleet, in fact, had a strangle-hold on the New England oyster
business. From the thirties to the seventies she supplied the State.
The best schooners that could be built were none too good for this
trade. They were the only fishing vessels that could match the
Provincetown fleet of Georges-Bankers in speed and beauty. Two of them,
the Express and the Telegraph, were designed by the great Samuel Hall,
of East Boston.

Before and after 1870, forty schooners, from eighty to ninety feet
long, the smallest of them with a capacity of 1750 bushels, were
busy carrying young oysters from the Potomac to Wellfleet, and from
Wellfleet to Boston and Portland. The firms of J. A. Stubbs, H. &
R. Atwood, D. Atwood, and R. R. Higgins Company were as well known
along Atlantic Avenue as they were in Wellfleet; but about 1900 the
proprietors of the Southern oyster-beds found other uses for their
seed oysters. This marked the beginning of the decline for Wellfleet.
Her dealers bought some from Long Island, to be sure, and bedded them
down as of old; and after 1914 an occasional schooner slipped quietly
through the Canal with a cargo of oysters from Wellfleet destined for a
sojourn in Cotuit waters; whence they emerged with the ‘Cotuit flavor,’
and a higher market value.

The last ten years, however, have seen the greatest falling off in
the business. In 1916, operating with a fifty-foot power boat and
a gasoline dredge that held three barrels, the Wellfleet oystermen
shipped sixteen thousand barrels at an average price of $7.50 a
barrel. This total was double what it had been the year before--the
increase being accounted for by the improved methods. But in 1926,
this gratifying figure had shrunk to eighteen hundred barrels, partly
because the management of the business changed and partly because
putting power against the oysters did not agree with them. Chiefly for
these reasons, then, and only in very recent years, has the Wellfleet
oysterman been caught up with and passed by the plebeian quahauger. The
fact that his oysters to-day fetch from twelve to eighteen dollars a
barrel instead of seven or eight dollars, gives him but cold comfort.

But what of Cotuit--the name that is synonymous with oysters in every
city from El Paso to Portland and as far west as Denver? In the days
of the Indians, Cotuit, like Wellfleet, had native oysters thriving in
the shallow waters of its harbor. Oysters, indeed, were the magnet that
first drew settlers to the South Sea, a name which covered the whole
shore-front from Bass River to Poponesset. Jonathan Hatch, who left
West Barnstable for the vicinity of Oyster Island about 1655, was among
the earliest pioneers of that region, and he undoubtedly sold oysters,
which he found growing thick on the beds close to his farm, to Nicholas
Davis, who a little later had a trading post on the shore of Lewis Bay
in Hyannis. Davis, at all events, included oysters in his miscellaneous
business; though the method of handling them was at that early date
very different from the present. They were opened and pickled in brine
instead of being shipped fresh--the process being known as ‘making
oysters.’ For years the shells supplied the community with lime.
Another early South Side oysterman was Benjamin Bearse, who died in
Hyannis in 1748. In his will he left his real estate to his younger
sons, but stipulated that his oldest son, Augustian, should be allowed
a convenient way to the landing ‘where I make oysters.’

From such beginnings grew the now celebrated Cotuit oysters. The
business is still the chief industry of the village, although not so
many oysters are raised there as formerly, because of the advance
in the price of seed oysters from Long Island--whence the Cotuits
are transplanted. Lack of capital, therefore, the same cause which
signed the death warrant of the Cape fishing fleets, has forced a
good many Cotuit men out of the oyster industry. The half-dozen or so
that remain send an annual total of about eighty-five hundred barrels
of the finest oysters in the world to the markets of Boston and New
York. This crop is the result of a yearly planting of about thirty-two
thousand bushels of seed from Long Island. For some reason, in spite
of repeated experiments, the spawn refuses to catch anywhere in Cotuit
Harbor, though small oysters thrive splendidly. This phenomenon is what
forces the local oystermen to import their seed and let the alchemy
of the harbor turn it into full-flavored Cotuits. The importance of
the Cotuit shellfisheries will be brought home to lovers of statistics
when they learn that after all shipping charges have been deducted,
about $100,000 a year comes into the village from the combined sale of
oysters and quahaugs.

‘I don’t care much for fish,’ said an old lady in a Barnstable
boarding-house, as a smoked herring was placed before her. ‘What!’
exclaimed the old gentleman who sat opposite; ‘don’t you like a
herring? Everybody likes a herring.’ And so they did when the old
gentleman was young; but fashions change, and the herring, once the
subject of complex and ever-changing laws, may now come upstream to
spawn in comparative safety. It is dangerous for so optimistic a
philosopher as Thoreau to lapse even for a moment into pessimistic
prophecies. ‘There are many Herring Rivers on the Cape,’ he writes.
‘They may soon be more abundant than herring.’ But the herring have
survived with the rivers they have named. Every spring the waters of
these narrow creeks are dark with them as they shoulder one another
in their eagerness to reach a pond. A few men on the lower Cape whose
houses are near a herring river, take some in dip nets either to eat
fresh or to smoke and hang in their barns, a dozen skewered together
with a stick through the gills, but the upper Cape (Mashpee and Bourne
in particular) is the only region where the business thrives to-day.

The middle of the last century, however, had a different tale to tell.
Citizens of every town were jealous of their rights in the herring
fisheries, for at first the General Court, and later the selectmen,
allowed every taxpayer free access to the rivers. Sometimes, if they
saw fit, the towns would rent these fisheries to the highest bidder,
reserving to every inhabitant the privilege of buying what he wanted
for his own use at the minimum price. Even mills--the construction and
maintenance of which were encouraged in every way--were not allowed
to interfere with the precious alewives. When it happened that a mill
was so situated as to obstruct the spring run, it was closed until the
spawning season was over. Incredible as it may seem, the citizens of
the South Side about 1740 dug a canal from Nine-Mile Pond to the sea in
order to bring more herring into the village. And just such a passage
was dug in 1917 to let the herring pass from the newly constructed Cape
Cod Canal into Monument River and so to Great Herring Pond.

Mashpee is the herring center to-day. Within a few years a thousand
barrels have been shipped in a season from the streams of this little
town. Salted and sunbaked, these fish yet fetch prices which warrant
the small effort involved in taking them with nets, curing them and
heading up the barrels. In 1890, the selectmen of Bourne rented the
Herring River fisheries for a thousand dollars--reserving two barrels
for every ‘Indian’ family and one barrel for every white family.
Perhaps after all the old gentleman was partly right, and some still
like a herring!

CHAPTER XI

STORMS, WRECKS, AND WRECKERS

It has been said that if all the wrecks which have piled up on the back
side of the Cape were placed bow to stern, they would make a continuous
wall from Chatham to Provincetown. This is a picturesque way of putting
what is substantially the truth, for Peaked Hill Bars and the Monomoy
Shoals are to sailors of to-day what Scylla and Charybdis were to
Æneas. Nauset Beach, which stretches along the whole coast line of
Orleans and Eastham, holds in its fatal sands the shattered skeletons
of vessels from half the seaports of the world; while farther north,
the outer shores of Wellfleet and Truro have gathered in the hulls of
a thousand ships, driven helplessly upon them by northeast gales. Even
the comparatively sheltered waters of the Bay have had their share of
shipwrecks, though there the hulls are not usually pounded to pieces as
they are on the outer shore. It is not idle curiosity that makes the
Cape-Codder a keen observer of the weather; it is habit inherited from
ancestors who antedate lighthouses and life-saving stations, who have
weathered typhoons and outguessed the fog.

[Illustration: APPROXIMATE LOCATIONS OF CAPE COD WRECKS DOWN TO 1903]

Great storms become, like wars, points from which each generation dates
events. The gale of August, 1635, marked an epoch in the lives of the
Pilgrims, who in the intensity of their religion, were torn two ways
in trying to interpret its significance. One half thanked God on their
knees for not having obliterated their settlement entirely; the others
anxiously scrutinized their past actions to discover wherein they had
offended. It was well for Plymouth that she had no fishing fleet at sea
when this storm hit the coast. If we can believe Bradford, it was of
such fury as to frighten men from the sea forever--if men could stay
frightened by memories. It seems to have been a vicious swing of the
tail of a West India hurricane, like that which visited the coast in
August, 1924. A building at the Manomet trading post lost its roof;
many thousand trees were uprooted or snapped off, and a twenty-foot
tide flooded acres of upland on the Cape. ‘The wrecks of it,’ says
Bradford, ‘will remain a hundred years.’

The lower Cape had a close call in September, 1815. Its towns lay
along the edge of a hurricane which wrought havoc on the shores of
Buzzards Bay but which did no damage to speak of farther east. A few
small vessels came ashore--among them a brig at Hyannis. The tide in
Buzzards Bay, backed by a furious gale from the east and later from the
southwest and south, all but made the Cape an island: a rise of another
foot would have done the trick. As it was, salt works were carried
away, vessels torn from their moorings, and trees uprooted. Salt houses
on the Elizabeth Islands, lifted bodily from their posts, came to
anchor in the Wareham woods. Coasting vessels were swept inland and
deposited in the front yards of houses alongshore; thousands of dollars’
worth of crops were ruined; wells and springs became brackish; sand was
deposited thick over hayfields.

But though the Cape towns, with the exception of Falmouth, suffered
little from this gale, they made up for it ten years later in the
succession of storms that raged along the coast in 1825. Between
January and June, three distinct gales sent a fleet of fishing vessels
and their crews to the bottom. Truro was especially hard hit. The
names Snow, Atkins, and Collins, all of them familiar in the town,
were conspicuous on the long list of casualties which her fishermen
sustained between Provincetown and the Grand Banks.

Grim as the records of this disaster are, they become a mere preface to
the October gale of 1841, which brought death to so many Cape fishermen
and poverty to their families. Truro alone lost seven vessels and
fifty-seven men. Ten men of Yarmouth perished, and upwards of twenty
from Dennis. The storm caught most of the fleet on the Georges Banks,
and, coming as it did from the northeast, made the passage home a beat
to windward in the face of a sea that swept the decks from stem to
stern. Of the Truro fleet only two crews survived: Captain Matthias
Rich brought his schooner Water Witch safe round the Cape and anchored
in Herring Cove under the lee of Race Point, having spent twelve hours
lashed to the wheel. Captain Joshua Knowles lost his vessel Garnet, but
saved the crew. No better picture of the storm or of the valiant fight
that the young fishermen put up against it can be had than Captain
Knowles’s account of his experiences.

We left Provincetown Saturday, second; at sunset were off head of
Pamet, one league East. Soon after spoke the Vesper of Dennis direct
from Georges, bound home; reported good fishing. For Georges we
shaped our course setting all sail. Wind light from the northeast
but soon began to breeze. At ten took in light sails. At twelve took
in mainsail, the wind now blowing a gale. At four Sunday morning
took in the jib. Had thirty-four fathoms of water. Judged myself on
the southwest part of Georges. At six double-reefed the foresail,
which soon after parted the leachrope and tore to the luff. We
cross-barred the sail, and put on a preventer leachrope as soon as
possible, and set it close reefed. The gale increased every moment.
At ten a heavy sea took the boat and davits. By sounding found we
were fast drifting across South Channel, and knew the shoals were
under our lea. Determined to carry sail as long as it would stand, to
clear the shoals, if possible. To the close-reefed foresail, set a
balanced-reefed mainsail and reefed jib, and, blowing as it was, she
carried it off in good shape; and had our sails stood, I have little
doubt we should have carried out clear.

The foresail again gave out, was repaired and set; as soon as up, it
blew to ribbons. Mainsail soon shared the same fate. We had only one
jib left. It was now about eight o’clock Sunday evening. We could
do no more. Sounded in fifteen fathoms of water and knew we were
rapidly drifting into shoal water. The next throw of the lead was
six fathoms. As the sea was breaking over fore and aft, advised all
to go below but brother Zack. We concluded to swing her off before
the wind, and if by any possibility we were nearing land, should
have a better chance. Put up the helm. Just as she began to fall
off, a tremendous sea or a breaker completely buried the vessel,
leaving her on her broadside, or beam ends. Brother Zack was washed
overboard but caught the mainsheet and hauled himself on board. The
foremast was broken about fifteen feet above the deck, the strain
on the spring-stay hauled the main mast out of the step, and tore
up the deck, swept away the galley, bulwarks and everything clean,
and shifted the ballast into the wing. I thought at once of a sharp
hatchet that was always kept under my berth, which was soon found. A
lanyard was fastened to the hatchet and a rope to Brother Zack, who
went to the leeward, and when she rolled out of water, he watched
his chance and cut away the rigging. I did the same forward, cut
the jibstay and other ropes, so we got clear of spars, sails and
rigging sheet anchor and chains. The men got into the hold through
the lazaret, and threw ballast to windward, so that she partially
righted. We were now a helpless wreck. I had noticed that immediately
after the great breaker the sea was more regular. With a few of the
waist-boards left, and a spare old canvas, we battened the hole
in the deck, and with the remaining anchor out for a drag, we made
a pretty good drift considering the circumstances, though mostly
under water. It was now nearly daylight, and the gale unabated. As
soon as fairly day, I saw by the color of the water that we were
off soundings, and had a fair drift. During the afternoon the wind
moderated considerably. Tuesday morning, the fifth, the wind was more
moderate. Saw a schooner under reefs standing by the wind to the
northwest; made every effort to attract their attention, but as we
lay so low on the water she did not notice us, and soon passed out of
sight.

We put a stay on the stump of the foremast, set the staysail for a
foresail, and the gaff topsail for a jib, so we could steer.

At ten A.M. the weather was fine. We opened the hatches, found some
potatoes floating in the hold--fortunately the teakettle was in the
cabin when the galley went overboard. The boys built a fire on the
ballast and boiled potatoes, the first mouthful of food since Sunday
morning the third. Just before sunset discovered a sail approaching
from the East. Our flag on a long pole served as a signal and we used
every effort to get in her track, lest we should not be discovered.
We were soon satisfied she was steering for us, and that there was
great interest in our behalf, as the yards and rigging were full of
men on the watch.

As soon as within hailing distance, the Captain inquired what
assistance he could give. I had before determined to abandon my
vessel and so replied. A quarter boat was soon alongside; the crew
and luggage were mostly taken in the first boat; during her absence
with the same hatchet that had done such good work, I let in the
blue water and stepped in the boat, leaving the Garnet, which had
been my home for several years, to find the bottom. Never was rescue
more fortunate. I found myself and crew of ten men on board the New
York and Liverpool packet ship Roscius, the first merchant ship of
her day, commanded by John Collins, a Truro boy, and formerly my
nearest neighbor, and a connection by marriage. One of the officers
was Joshua Caleb Paine, a Truro young man, and a nephew of Captain
Collins. I need not say we received every attention and were regarded
by the passengers, of whom there were four hundred in steerage
and cabin, with much interest. We were two hundred miles from the
highlands of Neversink, which we sighted the next day, landing at
New York on the seventh, receiving the most generous offers and kind
attention, and in good time all arrived safely in our homes.

So much for the survivors. The fate of the rest of the fleet will never
be certainly known, with the exception of the Pomona, of Truro (Captain
Solomon H. Dyer, aged twenty-three), which drifted bottom-up into
Nauset Harbor with three boys drowned in her cabin. But in the opinion
of experts, notably Captain Eldredge, of Chatham, who has charted the
whole region, they perished in the breakers on Eldredge’s and Rogers’
Shoals, two dangerous outriders of the great Nantucket Shoals.

These are the epoch-making gales--the high spots of disaster in the
story of the Cape. Others might well have been included, like the
squall of December, 1853, which sent twenty-one vessels ashore between
Highland Light and the Race; or the tidal wave which in 1871 rolled
into Provincetown Harbor in front of a heavy gale and carried the ship
Nina into the post office. The Portland storm of November, 1898, is
still fresh in men’s minds; wreckage from the unfortunate steamer came
ashore not far from the Clay Pounds in North Truro. But if every great
storm which has raged on this coast were to be mentioned, the end would
be far to seek.

The same is true, but to an even greater extent, with the wrecks, for
many a good ship has left her bones on the Cape beaches when no gale
shrieked a requiem through the rigging. Fog is a greater foe to seamen
than wind; it blinds pigmy and giant alike, and sends them groping
their way through a strange, new element, where strength avails them
nothing, where the old signs fail, and where science itself still
falters at the threshold. It is a bewildering task, therefore, to try
to select the most significant wrecks from such a list as is revealed
by even the most casual research. Storm and fog have multiplied the
tragedies; and sometimes the malice of man has contributed as well.

The first wreck on the Cape was probably contemporary with the voyages
of French and Basque fishermen, somewhere in the fifteenth or sixteenth
century. One may well ask one’s self where the Indians got the Biscay
shallop in which they sailed out to meet Gosnold a day or two before
he sighted the Cape, or how the blond-haired skeleton that the
Pilgrims found went to his grave beside Pamet River. The wreck of the
Sparrowhawk on Nauset Beach, in 1623, has been mentioned in an earlier
chapter. These ancient disasters are so remote that the details and
sometimes even the names of vessels are conjectural; quite different is
the story of Captain Rymer, of the George and Ann.

This vessel was not wrecked; but her voyage was a prolonged nightmare
of four months and a half, hardly a day of which passed without
Captain Rymer’s reading the funeral service over the shrouded figure of
a passenger. She sailed from Dublin in April, 1729, her decks crowded
with Irish emigrants whose hopes were high for easy riches in the
New World. Almost immediately an epidemic set in, and burials at sea
became daily occurrences. Bad weather made progress slow, giving the
disease plenty of time to take its full toll. Before its ravages were
at an end, fourteen servants, forty-two children, and about forty-five
other persons had died--a total of over one hundred--and the end of the
voyage was nowhere in sight. The survivors, weakened by disease, by
short rations, and by fright, were in no condition to work the vessel.
Westerly gales blew them off their course; week followed week, and
still the westerlies prevailed. The end of their drinking-water was
at hand; provisions shrank lower and lower. Mutinous mutterings were
heard among what were left of the passengers. Rymer, they said, was
prolonging the voyage on purpose, waiting for them all to die. Then he
would seize their money and baggage and sail home before the wind.

These whispers reached the Captain’s ears, but with set teeth he kept
his vessel headed westward as the weeks crawled by. Finally, one
October day, with fifteen biscuit and a few pints of water between
them and eternity, the ghostly crew steered the George and Ann into
the waters of Nantucket Sound, and saw a sail coming up on them from
astern. Frantically they flew signals of distress which were seen
from the other vessel, a Boston packet commanded by Captain Lothrop
and bound for Martha’s Vineyard. As soon as he came alongside, the
emigrants, pushing their captain aside, crowded to the rail, clamoring
to be piloted to the nearest land. They threatened to throw Rymer
overboard if he tried to continue the voyage.

Lothrop sized up the situation in short order; obviously these people
were half crazy from suffering; the best thing to do was to put them
ashore as quickly as possible. There was Jo Stewart’s tavern at Wreck
Cove, not far from the end of Monomoy Point. That would be a good place
to land them. So he changed his course, told them to follow in his
wake, and led the way round the long arm of Monomoy, where he gave them
some fresh water and provisions, pointed out the location of Stewart’s
tavern, wished them good luck, and squared away for the Vineyard.

Stewart made shift to put the forlorn company up for the night; the
next day they were billeted for the winter in various houses about
the village. The townspeople little realized what a service they were
performing for the country-to-be. The head of the party, Charles
Clinton, a native of Ireland but born of Scotch parents, proceeded the
following spring to establish a colony in Ulster County, New York.
Among his descendants are some distinguished names. His son, General
James Clinton, had a fine record in the Revolutionary War; another
son, George, became Governor of New York and was Vice-President under
John Adams. James’s son, DeWitt, served as Mayor of New York, Governor
of the State, and United States Senator. Truly the hospitable folk of
Chatham and Harwich, who sheltered the father of such sons, builded
better than they knew.

A diligent historian has said that wrecks form no part of local
history; and from one point of view he is right. Yet many wrecks that
came ashore on the Cape presented the townspeople first with a problem
in amateur life-saving, and second, with a more intricate problem in
_meum and tuum_. On the whole, they had more success in solving the
former than the latter, for the temptation of a rich cargo scattered
along the beach is hard for a poor man to resist. So before passing on
to the Cape-Codders’ exploits as life-savers, it is necessary to glance
at a few of their equally successful performances as mooncussers.

To be sure, the full significance of this picturesque term never
applied to the Cape. Originally it meant the villainous practice of
luring vessels to destruction by false lights in order to plunder
them when the crews had perished. It went even further and included
murdering survivors to give free play to the looting. A humorous
Provincetown saying used to be, ‘Don’t get ashore on the back side
of Truro; there’s women waiting there on the beach with a brick in
a stocking.’ But nowhere on the Cape was there ever a case either
of decoying a ship to its death, or of maltreating her crew. To-day
mooncussing means no more than the pleasant and sometimes profitable
practice of strolling along the beach looking for chance wreckage--a
plank worth hauling home, an unbroken lobster pot, a vessel’s
quarter-board to nail over the barn door. But somewhere between the
two extremes there exists a disagreeable truth, for unquestionably
stranded vessels have been robbed of their cargo and gear by
Cape-Codders; and who can say that mixed emotions did not sometimes
exist in the breasts of men as they stood on the beach hills of Nauset
and watched a ship pounding shoreward over the bars?

Laws there were, it is true, which from their very strictness, invited
violation. Early in the eighteenth century the colonial authorities
decreed that a man who found a wrecked vessel, any part of one, or any
of her cargo on the beach, should report it to the town clerk, whose
duty it was to salvage it and hold it safe until the owners should
appear. This law subjected human nature to too great a strain. The rule
that findings are keepings, though recorded in no statute book, is yet
a principle so deeply rooted in men’s minds, and so nearly in accord
with a pleasant and informal kind of justice, that it is likely to take
precedence over paper decrees. The Reverend Enoch Pratt, historian of
Eastham, writing in the middle of the last century, faces the facts
with commendable candor. After stating the law, he continues, ‘The law
requires that this should be done in all cases, yet it cannot be denied
that it was frequently evaded, and the property found appropriated to
private use, which has often been the case since.’ A few of the most
glaring cases of looting cargo will serve.

Early in the Revolution, the brig Wilkes was wrecked at Eastham, and
her cargo was made away with by certain of the townspeople before an
official could get to the beach. So much indignation, some of it envy,
no doubt, was aroused by the robbery, that a committee was chosen to
detect the culprits if they could, and bring them to justice. Whether
or not the committee succeeded in its commendable task does not
appear. It is hardly fair, of course, to take war-time conditions as
a criterion for normal conduct. If Cape men had not often plundered
cargoes when they had not the excuse of war and hard times, the Wilkes
incident would not have been mentioned. Everything considered, however,
it seems probable that her cargo would have met pretty much the same
fate fifty years later.

Young Zachary Lamson, of Beverly, who was wrecked on Nauset Beach in
1802, left the Cape with mixed feelings toward the inhabitants. He was
obliged to stay in Chatham for some time to make arrangements for the
salvaging of his cargo. His diary contains interesting comments on his
visit. After paying high tribute to the hospitality of the Chatham
folk, he says:

I wish I could say the same of the Orleans people; they were detected
in taking bags of coffee, and actually took one in defiance of
the watch. Apparatus of the vessel was stolen, more or less, and
deposited in an obscure outbuilding belonging to Mr. Timothy Blank,
where it was to lie for division. This fact I detected by taking one
of his party in a snowstorm with our effects in his possession, and
as he candidly confessed the whole plan and who employed him, I had
the satisfaction of deducting about one hundred and fifty dollars
from Timothy Blank’s account, which was very cutting to him.

The most sensational instance of pillaging a wreck in defiance of law
occurred in the spring of 1717, when the pirate ship Whidaw was driven
ashore on the back side of Wellfleet. It is a long story, but by no
means a dull one; it involves, in fact, not one wreck but two. After a
lurid cruise in southern waters, the notorious pirate, Samuel Bellamy,
headed his ship Whidaw north to try his luck in Nantucket Sound. He
was accompanied by a much smaller craft, a snow, which he had recently
captured off the Virginia Coast. Between sunrise and sunset on April
26, Bellamy took two vessels near Nantucket Shoals. One of them was the
Mary Anne, an Irish pink bound for New York with a cargo of Madeira;
the other a Virginia sloop whose name is not recorded. Seven pirates
from the Whidaw were put on board the Mary Anne; others took over the
Virginia sloop, and the whole fleet of four vessels headed north into
the night.

A gale came up from the northeast, and the pirates--none of them very
sober--found themselves in trouble, driven off their course to the
westward. The Mary Anne in particular made bad weather of it, no doubt
because her crew had a larger supply of Madeira than the others, and
toward midnight she got among breakers off Orleans and went aground.
Not knowing what better to do, the pirates stayed on board. In the
morning the Whidaw was nowhere in sight, but the snow and the Virginia
sloop were riding it out at anchor in deep water. Those two vessels
soon slipped their cables and made an offing--vanishing forever from
the sight of the Mary Anne and from this narrative.

Before long a boat with two men, John Cole and William Smith, of
Orleans, rowed off from the mainland and took the crew ashore. Not
until they arrived at Cole’s house did the rescuers know that they were
entertaining pirates, but here the fact was announced in no uncertain
language by one Mackonachy, cook of the Mary Anne, who demanded their
instant arrest. Seven to three was too long odds for Cole and Smith;
they did not hanker for a knife between the ribs. So by the time the
startling news reached Joseph Doane, Esq., of Eastham, who as justice
of the peace was the nearest official, the seven pirates had made off
over the road, headed for Rhode Island. Doane and a posse of volunteers
overtook them before they had gone far and sent them to the Barnstable
jail for safe-keeping. The pink went to pieces where she lay--but not,
it is to be hoped, until her casks of Madeira had found their way into
Eastham and Orleans cellars.

Meantime, the Whidaw, flagship of the pirate fleet, was having troubles
of her own--divine retribution if ever there was a case of it. She had
thrashed her way as far north as the ocean side of Wellfleet, but there
Bellamy, realizing that he could keep off shore no longer, let go his
anchors and tried to ride it out. The seas ran so high, however, that
the Whidaw threatened to go under. As a last resort he set a little
sail, cut the cables, and tried to claw off into deep water. He might
have saved himself the trouble. Before morning his ship had capsized
and was fast going to pieces in the breakers about two miles south of
Cahoon’s Hollow. Bellamy and one hundred and forty-four of his men were
drowned. Only two survivors ever reached shore alive. They were Thomas
Davis, a Welshman, who had been impressed from a captured ship, and
John Julian, a Cape Cod Indian.

Davis found his way to the house of Samuel Harding in Wellfleet early
in the morning of April 27, and told him of the wreck. Harding scented
rich pickings; he hitched up his horse and, accompanied by Davis and
the Indian, salvaged several wagonloads of the most valuable plunder
before any one else knew that the Whidaw was ashore. But before long
the beach was black with carts, half the able-bodied men of the village
being on hand to haul what they could from the surf. The great prize
would have been the chest of gold coins which was supposed to have been
on board when the ship struck; but, like most pirate gold, it has never
been found.

News of the wreck reached Justice Doane while he was still busy with
the crew of the Mary Anne, but as soon as he had started them on their
way to the Barnstable jail, he hurried to Cahoon’s Hollow, only to find
that the bones of the Whidaw had been picked clean. He arrested Davis
and John Julian, who joined the seven men of the Anne at Barnstable,
whence all were marched under an armed escort to Boston and tried for
piracy--all but the Indian, that is, who vanished soon after reaching
the city. Davis was acquitted; the others were hanged.

As soon as word came to the ears of Governor Shute that a pirate
ship was ashore at Wellfleet, he did two things, both of them proper
and both futile. First he issued a proclamation to all His Majesty’s
subjects whom it might concern, to seize all ‘money, bullion, treasure,
goods and merchandises,’ from the wreck, that they might swell the
royal exchequer. Second, he ordered Captain Cyprian Southack to sail
to the Cape, collect the loot, and return with it to Boston. No man
ever tried harder to achieve the impossible than Southack did. He
anchored in Provincetown Harbor five days after the wreck, searched
the town in vain for a horse, dispatched a detail of two men to Truro
with orders to hire a pair there and proceed overland to the scene
of the wreck, where they were to post themselves as a guard over the
valuables on board her! Meanwhile, he himself set out for the spot in
a whaleboat (with which the town was better supplied than it was with
horses), skirted the Bay shore as far as Boat Meadow Creek in Orleans,
and made his way across the Cape to the outer beach via this waterway,
Jeremiah’s Gutter, Town Cove, and Nauset Harbor, a feat which could
have been accomplished even at that early date only on the very top of
the spring tides.

All that was left of the least value on the Whidaw had been taken home
by the citizens. The men whom Southack had sent to watch over the
treasure had found nothing but fragments of the hull to guard. The
cold rains of May, for which the Cape is famous, did nothing to improve
the Captain’s temper. It was a dour mariner who began knocking at the
doors of the Wellfleet inhabitants, most of whom had a barn full of
plunder from the wreck, and demanding that they hand it over. He was
greeted variously. Some, with expressions of blank astonishment, asked
him to what wreck he referred--they had heard of no wreck. Others
laughed and bade him try to get it. Samuel Harding, at whose door the
angry minion of His Majesty knocked loudest--for it was he who with
Davis had skimmed the cream of the cargo--assured Southack that he was
holding the goods for Davis until after the trial. It would be a breach
of trust to give them up, even to so well authenticated an official as
the Captain. In short, Southack returned to Boston with nothing but
some second-hand rigging for his pains, convinced that all Cape-Codders
were villains.

From the official point of view he was right, for the law expects
men to do what it demands of them. But from the point of view of the
observer of human nature, who realizes that temptations are sometimes
too strong for mere man to resist, these same Cape-Codders appear as
average samples of our race. Many an honest man has robbed the Crown
who would not take so much as a stick of firewood from a neighbor. One
may sympathize with Southack, without being prepared to denounce the
men of Wellfleet. Even so there is danger that the Cape beachcomber is
beginning to look like a more desperate fellow than he really was. It
is time to reverse the canvas and contemplate a few of his virtues.
He often had to open his doors to shipwrecked men. In December, 1820,
Freeman Doane, of Eastham, boarded and lodged the only three survivors
of the ship Rolla for ten days and refused to take a cent. The wreck of
this ship, which was a total loss, kept local treasure-seekers tramping
the beach for weeks when it became known that a chest containing
thirteen thousand dollars in cash had gone down when she went to
pieces. Shipowners, it seems, knew rather more about human frailty
than legislators did, for the owners of a Virginia coaster, which was
wrecked on Nauset Beach in the winter of 1799, wisely offered one
fourth of the cargo of tobacco to the citizens if they would salvage
it. Even allowing for an occasional illegal pipeful, this arrangement
must have proved more profitable to the merchant, and was surely
a lighter burden for Eastham consciences, than a less intelligent
attitude on the owners’ part would have been.

Again Easthamers showed restraint when the brig Java, on her way from
the East Indies to Boston, was wrecked outside Nauset Harbor in the
winter of 1831. Not content with bringing the crew safely ashore in
dories, the citizens salvaged her cargo of coffee and nutmegs and were
well paid for their exertions by the owners. The Java’s hull soon went
to pieces, furnishing, like the hulls of so many other vessels, legal
spoil in firewood and building material for any one who would take the
trouble to harness his oxen and drive to the beach for it.

Underwriters and owners usually found it more economical to employ Cape
men as wreckers than to send crews of their own to the scene. In every
town below Yarmouth experts were to be found whose principal occupation
was salvaging cargoes, transshipping them to their own schooners, and
sailing them to their destination. Sometimes, if there was a chance of
floating a wreck whose hull was not badly damaged, the same men would
patch her up, work her off the bar, and sail her to port, jury-rigged
under her own canvas. The great difficulty in this business was the
weather. As long as the sea remained calm, all was well, but a single
blow often was enough either to smash the vessel to pieces or to drive
her so hard aground that she could never be floated. A job of this
sort, therefore, was gambling with the elements for high stakes, but
oftener than not it succeeded.

[Illustration: THE WRECK OF THE CALEDONIA, JANUARY 1, 1863]

In 1829, Messrs. Doane and Knowles, two well-known Eastham wreckers,
took a contract to float the brig Creole, which had stranded near the
entrance to Nauset Harbor, and sail her to Boston. The cargo of cotton
was first lightered ashore, carted across the Cape, and transshipped to
Boston. Then Doane and Knowles set to work on the hull, got her off by
means of anchors and cables, and sailed her round the Cape to Boston,
where they collected $1150. On another occasion the same two men landed
a mixed cargo from the brig Massachusetts, hauled it across to their
schooner on the Bay shore, and delivered it undamaged to the consignees
in Boston. Provincetown wreckers were employed to do the same with
the cargo of the cotton ship Jenny Lind, which was wrecked in 1857.
‘Our village,’ writes a reporter for the Provincetown Banner, ‘has
presented quite a cottonish aspect during the present week, the cargo
of the Jenny Lind, which came ashore on the back side of the town,
being conveyed across to our port to be reshipped to Boston.’ Between
times the wreckers kept busy dragging for lost anchors and cables, a
steady industry until well into the eighties. Coasting schooners that
lay at anchor waiting for a good chance to sail round the Cape were
often caught by a sudden blow and forced to slip their cables and make
an offing in a hurry. By dragging for this lost ground-tackle in heavy
sloops, the wreckers made enough to keep them going between storms.

The only flaw in the character of wreckers was that they sometimes
forgot their humanitarianism in their zeal for a profitable job. In
this respect, indeed, they furnish the last echo of the triumphant
yells which in earlier and robuster years had accompanied the
plunderers of wrecks in their pell-mell rush to the beach. Emerson
writes under the date of September 5, 1854, ‘Went to Yarmouth Sunday
5th, to Orleans, Monday, 6th; to Nauset Light on the back side of Cape
Cod. Collins, the keeper, told us he found obstinate resistance on Cape
Cod to the project of building a lighthouse on this coast, as it would
injure the wrecking business. He had to go to Boston, and obtain the
strong recommendation of the Port Society.’ In fairness to the Cape
it should be said that in 1854 three quarters of her best citizens
were at sea as shipmasters, and could therefore have had no share in
the business. It is certain, too, that those who were at home between
voyages would, as sailors, be the last men in the world to object to
lighthouses. For the miserable remainder no defense is offered.

The statement was made early in this chapter that Cape-Codders were
valiant amateur life-savers. A glance at some of their exploits in
this highly special form of Christianity will help to obliterate the
unpleasant recollection of the anti-lighthouse faction. They had plenty
of chances to practice it, too, for only after wrecks had been coming
ashore for years, did the Government see fit to establish a Life-Saving
Service. In the mean time the citizens had to make shift to get as many
sailors off wrecks as they could with a boat and a pair of oars.

Early in April, 1849, the British ship Josephus, bound for Boston, went
aground at Truro in an easterly blow about a mile north of Highland
Light. She was a wooden vessel and immediately began to break up.
Most of the townspeople were on the beach, but they could only watch
helplessly while spar followed spar into the surf and was whirled
ashore. Two fishermen, Daniel Cassidy and Jonathan Collins, who had
just arrived on the scene, caught sight of a dory which lay high up
under the bank. Without a moment’s hesitation they dragged it to the
water’s edge, where, heedless of their friends’ protests, they performed
the apparently impossible feat of launching it through the surf, and
were off, rowing into the breakers toward the Josephus. For a few
minutes all went well. Then a wave of such size tore in upon them that
before the little boat could rise on its crest, they were buried under
tons of water. The last that was ever seen of them was two heads--black
dots against the foam--that appeared for an instant and vanished under
the next wave. Cassidy, who had been married only a few weeks, left a
widow who had already lost a father and a brother in the great gale of
1841. These were not the first men of Truro to perish thus. Fourteen
years earlier Elisha Paine lost his life in the same way in an attempt
to row off to the Russian brig Emeline Charlotte before she went to
pieces.

The day after Christmas, 1873, brought with it a gale that at times
approached hurricane violence and sent two vessels to their graves
on Cape beaches. One, the American ship Peruvian from Calcutta to
Boston, was doomed the moment she struck, for the Peaked Hill Bars off
Provincetown held her a mile from shore where there was never a chance
for her crew to be taken off, even if any one had happened to be on the
beach in such a storm and had been able to see her through the snow.
Bit by bit she went to pieces through the night; all hands perished,
and only three bodies were ever washed ashore.

The other vessel fared better, at least as far as loss of life was
concerned. She was the iron bark Francis flying the German flag, and
had left Calcutta within a few days of the Peruvian. She came ashore
about three miles south of Peaked Hill, where there was water enough
to let her pound over the outer bar with hull intact; she fetched up
not more than a couple of hundred yards from the beach at North Truro.
The rescue of her crew by volunteers from the village was undoubtedly
the most laborious ever undertaken on the Cape. There was no boat on
the beach, none in fact nearer than the Bay shore. Nothing daunted, the
citizens dragged a whaleboat from the Bay to a pond; skidded it across
the pond on the ice; hitched a pair of horses to it, and began the real
journey across the Cape to the point on the outer beach where the crew
of the Francis were wondering how long her hull would hold together.

Finally the rescuers topped the last ridge and rushed the boat down the
beach. She was safely launched through the surf, but it took more than
one trip to bring the officers and crew of the Francis ashore. No one
was lost except the Captain, who had been sick for some time and who
died in the Highland House, North Truro, four days after being taken
from his vessel. The hull of the Francis, after remaining buried for
half a century, was uncovered by a freak of wind and wave during the
winter of 1927.

Again, in October, 1808, six Truro men whose names are unrecorded
rowed off in a storm to the schooner Active, Portland for Boston,
which had capsized several miles offshore the previous night. She had
not struck, but was drifting helpless on her beam ends in deep water.
The great distance the rescuers had to cover made their exploit a
particularly hazardous one. They took off Captain Danforth and three
passengers, whom they landed safely on the beach after a terrific row
through a rising gale. They had contemplated making another trip, but
it was too late. Darkness set in as they brought their first boatload
ashore, and there was no chance of locating the drifting wreck until
the next morning. When daylight came, no trace of the Active remained,
but two months later, long after they had been given up for lost, it
was learned that her crew had been picked up half frozen by the ship
Alexandria, which had subsequently been dismasted and had put into
Antigua under jury rig, thus causing the long delay.

The next adventure occurred farther up the Cape. After drifting
dismasted for three days, the sloop Fox, which had sailed from Boston,
November 29, 1820, with twenty-eight passengers, was sighted by some
Chatham men. They put off to her in a fleet of small boats and brought
every one of the passengers and crew ashore on Nauset Beach, half dead
from thirst and exposure.

Almost sixty years later, the schooner Sarah Fort was wrecked in April,
1879, near Peaked Hill Bars. Government life-savers smashed their
boat while trying to launch it through the surf. So Captain Isaac F.
Mayo, of Provincetown, rowed off in a whaleboat with a rough-and-ready
crew of local volunteers and brought a number of the schooner’s men
ashore. And so it goes. Sometimes these amateur life-savers succeeded;
sometimes they failed; but if there was the shadow of a chance for
success, they tried.

Valiant and expert as the rescuers were, they realized more poignantly
than any one else the need of an organized lifesaving service with
suitable equipment on the spot. But ‘the march of the human mind is
slow’--and it is particularly slow in the case of legislative bodies
when they are asked to appropriate money for humanitarian purposes.
Congress knew little of the surf on Peaked Hill Bars or of the shoals
that stretch seaward from Monomoy. With comfortable philosophy,
Senators concluded that a shipwreck was a shipwreck and that sailors
must take their chance. Besides, were they not voting money all the
time for lighthouses and coast surveys? [See notes to Chapter XI.]

But Massachusetts men knew something about shipwrecks and were ready
to spend money to reduce the number of fatalities. As early as 1786,
they organized the Massachusetts Humane Society--said to be the first
of its kind in the world. Its goal was to supply boats and equipment
to be kept ready at all times at dangerous points alongshore. They
could not at first afford to place lifeboats wherever they were needed,
but they did the next best thing. Relying for the moment on the
willingness of volunteers to continue rowing off to wrecks, they began
by building huts on remote beaches to shelter survivors who might get
ashore unaided. This was a much-needed measure, for a shipwrecked man’s
troubles had only begun when he dragged himself above the reach of the
surf. In March, 1872, for example, John Silva, sole survivor of the
wrecked schooner Clara Bell, was washed ashore on a plank shortly after
midnight within two miles of Highland Light. A snowstorm hid the flash
of the great lantern, and the wretched sailor wandered about until
daylight, when he was found in a road, still on his feet, but unable
to take another step or to utter an intelligible word. He finally
recovered with some minor amputations.

Again, Peter Woodbury and John Low, of Beverly, after having dropped
to dry land at Orleans from the bowsprit of their wrecked schooner,
celebrated the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1802, by wandering on
Nauset Beach until they fell exhausted in the snow. They were picked up
later in the day by citizens of Orleans and Chatham, whose wives thawed
them back to life with hot blankets. Zachary Lamson, acting captain,
and other members of the crew, after a futile attempt to find a way off
the beach, went back to the vessel drenched as they were and turned in
all standing. They were saved from freezing to death by the same men
who found Woodbury and Low. This was the same wreck which resulted in
Lamson’s somewhat caustic remarks about Timothy Blank, of Orleans.

A hut with some dry straw would have been paradise to any of these
frozen mariners, and if such huts were strategically located, there was
a chance that shipwrecked men might stumble upon them. So, at any rate,
argued the fathers of the Massachusetts Humane Society, and forthwith
they set about raising the money to build them--no difficult task in
a seagoing community like the Bay State. Before long, a scattering
chain of huts appeared, oases in the bleak desert of the Cape sand
hills. The first of them was put up in 1794, back of Provincetown, near
the head of Stout’s Creek, but, owing to faulty construction, it was
soon demolished by wind and blowing sand. By 1802, six properly built
shelters had appeared between Race Point and Monomoy. To aid survivors
in finding them, James Freeman in 1802 wrote a careful description of
the whole outer beach of the Cape, with instructions how to locate each
of the six shelters. His pamphlet was distributed in shipping circles
and may have helped a little. As early as 1704, for example, the three
survivors of the burned schooner Farmer were saved from perishing,
after being half drowned in the Orleans breakers, by finding one of
two huts which the Society had put up on Nauset Beach. Captain Schott
and his two men spent a tolerably comfortable night in this shelter,
buried in straw and listening to the fourteen-foot surf which pounded
the beach outside.

But, as may be seen from the experiences of Silva and Lamson, the
remedy was anything but sure. The trustees of the Society, therefore,
kept developing the equipment, until by 1845 the huts were supplied
with boats, and with mortars for shooting lines across the decks of
stranded vessels. At last the Federal Government began to take notice.
They had already begun, in fact, by paying part of the Humane Society’s
expenses, as did the State Government as well. But when finally
Congress took full charge, the result was appalling. The years between
1850 and 1870 were marked by waste and inefficiency, while as many
wrecked men were drowned as ever. Not till popular indignation had been
raised to the boiling point by repeated disasters along the coast with
all hands lost, was the Government finally frightened into establishing
an effective and disciplined service.

The Cape, for some reason best known to the politicians, was left till
the last; but the year 1872 saw nine stations built and manned between
Provincetown and Chatham. Four more have been added since. To-day they
are models of comfort and efficiency, with sleeping-quarters for the
crew, which in most cases consist of six or seven men and a captain,
spare cots for rescued men, and the best and most complete equipment in
boats and gear that can be obtained. Usually there are two surfboats.
The crew live in the station and are on duty the year round. Telephone
lines connect station and station as well as with the towns. Every
foot of beach from Wood End to Monomoy is patrolled each night and, if
the weather is foggy, by day as well. Throughout the week, drills of
various sorts are held to keep the crews tuned up to concert pitch, and
no more skillful or valiant boatmen can be found than those employed
in this service. Until very recently nine out of ten were natives of
the Cape, but within the last few years a Portuguese or two have been
admitted to many of the crews. A few samples of their skill and courage
will suffice.

The first rescue that suggests itself was in connection with the
grounding of the old stone sloop Trumbull, that was sighted in
distress by a patrolman from the Peaked Hill Bars Station on the last
day of November, 1880. She was aground on the bar, with white water
breaking all around her. Captain David Atkins, keeper of the station,
took five of his crew with him in the boat, got safely through the
first row of breakers, and arrived in due time close aboard the sloop.
The sea was so rough in the shoal water that it was out of the question
to bring his boat alongside; so he directed the crew of the Trumbull
to jump overboard one at a time, that he might pick them up. The crew,
three in number, obeyed orders and were promptly pulled into the
lifeboat. The captain and mate, however, whether from lack of courage
or from a proper desire to stay with the ship, refused to jump. It was
not a time for argument. Captain Atkins swung his boat’s bow toward
shore, and all hands were landed safely on the beach.

His duty was done, but Atkins was not satisfied. He looked off again to
the spot where the Trumbull, her boom slatting and her hull pounding,
threatened to go to pieces at any moment. Again he ordered his crew to
launch the boat through the surf, and again they rowed off to try to
induce the captain and mate to come ashore. This time a wave carried
him too close to the rocking hull; the slatting sheet of the sloop
was caught under the surfboat’s bow, a fierce gust carried the boom
across to the other side, the sheet came taut with a jerk, and the
lifeboat was capsized. Captain Atkins and two of the surfmen perished
almost immediately. The three remaining men of his crew clung for a
time to the bottom of their boat; then, kicking themselves out of what
clothes they could, they struck out for shore. All three arrived and
were pulled out of the breakers by John Cole, a surfman who had been
detailed to stand by on the beach and help the boat in landing. The
Trumbull floated clear of the bars on the next high tide, the wind
moderated, and she continued her voyage to New York, manned by the
captain and the mate. The quality of Captain Atkins and his men as
exemplified on this occasion needs no comment.

If life-savers could count on intelligent coöperation from the crews
of stranded vessels, a large part of the danger of their calling
would be eliminated. So expert are they in handling their surfboats
in all weathers, and so perfect is their discipline, that hardly a
man of them need be lost even in the worst storms, if those whom they
are trying to rescue keep their heads and obey orders. But too often
they do neither. The Monomoy disaster of 1902 is a terrible instance
of this sort. Like so many other tragedies, it involved no more
impressive a vessel than the stump-masted coal barge, Wadena, which
struck on Shovelful Shoal, south of Monomoy Station, on March 11 in a
heavy northeaster. Captain Eldredge and his men of the Monomoy Station
brought the crew ashore and supposed that the incident was closed. The
barge lay intact during the next few days, giving Boston wreckers a
fine chance to salvage the coal.

[Illustration: WRECKERS PULLING OFF A BEACHED SCHOONER AT PROVINCETOWN]

At the same time that the Wadena struck, another barge, the
Fitzpatrick, stranded not far from her, and two Chatham wreckers,
Captain Elmer Mayo and Captain Mallows, were engaged by the owners to
float her. They planned to begin work on the morning of the 17th, and
accordingly spent the night before on board, after making the final
arrangements with her captain. Toward evening it breezed up from the
southeast, but Eldredge and his men at the station felt no anxiety,
because they supposed that a tug which the wreckers were using had
brought all hands ashore from the Wadena. What was their surprise, the
next morning, to see a distress signal flying from the barge’s rigging.
Their surprise was mingled with concern, for the wind had increased
during the night until it blew a gale which turned the water around the
Wadena into a chaos of breakers.

Immediately Captain Eldredge, who had walked down to the end of Monomoy
Point to look the situation over, telephoned back to the station
for the lifeboat. When she arrived, he jumped aboard, and the crew,
shipping a little water on the way, pulled off through the breakers to
comparative shelter under the high leeward side of the Wadena and made
fast. They found that five men had been left on board, all of whom had
lost their nerve and were clamoring to be taken ashore. Worse still,
they were in no sense of the word sailors, as appeared when their
captain let go his hold of the rope by which he was lowering himself
into the lifeboat and fell crashing aboard to the accompaniment of a
smashed thwart.

Eldredge, ordering the five men to lie down in the bottom of the
boat, braced himself for the return trip, and his crew shot the boat
out from under the lee as he leaned against his long steering oar to
head the craft into the seas. It was a beautiful piece of boatmanship;
some water came aboard, but not enough to be dangerous. As soon as the
trembling cargo in the bottom of the boat saw the top of the wave slop
in over the side, however, they gave themselves up for lost, jumped to
their feet, and seized the man at the oars around the neck--doubtless
for the same reason that a drowning man winds himself around his
rescuer.

In a second the boat was bottom up, with all hands in the water. Even
now the Monomoy crew were calm. Twice they righted her, only to have
waves capsize her before they could pull themselves on board. They had
no strength for a third attempt, but clung to the bottom, determined to
hang on till the last gasp. One by one, benumbed and battered, they let
go and vanished, until the only man of that crew left was Seth Ellis,
number one surfman of the station. Finding himself alone, he managed to
wrap one arm around the centerboard which had floated up and protruded
like a shark’s fin from the bottom of the boat.

Up to this point the whole disaster had been shrouded in fog. Mayo and
Mallows on board the Fitzpatrick had not even seen the crew put off
to the other barge. But at this moment a hole was blown in the mist
and revealed to the Chatham men on the Fitzpatrick the white bottom
of a lifeboat with a single black figure sprawled across it. Deaf
to the protests of Mallows and the Captain of the barge, Mayo in an
instant had stripped to his underclothes, got a twelve-and-a-half foot
dory over the side, seized a pair of clumsy oars which he cut down to
somewhere near the right size, and was pulling toward Ellis and the
lifeboat.

For any man who had not spent his life alongshore, as Mayo had, the
attempt would have been suicide. But Mayo had been cradled in dories,
spent his youth as fisherman, anchor-dragger and wrecker, and had
substituted from time to time at various life-saving stations on the
Cape. Now, at the age of forty, he knew all that a man can know about
dories and the Monomoy Shoals. He knew that the boat which carried him
was a poor specimen of her class; but even an indifferent dory is a
remarkable sea-boat when handled by an expert, and that is how this one
was handled. Yard by yard he pulled her to the side of the lifeboat,
where the most ticklish part of the exploit awaited him. If Ellis had
been another Wadena wrecker, both men would have perished. But numb
and exhausted as he was, Ellis made not a single false move while Mayo
helped him into the bottom of the dory. Then he headed for shore, came
through the surf with the help of the shore detail of one, whom Captain
Eldredge had left there, and assisted Ellis to the station. Six weeks
later, Ellis, who was soon as well as ever, became keeper of it. Mayo
was given one medal by the Humane Society and another by the United
States Government.

The disasters which have been mentioned are not those that involved
the greatest loss of money; if such had been the intention, ships and
barks would have taken the places of brigs and schooners. The famous
triple wreck of the Crowninshield East-Indiamen, Volusia, Ulysses, and
Brutus, which were lost at Provincetown in 1802, would have headed
the list; the ship Confidence, Captain Isaiah Knowles, which in 1806
floated into the Bay on her beam ends without a living man on board,
would have been a close second. The ships Franklin and London, both
lost in 1849, one at Wellfleet, the other on Nauset Beach, would have
been included. So would the ship Columbus, a total loss at Barnstable
in 1851, and the Orissa, another full-rigged ship, which added her
bones to the Nauset graveyard in ’57. All these and many more were
wrecks of the first magnitude. A list prepared in 1864 shows that from
the year 1843 to 1859 about five hundred wrecks occurred on the Cape.
In 1903, the United States Engineer’s Office at Newport, Rhode Island,
made a map showing the locations of five hundred and forty more between
1880 and 1903. But the disasters which have been recounted above are
those which in one way or another revealed the mettle of Cape-Codders.
And taken by and large these men have not done badly by the shattered
ships and broken men that the northeasters of three hundred years have
hurled upon their beaches. If there was looting sometimes, so was there
heroism; if there was greed, there was charity as well; and it should
be borne in mind that the community where all men are righteous must
be sought for on some planet other than our own.

To-day, though storms still pound ships to pieces on the Cape as easily
as ever, the Canal and the Life-Saving Service have made it possible
for most honest citizens to remain potential heroes only. The wrecker,
done out of his business by metropolitan firms, has thrown out a sheet
anchor in the shape of a cranberry bog or a filling station; the
mooncusser hugs his hearth or smuggles whiskey for a thirsty land.

CHAPTER XII

THE MERCHANT MARINE

A full account of the merchant marine of Cape Cod would require not
a chapter but a volume. Its tentative beginnings, its gradual rise
to the glory of the forties and fifties, and its inevitable decline,
comprise too vast and varied a subject for a condensed narrative. So
in this chapter no mention can be made of many names that in their day
were great, or of many ships that spread their masters’ greatness from
sea to sea. No foreign voyage is insignificant; every captain is in a
very real sense his country’s ambassador. Especially was this true in
the early days of our nation, when we were yet a people unknown and
untested, with the world before us to antagonize or conciliate, and no
one but our shipmasters to represent us. These men neither antagonized
nor conciliated. Instead, by their shrewdness, resourcefulness,
and vigor, they won for their country the reluctant and sometimes
acidulated respect of the world.

The Cape has so long been associated in men’s minds with the sea and
with those that come and go in ships, so large a part of her population
has until very recently been composed of master mariners, either active
or retired, and such a wealth of salty tradition has clustered about
her name, that the casual observer is deceived with false pictures.
He sees the Pilgrim Fathers themselves sailing the Mayflower into
Provincetown Harbor with their own hands, and shouting orders to each
other in a language of tarry technicalities. He sees the very earliest
settlements that our forefathers made on the Cape as busy seaports,
their harbors white with sails, and the settlers themselves, whenever
they happened to be ashore, walking with a nautical roll. But the
facts--it cannot be too often emphasized--were very different. It
was not until years later that, with their houses built, their mills
grinding, and their crops growing, Cape men turned their attention
to the two most intricate arts that they ever mastered: the art of
building ships and the art of sailing them. The first vessels that
they built--aside from fishermen and whalers--were packets to run
between Cape towns and Boston and New York. And naturally enough, for
the discomforts of overland travel in stage-coaches were so great that
only philosophers, like Thoreau, or men of God, like Timothy Dwight,
dared face them. Most wise men on the Cape knew the way to China by
sea better than they did the way to Boston by land. The Cape-Codder
who had once undergone this journey, and who again found it necessary
to visit Boston, would wait, if necessary, a month until a chance
lumber schooner or fisherman could carry him by water. One man, who by
a ghastly accident had been harpooned on a whaler off Provincetown,
was rushed to Boston in a whaleboat rowed by a double crew working
in relays. It became (and this is a happier motive for the trip) a
common practice for young Provincetown and Truro fishermen to carry
their sweethearts to Boston in their schooners when the time came for
selecting a trousseau. Another incentive for starting packet lines
was the enormous quantity of salt that was being made everywhere
on the Cape. Much of this was used by local fishermen, but there
remained a surplus for export, and the water route was the only way
to carry it. There were also occasional cargoes of onions and flax.
Thus the appearance of packets was inevitable. They were needed for
both passengers and freight, and, with the prospect of sure returns on
their investment, local merchants began to build them and to operate
them. Framed by townsmen from timber growing near by, commanded and
manned by Cape men and boys, these craft were as complete and absolute
products of the region as anything made by man can be. The inhabitants
regarded them with far more than a business interest. They looked on
them with a pride and affection that was curiously allied to the pride
and affection that they felt for their husbands, brothers, and sons who
sailed them.

There were often two or three packets hailing from a village, and
they usually made, among them, three trips a week to Boston and back.
One, the Northern Light, of Provincetown, about 1830, ran to and
from Boston three times a week from March to December--a performance
unparalleled by sail before or since. No vessels of their size were
ever kept more immaculate or were more promptly refitted or discarded
when they began to show signs of age. Their beauty and comfort were
almost as important in their owners’ eyes as their speed and safety.
One in particular, the schooner Postboy, of Truro, has been called
‘the finest specimen of naval architecture and passenger accommodation
ever seen in Bay waters.’ Her cabin was finished in solid mahogany and
bird’s-eye maple; her draperies were of silk. She was at once fast and
comfortable, the pride of her captain, Zoeth Rich.

There is no keener rivalry than the rivalry between towns of any
district, and no more exciting sport than boat-racing. When these
two factors combine, when the men concerned are Yankees, and when
the question of pecuniary investment is also involved, the cords of
competition will be stretched extremely taut. This was the situation
that existed between the Cape Cod packets, their owners, and their
captains. No sooner did the Postboy appear at Provincetown than the
merchants of Eastham would see what they could do to go her one better.
If Truro appeared with a new flier, Wellfleet within a month was laying
the keel of a bigger and faster craft. If local timber and local talent
were thought unequal to the task, vessels were ordered from other
places where it was supposed newer methods obtained, for it is with
shipbuilders even as it is with prophets.

The best example of this sort of rivalry occurred between the towns
of Barnstable and Yarmouth. Yarmouth, about 1840, had a sloop, the
Commodore Hull, that was rightly considered the finest and fastest on
the coast. There was not a packet captain on the Bay who had not been
chagrined by having her boil up from astern, pass him to windward, and
beat him to Boston by a margin that was measured in hours. Barnstable
stood this as long as she could, and then two of her leading citizens,
Captains Matthias Hinckley and Thomas Percival, went up the Hudson
River to contract for a new packet that would beat the Yarmouth wonder.
The result was the sloop Mail. On their first rival voyage for Boston,
the two vessels crossed Barnstable Bar abreast, leaving behind them two
villages wild with excitement, and many wagers between the inhabitants
of each. The watchers from the shore could see no change in their
relative positions; neck and neck they tore along before a fresh
southerly breeze until they were hull down and lost to sight. The new
Barnstable vessel, however, fulfilled her destiny and nosed out the
Commodore Hull, sliding into Central Wharf a bare three lengths ahead
of her rival. But the Yarmouth citizens were loyal and declared that
the Mail’s victory was an accident, or was perhaps due to the fact
that both Captains Hinckley and Percival had sailed her; and that the
Commodore Hull was still the faster sailer.

This famous packet had other rivals right at home--chief among them
being the Eagle’s Flight, commanded by Captain Ansel Hallett. The
competition between these two Yarmouth vessels was almost as keen as
that between the neighboring towns. No records exist to show which was
the faster; but there was no doubt in the mind of the bard who composed
this lively stanza:

‘O! the Commodore Hull, she sails so dull
It made all the crew look sour,
While the Eagle’s Flight was out of sight
In less than half an hour.’

A trip to Boston by packet, even when there was no one to race against,
was by no means a dull affair. For one thing, there was the uncertainty
how long the passage would take; it might last anywhere from six hours
to two days, and the passengers made the most of their holiday. High
and low, rich and poor, were on an equal footing, for the crowded decks
and cabins (there were anywhere from twenty-five to fifty passengers on
these little vessels) prohibited all exclusiveness. There might be a
deep-water captain on his way to Boston to take his ship out to China;
he kept the ship’s company entertained with tales of deep waters,
while others talked of record fares of cod, great schools of stranded
blackfish, of local politics and national policy. The meals were plain,
but abundant, and cost twenty-five cents. The fare for a round trip was
$1.50.

As soon as a returning packet was sighted at Barnstable or Dennis or
Wellfleet, a flag was run up, on a pole perched inland on the highest
available hill, to notify the South-Siders. Since oftener than not the
vessel was bringing home a shipmaster who had left his vessel in Boston
and who was returning to the Cape after a year’s voyaging on the other
side of the world, it is easy to imagine the excitement that attended
the hoisting of this signal and the scenes that took place at the
little wharves along the Bay shore. Joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy
they saw, and healthy activity and moderate profits.

The importance of the packets to the Cape, however, was
farther-reaching than the mere profits to their owners and convenience
to the chance traveler or salt-maker. To be sure, they kept business
brisk alongshore with plenty of work for the rigger and ship-chandler
and an active turnover for the general storekeeper; so much so that
when the railroad finally stretched its way to Provincetown, and
the packets by the same token vanished forever, the opinion of one
longshoreman, who found himself idle and the wharves empty, was,
‘George, the railroad is a cuss!’ But their real importance was that
they served as the primary school for seafaring, and that, unlike some
schools, they furnished their pupils with incentive to fare farther
and reach higher, until many a youngster who began his career coiling
halyards on a Dennis packet, finished on the quarterdeck of a clipper
ship, establishing a new record across the Atlantic.

Such a _cursus honorum_ is neither theoretical nor imaginary. Captain
Joseph H. Sears, of East Dennis, left the little packet Combine to
command full-rigged ships on foreign voyages. So did Captain Dean
Sears, of the same town. Mr. Edgar Jones, of West Barnstable, an
ex-seafaring man who spent his last years sailing parties around Nine
Mile Pond in a jaunty little sloop, and who was in his day first mate
of such ships as the Radiant, Comet, and Royal Arch, told the author
that his first desire to go to sea came to him when, as a boy, he
watched the sloop Mail leaving her wharf in Barnstable for Boston. How
could it be otherwise? What youngster could sail into Boston Harbor on
the Mail or Modena or Young Tell, and there see the spars of tall ships
cutting the sky with their intricate tracery of rigging, or watch the
strange and varied cargoes derricked up through their hatches, without
longing to join the ranks of the conquerors and command those towering
ships that would carry him to the ends of the earth?

So the packets, before they died and became history, opened the eyes
of the young Cape-Codders to the roadsteads of the world; and this,
if it had been all, would have justified their existence. As to their
death, it was inevitable, and was due in the main to two causes.
Salt-making began to be abandoned, for salt mines supplanted the old
way of evaporation. Then came the railroad, which reached village after
village along the Cape until it came roaring into Provincetown and
steamed out with everything, passengers and freight, that the packets
had carried.

The little vessels themselves fared variously. Some became fishermen;
others continued a losing struggle with the railroad until they
grew old and were condemned. One, the famous Northern Light, of
Provincetown, was sold to owners on the Pacific Coast and was wrecked
on her way round, in the Straits of Magellan. Another was sold for a
pilot boat in New Orleans.

But steam in another form had already cut heavily into the business
of the pioneer packets. The steamboat Naushon in 1857 ran from
Provincetown to Boston and touched at other points on the north shore
of the Cape. The steamer Acorn, of Sandwich, followed a few years later
and plied back and forth until she was sold for a blockade-runner in
the Civil War and was sunk by accident off the Carolinas. The George
Shattuck and the Longfellow continued until the eighties, when the
silting up of all the Cape harbors except that of Provincetown, the
increasing efficiency of the railway, and the general depression of all
business on the Cape, sounded their knell.

The wider horizons that young Cape sailors had caught glimpses of
from the decks of the packets lured them in increasing numbers into
deep water. Even before the Revolution, a few had followed the gleam.
Timothy Thornton had grown rich by foreign trade as early as 1671, and
Chatham boasted a far voyager or two in 1740. But most of the colonial
seafaring was for codfish or whales. After the Revolution, however, the
case was different. As soon as the new country got her bearings, she
started out with energy, tripped over the Embargo of 1807, stagnated
through the War of 1812, and then started afresh toward the great
decade of the fifties. And from 1815 to 1860, it is safe to say that no
part of the Atlantic Coast prospered more mightily than Cape Cod.

One should realize at the outset of this period the fundamental
difference so far as the Cape is concerned, between deep-water
navigation and the point-to-point work of the packets. The packets
sailed from every little creek and harbor alongshore. Such harbors were
impossible to vessels of deeper draught; nowhere along the Cape, except
at Provincetown, was there a harbor fit for sheltering big ships, nor
were there any facilities for loading and unloading them. Our merchant
captains, therefore, sailed from other ports--from Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, and Baltimore--and returned to their homes on the Cape
between voyages only. No Cape town ever saw the graceful hulls and
rakish masts of clipper ships tied up alongside her wharves or swinging
at anchor in her roadsteads.

On the other hand, the shipowners of every port on both coasts of the
United States were eager to get Cape men to command their vessels and
transact their business in the far corners of the world. From 1815 to
the decline of American shipping in the eighties, her captains carried
every sort of cargo to every sort of port; encountered everything that
can be encountered at sea (mutinous crews, calms, typhoons) and every
sort of trickery that can be encountered on land, from the barefaced
shanghaiing of crews to the devious business practices of the Orient.
And, to the credit of Yankee resource and valor, it may truthfully be
said that they seldom came off losers. It will be worth while to follow
some of them to sea.

One of the early long-voyage Cape-Codders was Captain John Kendrick,
who was born in Harwich in 1740. He is a proper figure to begin with,
not because he was an example of the best the Cape produced, but
because he was active at the outset of American seafaring, and, in
fact, had helped to create it by commanding the privateers Fanny and
Marianne during the Revolutionary War. Four years after the war, a
group of Boston merchants, fired by a chance remark of the celebrated
Captain Cook, of South Sea fame, decided, since Britain had slammed
her doors against us, to take a financial flier by opening a Northwest
fur trade. The scheme involved gigantic distances over a route much of
which was uncharted. The first leg of the voyage was round the Horn and
up to Nootka Sound off the Oregon Coast; thence the course lay across
the Pacific to the China Coast, where the adventurers traded their furs
for silk; then south and west through the China Sea and across the
Indian Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope, and northwest across the
Atlantic to Boston.

The men who invested their money in so hazardous an enterprize
naturally wanted the hardiest and most courageous seaman they could
find to take command. They selected Captain Kendrick. He set sail
from Boston in 1787 in a stumpy little ship, eighty-three feet long,
named the Columbia; with him as first lieutenant, in command of the
little sloop Lady Washington, sailed Robert Gray, of Boston. They beat
their way round Cape Horn, with flooded decks, the crews rotten with
scurvy, cruised north by the west coast of South America, skirted the
long coast of California (San Francisco was not then in existence),
and finally dropped anchor in Nootka Sound near what is now Vancouver
Island.

Kendrick ordered all hands ashore, and built a big shack in which to
spend the winter while trading for sea otter with the Indians. At this
point the Captain’s character began to disintegrate. He had not shown
himself a ‘nimble leader’ (to quote Gray’s phrase) on the way out,
but had wasted a month at the Cape Verde Islands and ten days more at
the Falklands. Having now at last reached Nootka, he stayed there in
idleness all winter, allowing Gray to do all the cruising for skins. In
the early summer, when enough had been collected to fill the Columbia,
Kendrick, instead of sailing with his cargo to China, turned the
command of the larger vessel over to Gray, who promptly set out across
the Pacific, leaving the nominal commander of the expedition to his own
devices in the Lady Washington.

Kendrick spent the summer pleasantly enough in exploring and trading,
and went as far north as Barrell Sound in Queen Charlotte Islands,
where the Indians stole some clothing from him. As punishment, he
seized two of their chiefs, bound one leg of each down the barrel of
a cannon, and pretended that he was about to set them off. The cruel
bluff succeeded; the other Indians in terror returned the stolen goods,
but the Captain was not satisfied. Realizing that he had burned his
bridges so far as trading with these Indians was concerned, he demanded
all the skins in the village, paid the usual trade price for them,
and headed for China. He took his time, as usual, stopping at one of
the Hawaiian Islands, where he found sandalwood growing wild. This
suggested possibilities; he left three men there to cut enough for a
cargo, and reached China in January, 1790.

Here he spent a year and two months disposing of his skins, and
rerigged the Lady Washington as an hermaphrodite brig. Neither a fever
which he contracted, nor the hostility of Chinese officials, who made
things as hard as they could for him, can account for such a waste of
time. Clearly he was becoming demoralized. When (in March, 1791) he
finally did leave the China Coast, he was heavily in debt. He headed
east and very foolishly visited Barrell Sound again, supposing that the
two years which had elapsed had given the Indians time to forget his
previous treatment of them. Under pretense of friendly trading, they
sprang a surprise attack on his vessel and very nearly took her. But
they were finally repulsed, and Kendrick, with wanton malignity, killed
as many as he could even while they were retreating in canoes. That he
had abandoned all idea of returning home appears from the fact that he
bought a great tract of wild land on Vancouver Island from the Indians,
and built himself a log house which he called Fort Washington. Here
Gray, who again arrived from Boston via Cape Horn, found him living at
ease.

After this the Captain made only one more voyage to China. He started
another, but got no farther than the Hawaiian Islands, where he found
life so agreeable that he spent the last half of the winter loafing
about Kauai, where the sandalwood grew. Returning there the next fall,
after another summer on the Northwest Coast, Kendrick met Captain
Brown, of the British navy, at Oahu, and was killed in an exchange of
salutes. The Englishman’s cannon, by some ghastly accident, was loaded.
So died a man who had left Boston seven years before a respected
merchant captain, and had degenerated into little more than a South Sea
trader.

Such was the beginning of the Northwest fur trade, one of the earliest
branches of our country’s maritime activity. Other Cape men were
quick to follow the long wake of Kendrick--notably Captain William
Sturgis, of Barnstable, and his mate and fellow townsman Daniel Bacon.
Captain Sturgis forms the sharpest contrast to Kendrick. At sixteen
he sailed to the Northwest Coast as foremast hand on the Eliza, of
Boston, and returned as third mate. A few years later, after bringing
the Caroline back to Boston from the Hawaiian Islands, he was given
command of the Atahualpa, one of Theodore Lyman’s vessels, and with
Bacon as mate, he made another voyage to the Northwest coast. In 1820,
Captain Sturgis retired from the sea to start the firm of Bryant and
Sturgis, one of the oldest and soundest Northwest trading houses of
Boston. Captain Sturgis’s experiences with the Indians were always of
the friendliest kind. He learned their language, and it is hardly an
exaggeration to say that there was as much of the missionary as of the
trader in his dealings with them. Apropos of their occasional attacks
on American ships, he writes: ‘It would be easy to show that these
fatal disasters might have been averted by a different treatment of
the natives and by prudence and proper precaution on the part of their
civilized visitors.’ But though Captain Sturgis never had any trouble
with Indians, he once had a battle with a fleet of Chinese pirates that
makes Kendrick’s brush with the natives of the Queen Charlotte Islands
look like a cockfight.

It was the Captain’s last voyage in the Atahualpa. She lay one day in
August anchored in the Macao Roads. Bacon had been sent ashore on some
business or other, and hardly had he landed when a fleet of piratical
junks--sixteen in number--swooped down upon the ship. Sturgis, a cigar
clenched in his teeth, put up a terrific fight, for every merchantman
went armed, and the Captain, although short-handed owing to the absence
of Bacon and his boat’s crew, had firearms aplenty and poured out shot
after shot from his howitzers, while the crew peppered the decks of
the pirates with musket balls. Knowing well enough the character of
his assailants, he placed a barrel of powder on deck and announced to
his crew that if the pirates once got possession of the ship, he would
touch it off and blow them all to eternity together--yellow men and
white.

Bacon heard the guns and rushed to the shore with his boat’s crew,
where he shoved off, despite the advice of his friends, who told him
that it was suicide. How he got through the swarm of pirates and
reached the side of the blood-streaked Atahualpa is a mystery; but
he succeeded, and owing very largely to this reënforcement, Captain
Sturgis was able to keep the Chinamen at bay until he had worked his
vessel up to a place of safety under the guns of Macao forts. The
commander of the pirate fleet was afterwards captured and executed by
the Chinese process of hacking to death, known as ‘the thousand cuts.’
The moral effect of this episode on the pirates was as beneficial as
its immediate effect was disastrous to their leader, and American
vessels and American masters were from then on regarded with no small
respect by the inhabitants of Canton and Macao.

Just before the turn of the century, European wars switched some Yankee
shipowners, who were willing to take a long chance for big profits,
away from the Northwest Coast, into neutral trade with France. Food
was so scarce in that beleaguered country that a cargo of provisions
was worth almost any price, but the difficulties involved were
twofold--first, to get across the Atlantic without being picked up by
a hostile frigate, and second, to collect from the starving Frenchmen.
The business called for very different qualifications from those
demanded in the Northwest and China trade. Open powder barrels had no
effect on naval officers; patience and diplomacy were of more avail
than cutlasses in extracting payment from revolutionary Frenchmen; and
patience and diplomacy are attributes which we do not always associate
with the American temper, least often of all, perhaps, with the temper
of American shipmasters. But consider the account that Captain Elijah
Cobb, of Brewster, gives us of his difficulties with the French
Government and his subsequent visit to Paris.

Captain Cobb was born in 1768 in what is now Brewster, but was then a
part of Harwich. At the age of twenty-six he sailed out of Boston in
command of the brig Jane bound for Cadiz. This was during the Reign of
Terror, when Robespierre was supreme. Cobb’s vessel was captured by a
French frigate and taken into Brest. His situation looked hopeless,
for his papers had been seized, and without papers his claim to the
ship was worthless. He appealed, as a matter of form, to the _chargé
d’affaires_, and was told that he must exercise patience and that in
time the Government would do the right thing. The officials were as
good as their word, for in six weeks Cobb was allowed to sell his
cargo, receiving payment in bills of exchange on Hamburg, payable in
fifty days. He went to Paris to get back his papers, riding three
days and nights without sleep, and passing the remains of a butchered
courier strewn about the road, together with fragments of master,
postilion, and horses. This was a mild prologue, however, to the scenes
he was to witness, for he subsequently watched a thousand persons mount
the scaffold to be guillotined.

But the young Yankee captain had something else to do besides standing
round at executions. He had to recover his papers, and these were
not forthcoming. He pestered the office of what was called ‘the 23rd
department,’ until he was forbidden the premises. Then by chance some
one told him to try the great Robespierre himself. Cobb, nothing
daunted, followed this advice, explained his predicament to the great
man, secured the papers, and reached Hamburg just before the French
agent there stopped payment.

For the next fifteen years or so Cobb sailed various vessels to various
ports, now and then smuggling Medford rum ashore on the Irish Coast,
but meeting with no startling adventures until, one August morning in
1812, while returning from Cadiz to Boston, he was captured on the edge
of the Grand Banks by an armed British schooner and carried to St.
Johns. Here he found about twenty other American captains living in
comfortable captivity, and twenty-seven American prize vessels. This
was the first he knew of the War of 1812. In the course of a week an
exchange of prisoners was made, and all the Americans sailed out of St.
Johns, landing two days later in New York, whence Cobb made his way to
Harwich and walked in on his wife at midnight. He found her sitting up
in bed, reading his last letter and conjuring up in her imagination the
horrors of his life in a British dungeon.

It is quite possible that during his comfortable sojourn as prisoner
of war at St. Johns, Cobb fell in with another deep-water shipmaster
from the Cape--Captain Isaiah Crowell, of Dennis. At all events Captain
Crowell was held at St. Johns at about the same time, and, like Cobb,
was soon released by exchange. Captain Crowell’s exploits are worth
telling, for they typify the sort of experiences that half the Yankee
sailors met with during this frenzied epoch in our maritime history.
The British Orders in Council, which declared any neutral vessel that
cleared from a French port lawful game for His Majesty’s navy, found
Crowell and his ship in the harbor of Marseilles. To get out into the
broad Atlantic through the bottle-neck of Gibraltar was ticklish work,
but doubtless the Dennis captain and his crew enjoyed it--all the more
so as they were successful in eluding the British frigates.

[Illustration: ELIJAH COBB]

But troubles at home were almost as great as dangers abroad. In April,
1812, when Madison’s Embargo was expected at any moment, Crowell was
loading at Boston for Lisbon. If the paralyzing decree should arrive
before he could clear, his voyage would be lost. Just before the blow
fell, therefore, Crowell, with only half a cargo, slipped out of Boston
with clearance papers coastwise for Eastport. He arrived there still
one jump ahead of the Embargo, dropped across to Campo Bello in British
waters, finished loading at his leisure, and set sail for Lisbon. While
he was there, war was declared, and on his return trip an English
cruiser made a prize of his vessel, and his voyage ended at St. Johns
instead of Boston.

Such misadventures were part and parcel of seafaring at this unsettled
period. Crowell’s adventures were duplicated by a score of others,
for profits were so great that Yankee sailors were determined to make
voyages whether or no. They set sail, Madison or no Madison, Embargo
or no Embargo. The adventures of Captain Rowland Crocker, of Falmouth,
another neutral trader, furnish a good case in point. To call him a
neutral trader is to do him scant justice, for in fact there were few
experiences that he did not meet sooner or later in the course of his
life. He was a whaleman, privateer, merchant captain, Liverpool packet
commander, and State Representative; a musket ball had gone in one side
of his body and out the other; he had shaken Napoleon by the hand; he
had been captured by the French, and rewarded by Lloyds’ for navigating
a wreck through a gale. The exploit last mentioned took place in 1807.
The ship was the Otis. She lay in the Downs ready to weigh anchor, with
a cargo worth £100,000 under her hatches. A sudden gale sprang up; the
anchors let go, and the vessel crashed into a frigate that was lying
close aboard her. She was badly shattered--so badly that the pilot and
a good many of the crew, believing her lost, took to the boats and went
ashore. Captain Crocker, with what was left of his crew, got the Otis
under way and, crippled as she was, worked her through the gale into
Dover. Lloyds’ did not exaggerate when they presented him with a silver
cup inscribed with the motto, ‘Forti et fideli nil difficile.’ Perhaps
the five hundred pounds that accompanied this mark of esteem was as
acceptable to Captain Crocker as the Latin dictum. It was the Cape’s
misfortune that this energetic citizen, like many others of her sons,
spent most of his life away from his native town.

[Illustration: ROWLAND R. CROCKER]

It is no wonder that the War of 1812, which clipped the wings of our
lusty young merchant marine just as it had learned to fly far and
fearlessly, was gall and wormwood to Cape-Codders. But they forgot
their resentment in the fresh activity that came with the signing of
the treaty of peace. To trace the courses that Dennis, Barnstable,
and Truro navigators pricked off between 1815 and 1850, would be to
draw a network over all the oceans of the globe. Apparently haphazard,
these voyages were in truth systematic and very rational, for though
the Yankee trader was as ready a gambler as any man, he never crossed
the sea on a fool’s errand. Out of the tangled lines of trade that
followed the war, there emerged as early as 1816 the glorious but
grueling routine of the Liverpool packets. These vessels were built
especially for trans-Atlantic work in all weathers--stout craft with
more staterooms for passengers than any ships had had before, ample
stowage room below decks, and lines that gave them as much speed as
could be safely combined with these prerequisites. Their captains were
confronted with a task that was new to seafaring men: they had to keep
the passengers happy and the line popular. One way to do this was by
making quick passages; another was by playing the genial host. There
were plenty of drivers to be had in every Atlantic seaport, but to find
a driver with the manners of a deep-sea Chesterfield was not so easy.
Any swaggering bully who was a good sailor would do to carry cargo. But
the commander of a Liverpool packet had to be able to move gracefully
among a ship’s company, leaving affability and serenity in his wake.
And let no one suppose that the nicest seamanship was not also required
of him. If an ordinary merchantman held on till a topsail was blown
from the bolt-ropes, nobody knew it except the owner. But if a Black
Ball packet lost a sail or sprung a spar, a horde of eager passengers
spread the glad tidings to wide-eyed folk on shore, who solemnly vowed
that they ‘would never book on a Black Baller, the captains were so
reckless!’ If, on the other hand, a cautious commander lengthened his
passage by shortening sail, the tongues of the passengers were equally
busy. None but the most expert and genteel were fit for the command
of an ocean packet, and they must be men of iron as well, for their
forecastles were infested with the wildest crews that ever sailed
under the flag of a civilized nation. The Liverpool ‘packet rat’ was
the incarnation of all the toughness and evil and malice that have
clustered throughout the ages about the reputation of sailors. True,
the captain no longer donned knuckle-dusters or swung belaying pins
himself; he had mates to do such work for him. But he had to be a
graduate of the belaying-pin school, for on him rested the ultimate
responsibility for the obedience of the crew. Only men of parts need
apply.

Such men--to name a few among many Cape-Codders--were John Collins, of
Truro, Rowland Crocker, of Falmouth, and Ira Bursley, of Barnstable.
From Yarmouth came Allen Knowles and the three Eldridge brothers, John,
Oliver, and Asa. None of these men rested content with the Liverpool
run. The packet service was only one step in the giant’s stride of
their careers.

Bursley was a veteran of more lines than one. He commanded everything
in the way of ocean-going packets, from the little Dover, built in 1827
for a short-lived Boston-Liverpool Line, to the Hottinger, of the New
York Swallowtail Line, a ship of twice the size, which he was driving
back and forth across the Western Ocean twenty years later. Crocker, as
has already been seen, figured in every branch of maritime activity,
from whaling to the New York-Liverpool trade in what a contemporary
newspaper calls ‘the floating palaces’ of the packet lines. He
retired after having crossed the Atlantic a hundred and sixty-four
times without the loss of a ship. Allen H. Knowles, who lived just
across the street from the Eldridges, was given the command of the
two-thousand-ton Chariot of Fame, one of Donald McKay’s creations,
built in 1853 for the Boston owner Enoch Train. Captain Knowles
received her as she left the stocks and took her on her maiden voyage
to Liverpool. She remained his vessel for about ten years, the first
two of which were spent in the packet trade, the rest as a general
merchantman.

One of Captain Knowles’s passages from Liverpool to Boston will give an
idea of what a commander might expect in winter. He sailed on January
11, 1854, with a cargo worth half a million dollars and a passenger
list of over eighty, most of them in the steerage. The first night out
he lost his jibboom in a collision. Ten days later, in mid-Atlantic,
the main topsail was blown from the bolt-ropes, and the main yard
broken. Knowles had hardly got the yard lowered and the vessel snug
when a sea came aboard which carried away four boats and a section of
the bulwarks and flooded the cabin. The gale increased until it blew
several furled sails out of their gaskets and raised a sea that carried
away the figurehead. By Herculean efforts the crew got a new yard
slung and new sails bent, but in spite of everything the Chariot made
not a mile of progress westward from January 22 to February 7. Again,
off Boston, a northwester carried off the last of her spare sails;
but Captain Knowles piloted her through a terrific snowstorm into
Provincetown, where he got his first night’s sleep for six weeks.

Late in the thirties, E. K. Collins, a nephew of John Collins, of
Truro, started the famous Dramatic Line of Liverpool packets. It is not
surprising that he gave the command of his flagship, the Roscius, to
his able and energetic Uncle John. Captain John showed himself worthy
of his vessel. It was during his years in her that he effected the
rescue of the fishing schooner Garnet, quite as dramatic as anything in
the career of the celebrated actor for whom his ship was named.

Collins later took command of the Shakespeare of the same line, and
Asa Eldridge received the Roscius, in which vessel he learned, as will
appear presently, all there was to know about trans-Atlantic work under
sail. His brother John was at the same time captain of the Liverpool,
with Oliver, the third brother of this illustrious family, serving with
him as mate. Thus had these men of the Cape--from Falmouth, Barnstable,
Yarmouth, and Truro--reached what was then the pinnacle of maritime
ambition, the command of crack Liverpool packets. They trod their
quarterdecks the lords of creation, taking back-wash from no man alive.
To be sure, they admitted Captain Nat Palmer, the young Stonington
sailor who was to become the dean of clipper-ship commanders, as an
equal, albeit his ship, the Siddons, was not the vessel that the
Roscius or the Shakespeare was. But this they did in recognition of
Palmer’s sheer greatness.

Mighty as they were, these Cape-Codders were to become yet mightier
before they died. They were still unsatisfied and kept looking ahead
for new worlds to conquer. They had long to wait, for the dawn of the
clipper-ship era was at hand. Space is lacking to discuss the evolution
of these wonderful vessels. Suffice it to say that they revolutionized
the naval architecture of two nations, ourselves and the British, and
became at once the envy and the despair of the other maritime countries
of the world. The bows of the clippers, instead of being the bluff,
apple-cheeked affairs of the earlier type, were sharp, tapering, and
concave, and cut deep into the waves instead of beating flat against
them. Then the flare of the hull at the fore-rigging lifted them over
the waves and prevented them from being flooded too often. The stems,
too, tapered gracefully and no longer squatted flat in the water. The
alterations in the design of the hull were hardly greater than the
changes in rigging and top-hamper. The masts of the clippers towered to
a height hitherto undreamed of, and spread one and in some cases two
more courses of sails. These sails fitted as sails had never fitted
before, with the result that the clippers, when it came to windward
work, sailed like yachts, and would lie closer to the wind than
anything of their size afloat. Supplied with such ships from the yards
of New York and Boston by such builders as Webb and Westervelt, Hall,
Curtis, and McKay, the American captains sailed forth in the fifties
and in a year or two had captured the commerce of the world.

The clippers were the most beautifully finished and expensive vessels
that had ever been built and were the pride of their owners’ hearts--a
pride nicely blended with anxiety when they considered the investment
that each ship represented. Handling these wild beauties was ticklish
business, requiring far more dexterity, nerve, and experience than
was needful for the old-style barrel-bottomed craft that bobbed along
comfortably under stumpy masts and seldom came to grief. Even the
stalwart packets were eclipsed by these glorious vessels. The owners
wanted the best men in the business for commanders, and they got them.
Hence the clipper-ship captains became the aristocrats of an already
aristocratic profession--the conquerors of the conquerors of the
world--and scores of Cape men strode proudly in their ranks.

There was Baker, of the Flying Dragon and Shooting Star; Burgess,
of the Whirlwind and Challenger; Kelly, of the Fleetwing; Sears, of
the Wild Hunter; Jenkins, of the Raven; Crowell, of the Robin Hood;
Sprague, of the Gravina; Dillingham, of the Snow Squall; Stevens,
of the Southern Cross; Bearse, of the Winged Arrow; Hallett, of the
Phantom; Baxter, of the Flying Scud; Hatch, of the Northern Light. The
list might be doubled and trebled, and every name, whether of ship or
master, would be of the first magnitude. And it must be emphasized
once more that the first magnitude in this case means not merely
first among Cape captains nor even among American masters. It means
of first magnitude in the world--men who commanded the finest ships
afloat--extreme clippers that could leave any other vessel of any other
type hull down in half a day.

Before going into particulars about such men as Sears or Dillingham or
Hatch, it will be interesting to follow a few of our friends of the
packets--like Oliver Eldridge, Asa, his brother, and Ira Bursley--as
they forsook the stormy Atlantic and drove their new commands, the
clippers, through the wild waters of Cape Horn and into the balmy
trades of the Pacific. Even before the full splendor of the era of
clipper ships arrived, these men were pacing the quarterdecks of the
early medium clippers, which ushered in the extremely sharp models of
the fifties. Oliver Eldridge turned his energies to the China trade,
and in 1844 was given the command of Russell and Company’s beautiful
clipper bark Coquette, built by Samuel Hall in East Boston. Captain
Eldridge took her from Boston to Canton in ninety-nine days. Four years
later he commanded Warren Delano’s new clipper ship Memnon on her
maiden voyage to China. Owners, it seems, had a habit of entrusting
their new vessels to Captain Eldridge, for in 1855 Daniel C. Bacon,
the retired shipmaster of Barnstable and Boston and President of
the American Navigation Club, invited him to take command of the
big clipper Titan, which had just taken the water from the yard of
Roosevelt and Joyce in New York. Clearly Captain Oliver had profited
from his experience as mate of the Liverpool under his brother, Captain
John.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN OLIVER ELDRIDGE]

[Illustration: CAPTAIN JOHN ELDRIDGE]

Meanwhile, Ira Bursley, having learned as much as he cared to learn
about the rigors of Atlantic packet lines, took command of the
Maine-built clipper Alert and tried his luck in the California trade.
She was a small vessel, and her owners, Crocker and Warren, realizing
that Bursley was too good for her, gave him in 1853 a new and larger
ship, the Archer. The fact that Captain Cressy, of the Flying Cloud,
later commanded the Archer is sufficient indication of her quality. She
was a fast sailer even for a clipper. Captain Bursley also commanded on
her first voyages the Snow Squall--an extremely sharp little clipper,
one of whose voyages will be mentioned anon, when she was captained by
another Cape-Codder.

The last graduate of the packets who claims attention as a clipper-ship
commander is Asa Eldridge--the most distinguished shipmaster that the
Cape ever produced. His career is a varied one. As has been said, he
commanded the Dramatic Liner Roscius for a time, and later (after a
vacation in 1853, during which he piloted Commodore Vanderbilt’s steam
yacht North Star in foreign waters), he returned to this country in
time to receive command of a new extreme clipper ship Red Jacket, one
of the four fastest sailing ships ever launched. She was designed by
Samuel Pook, of Boston, and built during the winter of 1853 by George
Thomas at Rockland, Maine. Her owners were Seacomb and Taylor, of
Boston. Sharp, lean, and rakish, the Red Jacket was a vessel worthy
of Captain Eldridge, and it must have been with deep satisfaction
that he stepped on board a real ship again after his profitable but
inconclusive sojourn with Vanderbilt’s toy steamer. He cleared from
New York on January 11, 1854, for Liverpool, and drove the Red Jacket
through rain, snow, and hail to a record passage of thirteen days and
one hour from dock to dock. No ship has ever duplicated this run
of Captain Eldridge’s, but, as though this were not enough, he had
logged four hundred and thirteen miles on one day of the passage, a
distance which has been surpassed by only three other sailing vessels
in maritime history, the Lightning, the James Baines, and the Donald
McKay.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN ASA ELDRIDGE]

If the thirteen days during which the Red Jacket was crossing the
Atlantic are epoch-making in the history of American sail, it may
easily be imagined of what importance they are in the maritime annals
of the Cape. They place Captain Eldridge at the very summit of his
profession and put his name among the world’s half-dozen greatest
shipmasters.

Another distinguished commander of this epoch was James S. Dillingham,
Jr., of Brewster. At the time of the Civil War he was Captain of the
clipper Snow Squall, leaving Penang for New York. He made good time
across the Indian Ocean, and, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, was on
his way across the Atlantic when he sighted an American auxiliary
bark, the Tuskaloosa, which sailed up to windward and partly blanketed
him. The vessels lay so close that no speaking trumpet was necessary,
and the captain of the Tuskaloosa called out, ‘What ship is that?’
Dillingham replied, ‘Ship Snow Squall, Penang to New York; what ship
is that?’ ‘Heave to,’ replied the other, ‘and I will send some one on
board to tell you.’ With that a row of portholes in the stranger’s side
flew open, presenting a line of cannon; at the same moment the Stars
and Stripes was lowered and the Confederate flag run up in its place.

Captain Dillingham did some quick thinking. Without a moment’s
hesitation he sang out, ‘Aye, aye!’ but, instead of heaving to, he
worked his ship far enough ahead of the Confederate to catch some wind
in his forward sails; and, before the Tuskaloosa knew what was going
on, the Snow Squall had squared away and was off at a speed worthy
of her name and commander. Thanks to a rolling sea, the shots that
followed her from the rebel went wild, and every minute increased the
distance between the two vessels. The Tuskaloosa hung on till dark,
firing all the time, but finally had to abandon the chase. The Snow
Squall brought her cargo safe into New York Harbor.

It was for qualities like these that owners entrusted their finest
ships to Cape-Codders; and such incidents, of themselves of no great
historical importance, become significant for what they reveal of
Cape character: a rare mixture of good judgment and daring, with
experience and skill enough to carry through an apparently reckless
maneuver successfully. It must be remembered, however, that seafaring
was not all thrills and adventures, even in clipper ships. Much of it
was steady, hard, and discouraging work--sometimes slatting about in
the doldrums, sometimes trying for a week to get westward of the Horn
when it blew so hard that vessels could not carry sail enough to make
anything to windward. There is truth in the remark that Captain Joshua
Sears, of East Dennis, made toward the end of his life to a young man
who was just beginning his career at sea. ‘Well, my boy,’ he said, ‘I
am getting through, and you are just starting in. You have chosen a
tough life, but it will make a man of you.’ It certainly had made a man
of Captain Sears, for he had risen to the command of the Wild Hunter, a
beautiful little clipper that proved to be a gold mine for her owners.
This vessel, it will be remembered, was one of those built by the
Shivericks at East Dennis.

Another quality which helped to make clipper captains remarkable, was
loyalty to their owners--a loyalty that induced them to run grave
personal risk, and to perform with their own hands, if necessary, work
that even the hardy breed of stevedores or wreckers refused to tackle.
An anecdote regarding Captain Daniel Bacon will illustrate this point.
He left the sea before the era of clippers began, but was among the
first Boston merchants to become their owners when he ordered the
famous clipper ship Game Cock to be built for him by Samuel Hall, of
East Boston. One of the Captain’s vessels came ashore on Nantasket
Beach in a winter gale. Her hull was still sound enough to keep her
cargo dry if it was unloaded quickly. Bacon tried in vain to find some
one who would undertake the job. It promised to be too cold and wet a
business. So he hired an ox-team and went to the beach himself, where
he spent the day driving in and out of the water to unload the stranded
vessel. The underwriters presented him with the traditional silver tea
service.

But it will never do to conclude this account of the clippers and their
captains on any such low note as is suggested by a hull stranded on
Nantasket Beach. The proper tune is that which the brave westerlies
sing through taut rigging, or the music of the surge and swish of the
sea as it leaps along a ship’s topsides in the roaring forties. Such
was the song in the ears of Captain Freeman Hatch, of Eastham, during
his famous voyage from San Francisco to Boston in the Northern Light
in 1852. His ship was designed by the celebrated Samuel Pook--the same
who had drawn the lines of Captain Eldridge’s Red Jacket--and she was
built by the Briggs Brothers in South Boston. Her figurehead was a
full-length angel bearing aloft ‘a torch with a golden flame.’ Captain
Hatch made the voyage in seventy-six days, a record which stands to
this day. His epitaph, which may still be read in the Eastham burying
ground, is as follows:

Freeman Hatch, 1820-1889

He became famous making the astonishing passage in the clipper ship
Northern Light from San Francisco in 76 days 6 hours--an achievement
won by no mortal before or since.

In fairness to the memory of Captain Hatch, let the reader reflect that
it was the Captain who made the passage and his relatives who composed
the epitaph.

It may be asked why the name of Captain John Collins has not been
mentioned in connection with the clippers. The reason is not that he
lost interest in maritime affairs, but that, inspired by his brilliant
nephew, Edward K. Collins, of New York, he was a whole generation ahead
of his time. Foreseeing that the days of sail were numbered, he jumped
clear over the greatest of our salt-water epochs and landed among the
paddle-wheels and side-lever engines of the early days of steam. Edward
Collins was a man of parts and imagination. Realizing before most
Americans that sailing packets would soon be out of date, he turned his
energies toward the organization of a line of passenger steamers that
should eclipse the plodding Cunarders. One of his first moves was to
make his uncle, Captain John, a partner, and these two were the guiding
spirits of the enterprise. In 1847 they secured from the Government
the contract to carry the mails for $385,000 a year. Thus encouraged,
they proceeded to lay the keels for a fleet of steamers which were to
the Cunarders what the McKay clippers were to the sailing packets. They
were named appropriately for the oceans of the world, The Arctic,
Atlantic, Baltic, and Pacific. Captain Asa Eldridge, whose performance
in the Red Jacket was a byword in shipping circles, accepted the
Collinses’ invitation to command the Pacific, and all went well until
1855. Then came a series of disasters. The Arctic was rammed in a fog
by a Frenchman off Cape Race and went to the bottom in a desperate
attempt to reach the Newfoundland shore. Next year the Pacific and
Captain Asa Eldridge met an unknown fate somewhere in the North
Atlantic. By this tragedy the Company lost a fine ship and the Nation
one of its greatest shipmasters. With half their fleet destroyed,
the Collinses set to work to rebuild. But a more insidious blow was
to come. Economic readjustments led Congress to withdraw part of the
mail subsidy that had been keeping the line afloat. This was the thin
edge of the wedge which in the course of the next two years was driven
steadily into the seafaring interests of the country until by 1858, it
struck the heart. The Collins Line went out of business, leaving Great
Britain supreme in the Atlantic.

The Collinses were not the only shipowners who, in the late fifties,
began to realize uneasily that economic changes were taking place.
The successful opposition of British steam, adverse legislation in
Congress, the opening up of the West and the accompanying railway
expansion that drew capital into a new field where there was no foreign
competition--all played their part in driving the American flag from
the sea. Our great merchant marine was doomed before the sixties, and
would have vanished just as completely, though perhaps not so quickly,
if there had never been a Civil War, a Semmes, or an Alabama.

The change crept slowly over the water-front like a long twilight.
Merchants and shipmasters alike were at first not quite aware that
their day was done. Cape men in particular were incredulous and sailed
away as bravely as ever through the lengthening shadows into the
sunset. Captain Benjamin P. Howes, one of Dennis’s many shipmasters,
was in command of Baker and Morrill’s fine clipper Southern Cross when
she was burned by the Florida in 1863. After the war he decided to try
his luck in a smaller vessel. Accordingly, he had the little clipper
brig Lubra built for him and sailed off with his wife to become a
South Sea trader. The Lubra was his last command. She was captured by
Chinese pirates in 1866, and Captain Howes was murdered in his own
cabin.

Another Cape man, Captain Edmund Burke, of Truro, commanded the bark
Azor most of the time from 1854, when she was built, until 1870, when
she was sold. This vessel, the most beautiful of Charles Dabney’s
Azores packets, sailed back and forth between Boston and the Western
Islands with great regularity, carrying passengers, oranges, and
wine. A large part of her popularity was owing to Captain Burke, for
he was always ready either to crack a joke or to heave to and rescue
passengers from a vessel in distress, as he did those of the sinking
ship Gratitude in 1865. The maneuver meant trans-shipping three hundred
and twenty people in a high sea; to make room for them, Captain Burke
threw overboard a large part of his cargo of oranges.

In 1869, when Donald McKay launched the Glory of the Seas, the last of
his great fleet of clippers, Cape men were on hand again to command
her. Josiah Knowles, of Eastham, was her first captain; Elisha F.
Sears, of Brewster, had her for a time; but another Brewster man,
Captain Joshua Freeman, Jr., has the record of eighteen years as
her commander. As long as there was a living in it, Cape-Codders
followed the sea. Scores of them might be mentioned as commanders of
the capacious barks and occasional ships that sailed to Calcutta or
Hongkong in the lean decades between 1870 and 1890. Captain Frank
Hinckley, of the ships Star of Peace and Leading Wind, and Captain
Ansel Lothrop, of the Pilgrim, Conqueror, and Agenor, were both
Barnstable men. So were John Turner Hall, of the ship Abelino, and
Joseph Bursley, of the Victory. Not long ago Captain Howard Allen, who
still lives in Hyannis, made six consecutive voyages round the world
in his ship the Importer. Even as late as 1897, during the rush to
the Klondike, his fellow townsman, Captain Ezekiel C. Baker, took the
steamer City of Columbia from New York to the Yukon gold fields. But
it is idle to continue; one is overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers.
Captain Lothrop, who died in 1927, recently compiled a list of the
captains whom he could remember from Barnstable village alone. This
list, which is in the author’s possession, contains sixty-three names,
including both deep-water voyagers and coasters. Similar statistics
could undoubtedly be procured from half a dozen other towns on the
Cape. Enough surely has been said to show that, as long as it could be
made to pay, Cape men continued the losing battle against British steam
and sail.

Each year brought them fewer and lighter cargoes. The wealth of
the West was making itself felt more and more in Congress, and the
Westerner had no interest beyond the fences that bounded his own farm.
We ceased to be a maritime nation, and one by one the Cape commanders
furled their sails and squared their yards for the last time, left
their vessels to the mercy of the ship-breaker, and came home to live.
Here, though retired, their influence was almost as beneficial to the
Cape as their remoter activities had been. One such man could make
village affairs hum, and there used to be not one but scores in most of
the Cape towns. Town meetings in those days were handled in quarterdeck
style. Narrow-mindedness found barren soil in a district where two
houses out of every three belonged to men who knew half the seaports
of the world and had lived ashore for months at a time in foreign
countries. They had gained a perspective that measured matters against
far horizons, and they kept the Cape mentally alert as long as they
lived. When they died, they bequeathed it a salty tradition that has
not yet quite lost its savor.

CHAPTER XIII

THE CIVIL WAR

The most prosperous and active years in the history of the Cape--those
from the thirties to the fifties--were not occupied exclusively
with building bridges and dikes, erecting factories and salt works,
drying codfish, and greeting deep-water shipmasters on their return
from the antipodes. Such activities were marred by a less desirable
manifestation of energy--schism in the churches. Not that schism was
anything new or particularly undesirable. Usually it is an indication
that progress is in the offing. Furthermore, this particular rift in
the ranks of the church was brought about by a sufficiently righteous
motive on the part of those who left the fold. They refused to support
any longer a church which preached Christianity on the one hand and on
the other received into membership men who tolerated slavery. Those
who broke away were called ‘Come-Outers’ (or ‘Comers Out’), a name
which was not restricted to these groups of Abolitionists, but had been
given pretty generally to all who for any reason had seceded from an
established church.

The Come-Outers were not essentially riotous or seditious people. They
merely had the courage of their convictions and refused to remain loyal
to a church whose tenets they believed were unchristian. The two camps
would doubtless have rubbed along with no more friction than is usual
between dissenting organizations, if it had not been for agitators from
elsewhere. Such agitators there were, of course, all over New England,
and occasionally a band of them invaded the Cape. They did not come
often, for the Cape was out of their way; but when they did arrive,
trouble was sure to follow.

The most sensational instance of such a visit occurred in Harwich in
1848. A report had been spread in anti-slavery circles in Boston that
a Harwich coasting captain, whose name is not recorded, had taken one
hundred dollars from a Negro in Norfolk to bring him and a friend North
on his schooner, and had then seized him and had him advertised as a
runaway slave. Such indignation was aroused by this outrage that a
group of distinguished Boston Abolitionists visited Harwich and held an
indignation meeting. Among them were Parker Pillsbury, Stephen Foster,
and Lucy Stone. No building in Harwich, or for that matter on the Cape,
was big enough to hold the crowd that assembled; men and women poured
in from the neighboring towns until, according to one estimate, three
thousand had gathered in the grove where the convention was held.

The first speaker was Parker Pillsbury--a young enthusiast whose
emotions were stronger than his judgment. His share in the programme
was to state the case against the captain of the schooner, without
mentioning his name. Writing of the event thirty-three years later,
when time and age, if not the Civil War itself, should have somewhat
calmed his ardor, Pillsbury calls the Captain’s deed one ‘that no
Modoc nor Apache Indian under Heaven would ever have done! In cold,
unprovoked blood--never!’ Such ringing phrases written in his old age
give some notion of what Pillsbury’s oratorical style must have been
in his youth. It is no wonder that his speech started a tumult which
subsided only when the Captain himself took the platform and said
that a friend had just told him that he had been accused of stealing.
Pillsbury hedged, declaring that he had named no names and had not used
the word ‘steal.’ But the Captain demanded a hearing, and the crowd
became silent.

The Captain’s speech was a striking example of the perfectly natural
moral blindness that afflicted so many otherwise estimable and pious
citizens when they looked at slavery or were mixed up in the slave
trade. The phenomenon has not disappeared with the abolition of this
particular business: most men are still able to close the shutter
that blots from the mental vision a view of the suffering that their
profitable ruthlessness creates, and if they keep the shutter closed
long enough, they may even forget that there is any suffering and so
finally become unaware of any wrongdoing. Something of the sort, at
all events, had taken place in the soul of the Harwich Captain. He
seems to have pigeonholed his religion even more successfully than
most people do nowadays. He calmly told the story from his own point
of view, contradicting nothing that Pillsbury had accused him of,
and on concluding, took a seat on the platform. One of Pillsbury’s
accusations, which the Captain admitted, was that he was a member in
good standing of the Baptist Church. Taking this admission as his
text, the next speaker, Stephen Foster, launched forth on an invective
that evoked from Pillsbury the admiring comment that he seemed to be
‘Father of the seven thunders of Patmos.’ There is little doubt that
the tribute is deserved, for his speech provoked such a riot that
Pillsbury says, ‘I have seen many mobs and riots in my more than forty
years of humble service in the cause of Freedom and Humanity. But I
never encountered one more desperate in determination, nor fiendish in
spirit, than was that in Harwich, in the year 1848.’

It started when some of the Captain’s friends in the crowd stormed
round the platform, calling on him to pitch Foster down to them; but
the Captain, who had not commanded vessels in vain, kept calm and
told the rioters that he had no need of their interference. Shortly
afterwards he left the scene. Foster went on with his speech, declaring
that any church which admitted such men as members was no less than
the ‘bulwark of American Slavery.’ This was too much for the Harwich
Baptists. One of them, ‘a member of the Orthodox Church, who had just
come from his meeting (and it was said from the Sacrament) leaped like
a lion on to the platform. His eyes flashed fury if not fire; his teeth
and fists were clenched, and he seemed a spirit from the pit, who might
have been commissioned to lead its myrmidons in a deadly fray for such
a faith and such a church as his.... His first note was a shriek;
“It’s a lie; what you say is a lie; a damned lie! and I’ll defend the
church!”’

He had plenty of support. A group of fanatics jumped to the platform,
seized Pillsbury and hurled him to the ground with kicks and blows.
Two Harwich Abolitionists, Captain Chase and Captain Smith, who had
been seated near him, sprang to his defense and were knocked senseless.
Another speaker, William Wells Brown, was thrown over the back of the
platform, and Foster, the blasts of whose eloquence had kicked up
this ugly sea, was rescued from his assailants only after his ‘Sunday
frock coat had been rent in twain from bottom to top, and his body
considerably battered and bruised.’

Thus ended a lurid Anti-Slavery Convention. Certain inferences may be
drawn from the proceedings.

Seafaring is a broad school where men see customs that are not their
own and learn tolerance. Not all Cape shipmasters approved of slavery
(Sandwich and Barnstable had anti-slavery societies as early as 1837),
but they did approve of minding their own business and letting the
slave-owner mind his. There is much to censure in this attitude; it
is not one that hastens the millennium; it seems even to suggest that
the millennium had arrived and had taken different forms in different
places: slaves for the Virginia planter; smart crews for the New
England shipmaster. And this view--too tolerant to commend itself in
the High Court of Progress--may account not only for the placidity of
many Cape Abolitionists, but also for the stubborn stand-patters in
the church, who, with an inconsistency almost too perfect for human
beings to have achieved, regarded the Come Outers as traitors and the
Southerners as within their rights.

Some of the seafaring Abolitionists adopted other measures to show
their convictions, and used their vessels to bring slaves North to
safety. Among these kind-hearted smugglers was George Lovell, of
Osterville, who died in 1861. He was a wealthy and very influential
South Side shipowner with strong anti-slavery convictions. It was
quite natural, therefore, that he should slip a runaway on board one
of his vessels in Norfolk or Savannah now and then, and land him some
dark night on the free soil of Cape Cod. The slaves made their way
across the Cape, via a pretty well-established ‘underground railroad,’
to Barnstable, where they were always welcome guests at the houses
of Ezekiel Thacher and Alvin Howes. Yet the atmosphere of these New
England homes seems not always to have proved congenial to the Negroes;
for they frequently sought their own level in some hang-out in the
woods on Mary Dunn’s road, where rum and a less rarefied environment
put them more at their ease.

So matters stood when the opening shot at Fort Sumter cleared the
air for all Cape-Codders. Faced by a common enemy, Come Outer and
stand-patter alike forgot their differences and joined forces for the
coming struggle. The war found greater favor on the Cape than any war
had found before. It has been shown with what difficulty men were
drafted for Canada to fight the French and Indians. The Revolution
revealed Tories in almost every town. The War of 1812 found the Cape
hot and rebellious toward the Administration. But when, in 1861,
President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers, the Cape
responded with an enthusiasm that, coming from a maritime community,
was surprising. War meant that long-voyage trading could be carried on
only at great risk; that whalemen stood an excellent chance of being
captured on their way home from the Pacific, and that fishermen would
find their old markets closed.

Early in the war, R. B. Forbes, that saltiest of Bostonians, found
leisure, while patrolling Cape Cod Bay and the North Shore in his
four launches, to comment on the effect the war was having on Cape
fishermen. He writes:

BARNSTABLE BAY, _July 8, 1861_

I have visited Salem, Beverly, Gloucester, Provincetown,
Barnstable.... In all these ports and many others there are hundreds
of vessels laying idle and thousands of men, second to none in
loyalty, second to none in experience of our Southern Coast, and
second to none in all the elements which constitute the accomplished
seaman--excepting only a want of knowledge of the art of war....
Their fish markets are cut off, and the stock of last season is on
hand to a considerable amount, unsold and unsaleable; ... At this
moment I have in view from my Yacht a hundred sail, more or less, in
Provincetown, Wellfleet and Truro laid up for want of work to do.

Confronted with the prospect of such hard times as Captain Forbes
describes, the Cape yet went willingly to war. Sandwich led the way,
and on May 8, 1861--about three weeks after Lincoln first called for
volunteers--an enthusiastic company that gave itself the name of the
Sandwich Guards marched to Boston under the command of Captain Charles
Chipman. This organization was the fourth volunteer company in the
State to report for service. It was immediately sent to Fortress Monroe
and later took part in a number of engagements, including the battles
of Antietam and Fredericksburg. The other towns responded valiantly,
in almost every case exceeding their quota of men. Provincetown
contributed $45,000 and sent two hundred and fifty men, fifty-seven
over her quota. Barnstable raised $58,000 and exceeded her quota of
men by thirty-five, sending two hundred and seventy-two in all. The
prosperity of Harwich is shown by her three hundred and forty-one
enlistments and $54,000. The total number of soldiers from the Cape
was approximately twenty-five hundred, and her contribution in money
amounted to about half a million, $90,000 of which was subsequently
refunded.

The Cape’s most distinguished army officer was Major Joseph E. Hamblin.
He was born in Yarmouth, where he spent his youth; then he moved to
Boston, and at the outbreak of the war he was in business in New
York. Beginning as Adjutant of the Fifth New York Volunteers, he was
within two years promoted to the ranks of Major, Lieutenant-Colonel,
and Colonel. He took part in the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg,
Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, not to mention half a dozen minor
engagements. As Colonel at the battle of Cedar Creek, though he had
received two wounds early in the fight, he held on and was instrumental
in turning apparent defeat into victory. After this engagement, Colonel
Hamblin, on Sheridan’s recommendation, was promoted to the rank of
Brigadier-General, and for brilliant service at Sailor’s Creek, he was
brevetted Major-General. He died in 1870 and lies in the family tomb in
Yarmouthport.

The sea was, of course, the most appropriate theater for Cape
activities during the war, and the only reason why more local names are
not found in the naval records is that a large part of the country’s
merchant marine was still dodging the Confederates at sea--with
Cape-Codders on the quarterdecks. But, even so, a good many Cape men
enlisted in the navy. Some of them, indeed, were steered into it. As
early as May, 1862, Charles F. Swift offered a set of resolutions in a
Yarmouth town meeting to the effect that, since the enemy had showed
signs of sending out ‘piratical crafts’ to prey upon the commerce of
the country, it was especially proper for the citizens of Yarmouth,
whose pursuits and training were largely maritime, to ‘lend cheerful
aid in bringing these pests of the ocean to condign punishment.’ These
resolutions were not without effect, for fifteen Yarmouth men served
their country as officers in the navy, and three acted as pilots in
Southern waters.

The effect that the war had on the Cape was to hasten the decline which
had already almost imperceptibly begun. No community that depends on
the sea for its prosperity can flourish long after it is driven from
the sea, and, bit by bit, changing economic conditions were forcing
Cape-Codders ashore. Whaling had been virtually abandoned except at
Provincetown; fishermen had to begin again with new schooners or else
give up entirely; and now the props were being knocked out from under
the last and proudest business of Cape men--the merchant marine.
No wonder contemporary writers believed the war to be the cause of
all their evils. There was probably not a man on the Cape who did
not mistakenly curse Jeff Davis as the cause of the hard times--and
undeniably the circumstantial evidence against him was strong.
Before the war, business had been good; even in the late fifties
most shipmasters had had enough to do. Then four years of war, when
cargo-carrying was exciting work; and after the war, bad times indeed.
The war stood squarely between the good times and the bad; so the war
got the blame.

No bright spot appeared, even on the distant horizon; more and more
capital kept heading westward; less and less toward the sea and the
ships. The inevitable came. Young Cape-Codders, realizing that the sea
had failed them, moved inland and became manufacturers or bankers.
Writing in 1884, Shebnah Rich says:

Some of the Cape towns have been reduced more than half, Truro
among the number.... I have counted fourteen houses in a little
neighborhood nestled prettily enough for an artist’s pencil. For
forty years not a house had been added or removed.... The next turn
of the road opened another picture, where I counted a dozen houses,
and in imagination, a dozen more, that had been moved away within as
many years. The population of Truro ... in 1860 was 1883 ... in 1880
less than 1000. Over one hundred families from Truro now reside in
Somerville.

What a falling off was there! The fate of Truro is no solitary
instance. In the thirty years that followed the war, the population of
the whole Cape shrank from 36,000 to 27,000. It has dropped another
thousand since, but the damage was done with the first exodus. The Cape
has by this time grown used to commercial insignificance. If there
had never been a Civil War, this resignation might not yet have been
achieved. But the same end would have been reached ultimately and from
exactly the same causes.

CHAPTER XIV

THE CHURCH

The Pilgrims brought with them to Plymouth a faith that had already
removed mountains. It supported the Scrooby band through the troublous
days of their persecution in England; it pointed out for them the way
to Holland and freedom; it fortified them against the dishonesty of the
Merchant Adventurers; walked the waters of the Atlantic by their side,
and remained their only comfort through that first terrible winter in
the little clearing in the Plymouth woods. Our own age, that vaunts its
toleration, can know nothing of such faith as that. Whatever we may say
of the Pilgrims’ too rigid righteousness, whatever we may think of their
theology, we must remember that their righteousness and their theology
were real, hammered out at the forge of suffering and sacrifice. If
their form was not graceful and the marks of the hammer were still
upon them, yet were they as near to Christ as the polished spirals of
our own attenuated doctrines. We shall criticize the Pilgrims and some
phases of their religion in the following pages, but we shall do so on
our knees.

Persecution had united the Pilgrims long before they left England.
Certain independent spirits had begun in the first half-dozen years of
the seventeenth century to take strong exception to the ritual of the
Church of England. They saw, to quote Bradford, ‘how not only these
base and beggarly ceremonies were unlawful; but also that the lordly
and tyranous power of the prelates ought not to be submitted unto.’
They consequently withdrew from the Established Church and by degrees,
joining with other malcontents whose views were similar to their own,
they formed themselves, in 1606, into a new Church at Scrooby and held
services in the houses of one or another of their members. Their pastor
was Mr. Richard Clifton, and his assistant was Mr. John Robinson. In
the course of their wanderings from England to Amsterdam and from
Amsterdam to Leyden, Clifton vanished, and Robinson was in charge.

Robinson was one of the sanest progressives in ecclesiastical history.
Convinced though he was that his church was an improvement over the
Episcopal Church, he did not for a moment believe that it was the last
word in organized religion. ‘I profess myself,’ he writes, ‘always one
of them who still desire to learn further what the good will of God
is.’ Though he believed in the infallibility of the Scriptures, he did
not believe in the infallibility of man’s interpretation of them. ‘It
is not possible,’ says he, ‘the Christian world should come so lately
out of such thick Antichristian darknesse, and that full perfection
of knowledge should break forth at once.’ His quarrel was not with
the doctrine of the Church of England, but with its government by the
Bishops; and for this government he substituted an almost perfect
democracy. His church was ruled by Elders, chosen by the congregation
and authorized to serve only with the consent of the brethren, ‘Who,’
he says, ‘ought not in contempt to be called the laity, but to be
treated as men and brethren in Christ, not as slaves or minors.’

Such was the doctrine which the founders of the Congregational Church
in New England brought with them when they came. How far they succeeded
in following it will appear anon. ‘We must apply ourselves to God’s
present dealing, not to his wonted dealing,’ was a maxim which they
knew to be true in theory and which they did their best to put in
practice. If Robinson had been able to go with them to Plymouth,
their best would have been a good deal better. But he died in Leyden,
thwarted in his greatest desire, which was to tend his flock in their
new pastures. Their Covenant was couched in general terms, and so
sounds broader than it really was:

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in obedience to his holy
will and divine ordinances, we, being by the most wise and good
providence of God brought together in this place, and desirous to
unite ourselves into one congregation or church under the Lord Jesus
our Head, that it may be in such sort as becometh all those whom he
hath redeemed and sanctified to himself, we do hereby solemnly and
religiously, as in his most holy presence, vouch the Lord Jehovah the
only true God to be our God and the God of ours, and do promise and
bind ourselves to walk in all our ways according to the rule of the
Gospel, and in all sincere conformity to his holy ordinances, and in
mutual love to and watchfulness over one another, depending wholly
and only upon the Lord our God to enable us by his Grace hereunto.

This Constitution was framed by men who, unlike Robinson, were
convinced that they had found the one true faith and so were quick
to resent any deviation from it. When settlements began to appear at
Sandwich, Yarmouth, and Barnstable, the Court stipulated that each new
group should have an _Orthodox_ minister, or should be near enough to
a town that had one, to go to church on Sunday. If the preaching was
in any way irregular--‘weak and unsafe’ were the stock adjectives--the
minister’s record was examined, his doctrines scrutinized, and if he
got off with a warning, he was lucky. What Artemus Ward says of the
Puritans is, unfortunately, about as true of the Plymouth men: ‘I
believe we are descended from the Puritans,’ he writes, ‘who nobly fled
from a land of despitism to a land of freedim, where they could not
only enjoy their own religion, but prevent everybody else from enjoying
_his_.’

One minister who was broader than most in his doctrine and who did as
much for religion and civilization on the Cape as any man has ever
done, was John Lothrop, who came from Scituate with his flock and
settled in Barnstable in 1639. Mr. Lothrop was a marked man even before
he came to Scituate. The record of his trial in 1632 for holding a
conventicle in the house of a brewer’s clerk in Blackfriars, shows
clearly enough what the Bishops thought of Congregationalist morals.
The custom at such trials was to hurl three or four questions at the
defendant before giving him a chance to answer. Lothrop was asked by
what authority he preached at the conventicle, and at the same time
‘How manie woemen sate crosse legged upon the bedd, whilest you sate
on one side and preached and prayed most devoutlie?’ (This from the
Bishop of London.) Lothrop replied, ‘I keepe noe such evill companie,
they were not such woemen.’ Thereupon the Bishop of London and the
Archbishop of Canterbury demanded in chorus, ‘Are you a minister?’ and
the Bishop of Saint David’s asked, ‘Were you not Dr. King, the Bishop
of London’s, Sizer in Oxford? I take it you were; and you shew your
thankfullness by this.’ Lothrop answered that he was a Minister. ‘How
and by whom qualified?’ asked the Bishop of London; ‘Where are your
orders?’ ‘I am a Minister of the gospell of Christ,’ replied Lothrop;
‘and the Lord hath qualified me.’ He then refused the oath and was sent
back to prison.

Like Robinson, Lothrop was a Congregationalist of the wisest sort.
He even admitted to Christian fellowship the persecuted Anabaptists,
who not only in England but in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as
well, knew the meaning of prison and stocks and banishment. Their
method of immersion, to be sure, Lothrop regarded as unnecessarily
thorough--‘Whole rivers,’ he writes, ‘show not forth Christ’s
suffering, pouring him out like water, besprinkling all his raiment.’
But if the Anabaptists preferred extensive immersion, they were welcome
to their belief and to fellowship in his Church. Lothrop took no stock
in creeds or particularized confessions of faith, for they seemed
to him narrow. He substituted the whole Bible for them, and gladly
admitted to membership in his church any one who professed faith in God
and promised to do his best to keep the Ten Commandments. Though his
writings show him to be a student of theology, and though this subject
was to him one of great intellectual interest, he wisely realized that
to fill sermons with it was to put congregations to sleep; so he chose
his texts with a view to the immediate temporal and spiritual needs of
his flock, and read theology at his own fireside.

If more men of Lothrop’s caliber had been ministers on the Cape, the
ugly period of Quaker persecution would have worn a fairer face. Though
he died before the Quaker troubles began, yet it was in great measure
owing to his tolerant teachings that his own town of Barnstable escaped
almost untouched by the tar brush that so thoroughly bespattered the
neighboring town of Sandwich. Sandwich, in fact, was the Friends’
Headquarters and the scene of most of the trouble. In 1658, eighteen
families there belonged to the new sect. Some said, indeed, that almost
the whole town had turned Quaker. One reason why the authorities dealt
so harshly with Quakers was that this sect was the first to rebel
against the standing order of worship. By the middle of the seventeenth
century they had established themselves in Sandwich and were enjoying
persecution. The following item from the Aspinwall Papers under the
date of 1659 is of interest:

I. I. and W. Leddra went ... to a place called Sandwich where there
are many friends, who suffer much in the spoiling of their goods;
after that they had been there some time, they were taken prisoners
at A Towne called Plymouth. Dearly Beloved C. Holder ... is passed
towards Sandwitch againe, as I have been told, where he had fine
service among friends since I. I. and W. L. were Imprisoned.

But the fine service referred to was not without unpleasant
interruptions, for on June 23, 1658, Christopher Holder and John
Copeland, the first Quaker ministers on the Cape, were arrested
on their way to Sandwich, and a little later were sent out of the
jurisdiction.

The authorities sometimes tried other tactics before resorting to
pains and penalties. In 1659, they made an attempt--apparently sincere
but comically ineffectual--to bring the erring brethren back to the
Orthodox fold. John Smith, of Barnstable, together with Isaac Robinson
of Falmouth, and two Plymouth men, was permitted to attend Quaker
meetings with a view to persuading the Friends to abandon their ways.
So far from succeeding, the experiment resulted in the conversion of
both Robinson and Smith, and three years later Smith was one of a
group that broke away from the Barnstable church and formed a Quaker
meeting of their own. A joint council of clergy and laymen was called
to recommend what measures should be taken in this alarming state of
affairs. Their verdict was sufficiently explicit and harsh enough to
suit the most vindictive. The gist of it was that other churches might
not hold communion with the Quakers, nor the Quakers among themselves.

But neither excommunication nor the disfranchisement that went with
it disturbed the Quakers in the least, for they believed that their
own consciences were better guides than the decrees of orthodoxy.
The authorities, however, did not stop with decrees. They, too, had
consciences which drove them to carry on vigorously the war that they
had declared. When the Quakers persisted in absenting themselves from
church and holding meetings of their own, they were fined. Since they
usually had not money enough to pay the fine, their goods were seized,
and this, in frontier settlements, where axes and kettles were scarce
and horses and cattle indispensable, was hardship, indeed. The marshal
whose duty it was thus to plunder the houses of recalcitrant Quakers,
had, one would suppose, an unpleasant task. But whether by accident
or design, a man had been selected as marshal of the three towns of
Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, who was as ruthless as the laws he
was called upon to enforce. George Barlow, ‘the Quaker Terror,’ had, so
far as can be discovered from contemporary authorities, not a single
good trait. A bully, a drunkard, and a hypocrite, he took malicious
pleasure in tyrannizing over a sect from whom he was in no danger of
suffering physical injury.

There is no need of reciting the long list of Barlow’s brutalities. He
had no imagination, and his technique never varied. It was his habit
to take not what would be most valuable to the authorities, but what
would be most poignantly missed by the Quaker families. The story of
his visit to the house of William Allen in Sandwich, which has become a
local tradition, will serve to illustrate his methods. Allen’s thrift
and industry had made him prosperous, but his subsequent adherence
to the Quaker doctrine made him poor. His house was a rendezvous for
Friends; he was therefore a marked man in the eye of the law, and
during 1658 and 1659, so much of his property was seized that nothing
remained but his house and land, and a single cow. He had himself been
driven from town and was, at the time of Barlow’s final visit, lying in
a Boston jail. His wife Priscilla and the children were alone in the
house. The marshal first took the cow, all the corn in the house, and
a bag of meal that had been given to Mrs. Allen by the neighbors. Not
content with this, he annexed the only copper kettle she had, and said
with a leer, ‘Now, Priscilla, how will thee cook for thy family and
friends? Thee has no kettle.’ ‘George,’ replied Mrs. Allen, ‘that God
who hears the young ravens when they cry will provide for them. I trust
in that God, and I verily believe the time will come when thy necessity
will be greater than mine.’ Barlow, so the story goes, lived to see
Priscilla’s prophecy fulfilled.

It is easy enough in this day of toleration, or indifference, in
matters of doctrine, to criticize the authorities who harried the
Society of Friends. Those dignitaries could see no sense in the reason
which the Quakers gave for refusing to contribute to the Orthodox
Church, though a sounder reason would be far to seek. They had Biblical
precedent, they said, for not giving support to those from whom they
had received no benefit. Most of the magistrates, it is true, from
Governor Hinckley down to the humblest office-holder, were blind
to the inconsistency of an attitude wherein they felt justified in
refusing to contribute to the Church of England, but refused to
acknowledge that the Quakers were justified in refusing to contribute
to the Congregational Church. One should reflect, however, before
censuring Hinckley and his assistants too severely, that they were
convinced that theirs was the one true church, and that any who refused
its doctrine, whether Episcopalians or Quakers, were heretics. The
casual citizen had little fault to find with Quakers. He found them,
except when expressing their views on the government, agreeable and
peace-loving neighbors, temperate, industrious, and helpful. He was
never shocked, as citizens in other parts of New England occasionally
were, by the spectacle of naked Quakers rushing through village
streets, to the glory of God and of the Society of Friends. So he was
far from sharing the Court’s views that all Quakers should either
recant or move away. More than once, in fact, Orthodox citizens, in
trying to act as buffers between the Quakers and the authorities, were
badly bruised between the rolling side of the Quaker ship and the
granite pier of the Government. In 1658, nine citizens of Sandwich
were disfranchised for being, or sympathizing with, Quakers. There
was danger even for a deputy who lifted up his voice in behalf of the
persecuted sect. James Cudworth, for a time a citizen of Barnstable and
deputy to the General Court, writes as follows in November, 1658:

Last election Mr. Hatherly, and my Self, left off the Bench, and
myself Discharged of my Captainship because I had entertained some of
the Quakers at my house (thereby that I might be better acquainted
with their Principles). I thought it better so to do, than with the
blind World, to Censure, Condem, Rail at, and Revile them, when they
neither saw their Persons, nor knew any of their Principles. But the
Quakers and my self cannot close in divers things; and so I signified
to the Court, I was no Quaker, but must bear my Testimony against
sundry things that they held, as I had Occasion and Opportunity:
But withal I told them, that as I was no Quaker, so I would be no
Persecutor.

Such was the attitude that cost Cudworth his captaincy and his position
as deputy.

It would, of course, be an error to suppose that all the punishments
the Quakers received were unjust. They were more than exasperating
in their ‘holier than thou’ attitude. Morton says truly that ‘they
placed their justification upon their patience and suffering for
their opinions, and on their righteous life and retired demurity, and
affected singularity both in word and gesture.’ Furthermore, contempt
of court was quite as often the cause of their being punished as their
‘corrupt and damnable doctrines.’ Governors and magistrates were to
them no more than farmers or tanners. Nor did the Quakers always
adhere to that ‘retired demurity’ of life on which they so much prided
themselves. Robert Harper undoubtedly got what he deserved when he was
whipped for ‘intolerably insolent conduct at Barnstable in railing
against Mr. Wally and at Sandwich against Mr. Wiswall.’ Even to-day
there would be a sensation if a high official were called in public
‘an impudent man and a pitiful governor.’ Yet that is the language
that a Sandwich Quaker used toward his chief magistrate; and he went
on to taunt the Governor, asking him ‘why he did not send him to gaol
since his back had long itched to be whipped.’ But the limit in abusive
language was reached when Humphrey Norton, addressing Governor Prince
before the assembled Court, said, ‘Thomas, thou liest; Prince, thou
art a malicious man.’ And again, ‘Thy clamorous tongue I regard no
more than the dust under my feet.’ ‘Thou art like a scolding woman.’
Imprisonment or whipping for such silly insolence was just enough.

By quick stages the persecution of Quakers began to cease. They
first appeared on the Cape about 1656. King Charles’s letter of
1661, enjoining all Colonial Governors to cease persecuting them,
was followed three years later by a commission which arrived in New
England in response to repeated Quaker appeals, to look the situation
over, try certain cases, and recommend toleration. The commissioners
were respectfully greeted by representatives from Plymouth; the King’s
men felt no real enthusiasm about the Quaker question; the Plymouth
men felt no interest in enlightening them. They talked pleasantly but
vaguely; the commissioners began to sigh for the fleshpots of London,
and soon sailed back home to the satisfaction of every one but the
Quakers. It cannot be asserted, therefore, that either the King’s
letter or his commission put an end to the persecutions, but they
undoubtedly gave the authorities pause. If the Quakers had the royal
ear, it might be as well to walk circumspectly. The death of Governor
Prince in 1673 and the succession of Josiah Winslow was another step
toward peace, for Winslow was far more tolerant than his predecessor.
From this date the policy of leniency grew, in spite of Hinckley’s
uncompromising attitude, until, in 1717, we find Yarmouth voting in
a town meeting that no Quaker need contribute to the support of the
Orthodox minister.

Why, it may be asked, was the Court and not the Church the power that
punished the Quakers? The answer is twofold. In the first place,
Quaker demonstrations were almost always breaches of the peace rather
than heresy, and as such they came under the jurisdiction of the
Court. In the second place, the worst penalty the Church could inflict
was excommunication, which was no punishment at all to the Friends.
Furthermore, for a long time there was almost no distinction between
the Church and the civil government--certainly nothing like the gulf
that separates them to-day. And this was natural, for the Bible in
the minds of the Pilgrims was an adequate source of government; they
consulted the Mosaic Law, it will be remembered, for the answers to
knotty questions in jurisprudence. More often than not new settlements
were made by churches, not by scattered individuals. It was Lothrop’s
church that came with him and settled Barnstable; it was half the
Plymouth church that made the town of Eastham. Membership in the church
was a requisite for civil distinction and even for the right to vote.
The personnel of the parish and of the civil government was identical.
It is not surprising, therefore, that for many years parish business
was transacted in town meetings. In 1703, when Falmouth decided to
dispense with the preaching of Mr. Shiverick, the action was taken in a
town meeting because every man at the meeting was necessarily a member
of the church. Another Falmouth minister, Mr. Isaiah Mann, died in
1789, and the town voted a supply of wood and rye for his widow. All
the early town records are full of ministers’ salaries and other church
affairs.

The Church, nevertheless, maintained disciplinary powers quite
distinct from the Court and held the right to excommunicate brethren
who refused to follow what it decreed even in regard to purely civil
controversies. Excommunication, though it held no terrors for the
Quakers, was a calamity to the Orthodox citizen, for with his loss of
membership in the Church came automatically the loss of his vote in
town and Colony elections. His only resource lay in his right to appeal
to a higher ecclesiastical council.

An interesting case of this sort of Church discipline--and one that
is the more striking because it occurred as late as 1868--was the
incident of Joseph Bodfish, of West Barnstable, and the pasture bars.
Mr. Bodfish, an elderly and respected member of the Congregational
Church, had for years, in getting out his winter’s wood, been in the
habit of crossing a piece of meadow that belonged to another member of
the family. At the owner’s death, the meadow went to Joseph’s cousin,
Sylvanus, also a member of the church. Sylvanus promptly warned Joseph
not to cross that way any more, and nailed bars across the gap in
the fence. Joseph consulted Judge Marston, who told him that he had
a clearly established right of way to the swamp and advised him to
pull down the bars himself if Sylvanus wouldn’t. Joseph--obviously a
lover of peace--asked one of the deacons to try his luck at persuading
Sylvanus to remove the bars. The deacon refused and recommended instead
that the matter be laid before the church. This Joseph did, but
unfortunately intimated that if the church did not decide in his favor,
he would take the dispute to Court, and rely on Judge Marston to see
him through.

The committee, not unnaturally, were angry at this veiled threat,
which reminded them of the unpleasant truth that the Court was a more
powerful body than they. So they refused to remonstrate with Sylvanus,
but said that they would examine the lot and see whether the wood could
not be taken out some other way. This they did and declared that Joseph
had no right of way across Sylvanus’s pasture and that they ‘could not
justify a further prosecution of the claim’; they further _required_
Joseph to leave the matter for the whole church to decide. He refused,
and was promptly suspended from membership for one year, ‘to give him
opportunity of fully reflecting on the matter.’ His wife Asenath and
his son Benjamin were likewise suspended. All three appealed in vain
for a hearing; their appeal for a Mutual Council to decide the matter
was equally vain, the parish taking the ground that ‘the church is the
highest earthly tribunal to deal with disorderly members.’ The year of
suspension ended on May 3, 1868, and Joseph wrote to the committee on
July 28, that he was ‘willing to right the wrong, but not to wrong the
right.’ This smart remark failed to please the authorities, and three
days later he and his wife and son were excommunicated for ‘violation
of the church covenant.’

Here was Church discipline with a vengeance. The unhappy family again
appealed in vain for a hearing before a Mutual Council, and as a last
resort proceeded to call a council _ex-parte_ composed of the Reverend
Henry Dexter, of Boston, and eight other clergymen. This Council
found that the action of the West Barnstable church was contrary to
the law of Christ and the fundamental principles and usages of the
Congregational Church; declared that, as such, it ought to be null
and void; and recommended that the three excommunicated members be
readmitted to good standing.

Other and earlier troubles had arisen to disturb the serenity of
the Church. The question of baptism--always an ecclesiastical
battle-ground--claimed the attention of the pious in the intervals
between Quaker demonstrations. The subject had been raised in Plymouth
as far back as 1638, and cropped up again in Yarmouth during the
ministry of Mr. Thomas Thornton, about 1670. Thornton was a liberal and
fearlessly adopted the so-called Half-Way Covenant. Up to this time
only the baptized could be church members, and only the children of
church members could be baptized. But the Half-Way Covenant authorized
the baptism of the children of any pious persons professing Orthodoxy,
even though they had never been baptized. This reasonable measure
raised a few ominous clouds in the conservative half of the heavens,
and resulted in some rumblings as of an approaching storm. But Thornton
forged ahead without shortening sail, and came through safely. The
Half-Way Covenant flourished in the free air of the New World, and
spread to one town after another up and down the Cape.

The fact is that, as their numbers grew and their prosperity increased,
the settlers began to feel less interest in the minutiæ of formalized
worship, if not in religion itself. The Mayflower band, with winter
knocking at the door of their unwarmed houses, had found comfort
in religion when no other comfort could be had. So was it with the
pioneers on the Cape. But when the first sharp struggle with the
wilderness had been won, and the settlers began to build adequate
houses with wide hearths, religion came to be less a crying need and
more an extra-curriculum activity. This is doubtless one reason why
there was not a greater storm when Thornton adopted the Half-Way
Covenant. Goodness knows men still read their Bibles and still went to
Church. The Reverend John Simpkins, of Brewster, writing as late as
1809, says, ‘It is still, even at the present day, considered quite
unfashionable not to attend the public worship.’ But the motive--the
impulse--which is revealed by the word ‘unfashionable’--was very
different from the old motive, and the change had already begun. Of
course this state of affairs did not arrive until long after Thornton
had gone to a well-earned rest, and his children’s children, if such
there were, as well. But the ball had begun to roll, and though its
momentum was as yet hardly perceptible, it was headed for a steep slope
and a straight track toward the toleration that comes from indifference.

The old clergy were much concerned at the state of affairs. Not
only was interest in religion waning, but ministers were becoming
scarce. Barnstable went for five years, 1678-83, without any settled
pastor. In 1678, the Reverend John Cotton, writing from Plymouth to
Governor Hinckley at Barnstable, says that it is a ‘dying time with
preachers’--a lament that is by no means foreign to the ears of our
own generation. Another and important development, which the Old
Guard interpreted as a sign of disintegration, was the tendency of
the Cape towns to split into two parishes, ostensibly because the
outlying houses were too far from the church, but perhaps also, if the
truth were known, because some disliked the teachings of the settled
minister and wanted a new church and a new minister of their own. The
geographical reason was a good one, however, and no real objection
could be raised by any one against such separations.

Sandwich made two parishes out of one in 1735, though for several years
the members of the new church were compelled to contribute to the
support of the old parish as well as bear the expenses of their own.
Barnstable began to show signs of restlessness as early as 1712, and
in spite of considerable opposition, a new parish was formed the same
year. The new meetinghouse was not built until four years later; but
in 1716 it was well under way on Cobb’s Hill in the easterly part of
the town. It is interesting to note Cotton Mather’s distress when he
learned of the proceedings. ‘Poor Barnstable,’ he writes; ‘what shall
be done for thee? Give the best Advice that may be, to the afflicted
and oppressed young Minister there.’ The ‘afflicted and oppressed’
young minister was the Reverend Jonathan Russell, Jr., who had recently
been called to the original Church, in the West Precinct. No doubt it
was hard for him to see half his parishioners walk out to serve new
gods, it might be, to the eastward. But the path of progress is ever
wet with the tears of conservatism or selfishness. In 1721, Yarmouth
followed suit by setting off the East Precinct as a new parish, which
later became the town of Dennis, and sooner or later Eastham, Harwich,
and other Cape towns did likewise, sometimes in the teeth of fierce
opposition from the Mother Church; sometimes with her blessing. The
fact that almost always the new parishes were in time incorporated as
independent towns suggests what may have been another motive for their
desire to separate. The fathers of the new church would be the fathers
of the new town; and independence was in the air. Thus, with mixed
motives and half or quite unconsciously, our ancestors used religion as
a means to civil independence.

[Illustration: WEST BARNSTABLE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BUILT 1717-18]

The new parishes had plenty to think about besides their church. Some
were already angling for incorporation; others devoted their energies
to acquiring broader acres, neglecting God in the service of mammon.
War is never good for morals or religion, and the long French and
Indian Wars were playing their part in loosening the bonds that had
held men to the Church. The clergy volleyed and thundered as loud as
ever, but the spirits of their congregations were not so eager as of
yore. The time was ripe for revival, and revival came about 1740 with
the dynamic George Whitefield and the Great Awakening, the effects of
which were violent and on the whole beneficial.

Whitefield was a young Episcopal clergyman who, like Mark Antony,
possessed the ‘power of speech to move men’s souls.’ If he had appeared
in New England a hundred years earlier, he would have been jailed
as a Papist and a corrupter of the true faith. But the century and
a quarter that had passed since the Pilgrims landed had gone far
toward obliterating the old hatred of the Church of England. So he was
permitted to travel the length and breadth of the Colonies, preaching
sometimes in churches but quite as often in the open air. He never
visited the Cape, but his disciples did, and the citizens listened at
first with interest and then with excitement to the exhortations of the
inspired young itinerants. Theirs was the doctrine of hope. Salvation,
they said, was waiting for penitent sinners. Such teaching was music
to the ears of men who were used to hell-fire sermons like those of
Treat. Here were preachers who told them that though their sins were
as scarlet, they could be as white as snow. They left the old churches
by the score and were again dubbed separatists by the stand-patters,
as their grandfathers had been before them. Sometimes they called
themselves ‘Come-Outers’; sometimes ‘New Lights.’

Whitefield’s influence was twofold, for the ministers of other
denominations copied his custom of traveling from place to place in
evangelical fashion. Elisha Paine, for example, a Connecticut Baptist
of Cape ancestry, made a flying visit to Harwich in 1744 in the course
of a peripatetic career, and held a series of open-air meetings in
which he rallied many to the Baptist standard. He writes to his wife in
an exultant strain: ‘The pine woods of Harwich ring with Hallelujahs
and hosannas, even from babes!’ and again, ‘I felt the spirit of the
Lord come upon me. I rose up and exhorted and persuaded them to come
to Christ, and immediately there was a screeching and groaning all
over the multitude and hath been very powerful ever since.’ No doubt
reaction followed the screeches and the groans, but the converts were
the better for some religious emotion, at least, and a good many of
them adhered to the new doctrine.

The Old Guard Congregational ministers, meanwhile, were at their wits’
end. No power that they could exercise, no denunciations that they
could compose, had any force in checking the stream of separatists
that flowed from the churches. The only response that occurred to them
was to hold a meeting and draft a document which should explain why
itinerant preaching in general, and Whitefield’s in particular, was
pernicious. Accordingly, in February, 1745, ten of them, representing
the seven principal towns, met at Harwich, which had become the center
of religious unrest on the Cape. They set about their task with an
earnestness born of despair. They composed a pamphlet in which the
‘many sad consequents’ of itinerant preaching were ‘discovered.’ If
the itinerants wish to wander about preaching, they argued, let them
go where the Word of God is not already adequately preached; let them
go among the heathen. As for their plea that they have received an
‘extraordinary call,’ we shall not believe it until we see results
commensurate with such a call. All impostors and enthusiasts have
pretended to such extraordinary calls. We admit that the itinerants
have done some good, but not enough to justify their practice; for ‘a
sovereign God can and ofttimes doth bring Good out of Evil, but this
in no wise excuseth the Evil-Doer.’ Furthermore, the chief result of
itinerant preaching has been to substitute schism and discord for peace
and unity in the established churches, and we do not believe, as the
itinerants are reported to declare, that ‘Contention is a sign of the
Work of God.’ Therefore, in conclusion, ‘We cannot in Faithfulness to
Christ or his People under our several charges, give any Encouragement
or Countenance to the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield as an Itinerant
Preacher.’

This serious appeal to reason stood no chance against the revivalist’s
sensational appeals to the emotions. The old Congregational clergy
had to content itself with ministering to the staid and cautious,
while the nimbler spirits enlisted under the flag of the schismatics.
There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the ministers who drew up
the indictment against the itinerants. They believed that unity was
the keystone of religion, and that if unity was destroyed, the whole
structure would fall in ruins. The fact that their own livelihoods
were involved in the crash was naturally present to their minds, for
they were human; but it served only to strengthen, not to create,
their conviction. The days of ecclesiastical monopoly were at an
end. The Quakers were exempt from supporting the Old Church; the
Separatists and New Lights were on the highroad to the same goal. So
were the Baptists. No wonder the Reverend Edward Pell, minister of the
Congregational Church in the South Parish of Brewster, remarked in 1752
on his deathbed that he would prefer not to be buried in that parish,
for fear ‘that the Lord would never think to look in such an ungodly
place for a righteous man.’

Religious affairs remained in pretty much this posture until after the
Revolution. Then, about 1795, came the Methodists, the last new sect
to meet with any appreciable opposition. The scene of Quaker troubles
had centered, as we have seen, at Sandwich; the principal activity of
the New Lights and Baptists had taken place halfway down the Cape, at
Harwich and Chatham. The Methodists began at the tip end of the Cape
among the shifting sands and scrubby hills of Provincetown and Truro.
Tradition says that a certain Captain William Humbert, a Methodist,
whose vessel was becalmed in Provincetown Harbor, came ashore and
preached to the fishermen. As nearly as can be discovered, this
happened in 1793. The Captain’s words seem to have found favor with the
Provincetowners, for within two years plans were under way to build a
Methodist meeting-house there, and in 1795, according to Dr. Coggswell,
‘the house at last went up; the second Methodist Church in New England.’

Coggswell might well say ‘at last,’ for the opposition to the new
sect was so strong that the town meeting voted that any who would not
pay the standing minister’s rate should have his interest ‘sesed,’
and ‘that there shall not be a Methodist meeting-house built in this
town.’ Hardly had the vote been recorded when a vessel-load of lumber
for the new church arrived at the wharf and was wheeled up to the
beach. Provincetown men have always been direct-actionists; a group
of determined Orthodox citizens went to the beach by night, cut the
lumber into convenient sizes and dragged it to the top of High Pole
Hill, where they burned it with an effigy of the Reverend Jesse Lee,
the Methodist minister. This gentleman was on hand to watch the
performance, which seems not to have been altogether unexpected, for
he writes, ‘I went to see the timber destroyed by the mob and felt
astonished at the conduct of the people, considering that we live in
a free country. However, I expect this will be for the good of the
little Society.’ Nothing daunted, the Methodists got another load of
lumber and, with armed men guarding it day and night, built their
meeting-house.

This victory gave the opposition its death-blow. Further objections
were but whistles against the hurricane. The town fathers were finally
forced to yield, for the number of Methodists grew so fast, not only in
Provincetown but in Truro and Wellfleet, that in 1830 the Provincetown
Congregational Church closed its doors for want of supporters.

It is not hard to see why Methodism made so strong an appeal to
the whalemen and cod-fishermen of the lower Cape. A modified form
of itineracy which the new denomination practiced provided that no
minister should preach in the same town for more than two years
and sometimes only for one. There was, therefore, no danger that a
congregation should suffer long from the harangues of a dull preacher.
But variety of another sort is what made most converts. The Methodist
preachers were often men of little education and no religious training.
Zeal and ‘a call’ with them took the place of theological schools. The
consequence was a breezy informality in their discourses. They never
hesitated to employ startling tricks to keep their hearers awake. On
one occasion a Methodist minister in Truro interrupted his sermon by
the remark, ‘Brethren, your stove pipe is so confoundedly crooked,
that I can’t preach a straight sermon.’ Another whose subject was ‘the
World, the Flesh, and the Devil,’ prefaced his remarks by saying, ‘I
shall touch lightly upon the World, hasten to the Flesh, and pass on
to the Devil, when I will give it to you hot as you can sup it.’ It
is a consolation, if we are to get the Devil, to be given him in a
language that we can understand. There was, in fact, little danger
that a Methodist preacher would shoot over the heads of his hearers.
This--with a pleasant smattering of rugged wit--went far toward
making Methodism popular, for no men appreciate wit more keenly than
Cape-Codders. The Reverend Edgar Clark, one of the early Methodist
ministers in Provincetown, showed adroitness and much sense when a
pharisaic whaleman of his congregation asked him what to do if, after
cruising for months without filling a cask, he sighted a hundred-barrel
whale on Sunday. ‘I think,’ said Mr. Clark, ‘I should call all hands
together and ask the Lord to bless us. Then I would go and get the
whale.’

Another pleasant practice of the Methodists was Camp Meeting Week,
which began at Wellfleet in 1819 and after a few years moved to
Truro. Camp meetings were, and continue to be, not merely religious
assemblies, but social outings as well. The women find a few days in
camp a pleasant change from the drudgery of their kitchens; the men do
not confine their conversation to ecclesiastical topics. The early camp
meetings were thronged with enthusiastic citizens of every denomination
from all over the Cape:

‘We saw great gatherings in a grove,
A grove near Pamet Bay,
Where thousands heard the preacher’s word,
And dozens knelt to pray.’

Eastham was the next camp meeting town. Here they began in 1828 and
were so successful that the Methodists bought a ten-acre lot called
Millennium Grove, and put up a big frame building to house the
ministers. The congregations lived in tents. Sometimes--especially
on Sundays--as many as five thousand persons attended, some of them,
it must be confessed, inspired by no loftier motive than curiosity
or mischief. Here men and women arose to give testimony as to their
religious experiences, and no doubt some who came to scoff remained to
pray. Camp meetings are still held every summer in the woods between
Yarmouth and Hyannis.

So, before long, for this reason and that, the Methodists out-numbered
any other denomination in most of the Cape towns; and as soon as this
happened, all question of their being obliged to support the standing
order vanished. Town meetings were parish meetings no longer. Religious
freedom became a fact, not by any one grand proclamation, but by years
of persistent work by Quakers, Itinerants, Baptists, and Methodists.
No two towns struck off the shackles at exactly the same time, but in
general by 1816, when Wellfleet exempted Methodists from supporting the
Orthodox Church, religion on the Cape might take what form it would.

All this was mighty hard on the devout old Congregationalist ministers,
whose lot, even in the palmiest days of orthodoxy, had been no easy
one. No picture of early ecclesiastical days in the Plymouth Colony
would be complete without at least a few words of tribute to these
stalwart pillars of a stalwart faith. Taken by and large, no finer
or more influential men ever ministered to a nation’s welfare. It
is no accident that the towns of Bourne, Dennis, and Brewster were
named for their pastors. Such men as John Lothrop, Richard Bourne,
Timothy Alden, Josiah Dennis, and Samuel Treat are titanic figures in
the history of the Cape. Theirs was the task of setting a spiritual
and intellectual standard that should permeate every phase of life.
Righteous themselves, they demanded righteousness in their followers,
and within the limitations of human nature, they got it. Their example
gave strength to the weak and courage to the faint-hearted. As often
as not they were physicians as well as pastors, ministering to ills of
the body with the same rugged energy they employed with the ills of
the soul. The Reverend Thomas Thornton was the only doctor in Yarmouth
from 1670 until old age forced him to retire. Fifty years later Mr.
Greenleaf was both minister and physician for the same town. The
Reverend Hugh Adams, who was called to the pulpit in Chatham in 1711,
is said to have had an extensive medical practice, even outside his
own parish. The tombstone of the Reverend Benjamin Fessenden, who died
in Sandwich later in the same century, bears among other eulogistic
remarks the following: ‘not only as a divine was he useful, but as a
discreet and successful physician.’

These early men of God had to be men of fine parts to get their
positions in the first place; before they were officially called to a
church, they were often required to prove their mettle by a long series
of sermons before congregations as critical and as potentially hostile
as school boys. Timothy Alden preached sixteen times to the Yarmouth
Parish before they were satisfied that he would do; and Mr. Joseph
Green, who antedated him by a few years, worked for fifty-two Sundays
to earn the same position. Sandwich was still more candid. Unable to
decide whether Thomas Tupper or Richard Bourne was the better man, the
congregation asked them to preach in competition, and he who had the
fuller house was named ‘minister for the day.’

The ministers needed ready tact and large sympathies, if they were
to cope successfully with such troublesome parishioners as Sunday
fishermen, many of whom were for nine months of the year exemplary
Christians. What, for example, was the Truro parson to say to a certain
noted skipper who used to assert with commendable candor that ‘there
was no hope for him if he died during the fishing season, but in winter
he was all right?’ Such questions wanted nice handling. Lack of tact
cost the Reverend Charles Boyter his pulpit in Truro. He arrived there
about a hundred years ago and decided one day to swell the numbers
of his congregation by announcing that his next discourse would be a
sermon on Luck. Sunday morning found the church filled with interested
fishermen, who knew more about luck than any other class of men in the
world. But Mr. Boyter proclaimed that there was no such thing as luck;
industry and hard work, not luck, were what brought full fares of fish.
‘Bait your hooks with red flannel,’ he told them; ‘then if you don’t
catch codfish, it will be because you don’t try.’ And he compared the
rigors of the Grand Banks to ‘trouting in the brooks of Vermont with a
fly and pole.’ Shortly after this sermon, Mr. Boyter left Truro to try
his luck in Orange, New Jersey.

Then there was the ticklish question of church music; that, too, craved
wary walking. The Old Church fell heir to Calvin’s prejudice against
instrumental music, though one may properly ask whether their peculiar
antipathy to organs was not owing to their cost and the difficulty of
getting them, quite as much as to any more pious objection. In 1726,
the West Parish of Barnstable was split wide open on the question of
music, and had to call in civil authority to decide it. But two years
later the progressives won, and the church voted to sing ‘the regular
or new way,’ that is, with the accompaniment of instruments. The
Orleans church had no music, other than vocal, until 1810; then a bass
viol made its appearance, probably in the face of strong opposition
from a conservative minority.

Through quicksands such as these the parson had to pick his way with
care, guided by his conscience on the one hand and expediency on
the other. But the greatest trials of the ministers arose from the
very ardor and attentiveness of the congregations. The Reverend John
Robinson’s principle that every member should feel responsible for the
church’s welfare and should have a voice in all its proceedings, was
undoubtedly a fine thing; but it made endless trouble for the pastor.
Any one felt justified in falling foul of his doctrine. Mr. Marmaduke
Matthews, who occupied the pulpit in Yarmouth about 1640, was hauled
over the coals for ‘weak and unsafe’ remarks in his sermons; and this
in spite of the fact that he has been characterized as ‘able, zealous
and devoted.’ Mr. Matthews humbly apologized, confessing that ‘he
might have expressed and delivered himself in terms more free from
exception,’ and he was allowed to continue his labors.

Yarmouth, in fact, was early a hotbed of trouble for ministers. In
1651, Mr. John Miller, the pastor of the town, was haled before the
Plymouth Court for alleged aspersions against the Government. What
these aspersions were is not stated. Doubtless they were as chimerical
as Mr. Matthews’s heresies. The citizens of Falmouth in 1702 voted that
they would not employ Samuel Shiverick any more to preach to them, and
chose Joseph Parker to tell him of it. What it was in Mr. Shiverick’s
preaching that offended his hearers one is left to conjecture.

Another celebrated row occurred in Eastham, where the Reverend Samuel
Osborn, after preaching from 1718 to 1738, was dismissed by a vote of
an ecclesiastical council. The judgment of this august gathering is no
surprise, for Osborn had forsaken Calvin for Arminius, and had been
indiscreet enough to assert a universal negative, by saying that there
were no promises in the Bible but what were conditional. Few Yankees,
even to-day, would let this statement pass without thumbing their
Bibles for evidence against it. Yet Osborn, aside from being a powerful
preacher, had done much for the temporal welfare of Eastham; he had
taught the citizens better ways of growing crops and had showed them
how the peat, of which there was a great quantity in the town, might be
used for fuel.

While Mr. Osborn was in doctrinal difficulties at Eastham, the Reverend
Joseph Metcalfe found himself in sartorial trouble in Falmouth. With
no previous warning, he appeared one Sunday in the pulpit sporting
a new wig, which, though ‘not expressed in fancy, neat, not gaudy,’
was yet a sufficient improvement over the old one to set the Falmouth
ladies’ tongues wagging about vanity and the preacher. The next day
he stepped, perhaps by accident, into a house where several prominent
ladies were discussing the absorbing topic. Mr. Metcalfe, the soul of
urbanity, suggested that they might be better pleased if he gave up
wearing a wig altogether? No, that would never do, they declared in
scandalized tones. Perhaps they would like the old one reinstated? By
no means! ‘Then let us alter the new one until it ceases to offend,’
said the patient pastor, wherewith he presented it to one of the ladies
after another, each of whom clipped from it what she regarded as the
sinful lock. The last lady declared that to wear a wig at all was to
break the Second Commandment, but Mr. Metcalfe pointed out that the wig
in its present condition ‘was so unlike anything in the heaven above or
on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth,’ that it was
surely exempt from any possible censure.

Quarrels of one sort or another between clergymen and their
congregations became so much matters of course that one canny divine,
Mr. Hugh Adams, who was called to Chatham in 1711, took precautionary
measures. He accepted the call on condition that if any difference
arose between him and his parish (‘which we should both humbly pray
there may never be’), a committee of clergymen should decide on the
rights and wrongs of the disagreement; that if the whole blame was
found to rest on the people, Adams and his heirs should still be
entitled to his salary forever, whether he was dismissed or not. If
neither party was found to blame, or if the blame was equally divided,
the salary, too, should be equally divided. Mr. Adams’s fears were
prophetic. After five years, the trouble came, and he was dismissed,
stoutly asserting that he did not care, for ‘he had a better call
elsewhere.’ It would be interesting to know whether the town lived up
to its agreement regarding his salary. Perhaps, though, he was found
_wholly_ to blame!

Any treasures which the old clergy laid up for themselves must have
been in heaven; certainly they got few enough of them on earth,
for ministers in colonial times were paid proportionally no better
than they are now; but it does seem hard that for a time they were
obliged to collect their own salaries. How they did it, one can only
conjecture; perhaps by a door-to-door canvas, hat in hand; perhaps,
if they were more discreet, by a fervid reference to the soaring
price of beef in the course of a parish call. At any rate, it was a
miserable arrangement, which in the words of the Reverend Enoch Pratt
‘was attended with much trouble [to the minister] and often impaired
his usefulness.’ After one generation had suffered under it, the method
was changed; but even so, not much actual cash found its way into the
parsonage. The fact that parishioners counted on drift whales to pay
part of the minister’s salary shows that installments must have arrived
with some irregularity. In 1659, some of the Yarmouth men refused
to contribute anything to the support of Mr. Miller, and were very
properly taken to task by the Court.

Sometimes the parishioners tried to dock the ministerial stipend, as
the Wellfleeters did with the Reverend Mr. Lewis in 1747. Times were
hard, and the rapid depreciation of currency threw all old standards
to the winds. His parishioners waited on Mr. Lewis with the suggestion
that he accept the sum of sixty pounds, new tenor, as his salary from
then on. But Mr. Lewis was a business man and no doubt had a large
and hungry family; it is a pleasure to record that he held out for
seventy-five pounds, and got it.

A good part of the pastor’s pay took the form of wood and salt hay.
Just after the Revolution, the Reverend Jude Damon of Truro received a
salary of seventy-five pounds in cash besides the use of the parsonage,
eighteen cords of wood cut and delivered at his door, and five tons of
salt hay. In 1749, Mr. Stephen Emery, the Chatham minister, received a
similar allowance of wood. So, taken all in all, and considering the
simplicity of the times, the early Cape clergymen lived comfortably
enough. If the flock sometimes grew careless and were late with the
winter’s wood, they were sure to turn up with it sooner or later.
Timothy Alden, the beloved pastor of Yarmouth, had this experience on
one occasion and chose for his next Sunday’s text, ‘Where no wood is
there the fire goeth out.’ Mr. Joseph Green, the Barnstable minister,
started the pleasant custom of asking the boys in to a hearty dinner
washed down with a glass of flip when the wood was unloaded.

As time went on, freedom of speech, which grew with the progress of
civilization, became gall and wormwood to the preacher. No divinity
hedged him; he was fair game for earnest conservative and godless
scoffer:

‘A learned Treat, a pious Webb,
And Cheever--all no more;
Mr. Shaw then took the helm
And run the ship ashore.’

So sang Peter Walker, the unregenerate blacksmith of Eastham, when
the Reverend Philander Shaw, after more than forty years of service,
retired from the old Congregational Church, which had grown as weak and
infirm as its pastor.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, a strange kind of
religious fanaticism visited many of the towns, attacking with greater
or less violence a small number of estimable persons who, as soon as
they became infected with the malady, promptly withdrew from whatever
church they had belonged to and styled themselves ‘Come-Outers.’
They then indulged in antics that rivaled the antics of the Quakers.
Frequently, when under the spell of their mania, they walked along
the tops of fences instead of on the sidewalks; affected a strange,
springing gait, and conversed by singing instead of by ordinary speech,
in the distressing manner of characters in light opera. A favorite tune
for the purpose was ‘Old Dan Tucker.’

If the Come-Outers had confined themselves to these eccentricities,
they might have been allowed, quite literally, to go their own gait
unmolested, for tolerance was pretty well established all over the
Cape. But fanatics are never satisfied while they see the rest of
the world sane; they must needs turn reformers and usher all mankind
along their special route to paradise. So it was with the Come-Outers,
and so their troubles began--troubles that bear a striking analogy
to the troubles of the Quakers. Certain of them were in the habit of
attending Methodist meetings in Barnstable in order to disturb the
proceedings by shouts and songs. After repeated warnings, they were
finally brought into Court, and Nymphas Marston was employed in their
defense. They lost their case and were ordered to pay the expenses of
the trial; they refused, whereupon Marston attached the cattle of one
of his recalcitrant clients, and the fun began. The animals were put
up at auction before a large crowd that had come on the chance that
there might be some excitement. They were not disappointed. Most
of the Come-Outers in town were there, proclaiming that the sheriff
would never dare to sell the cattle, and that no one would dare to
buy them, for they belonged to God, and that God’s curse would fall
upon all who were concerned in the transaction. They accompanied these
announcements with the dances and songs in which they always indulged
when angry, and which they called ‘dancing a person down to hell.’
Bidding was slow--perhaps because the citizens were frightened by the
threats, perhaps because they were being pleasantly entertained by
the performances of the Come-Outers. Finally two of the crowd, Daniel
Scudder and Daniel Smith, walked off, bored at the leisurely fashion
in which the auction progressed. This gave a fine chance for some
improvised lines from the Come-Outers, one of whom burst into the
following couplet to the tune of ‘Old Dan Tucker’:

‘I don’t wonder Daniel Smith and
Daniel Scudder flee away!’

But there were hard heads enough in the assemblage to bid on the cattle
at last, and run the risk of incurring God’s wrath. So Mr. Marston got
his pay.

Wherever money is at stake, it is usually possible to discover a thread
of reason in men’s actions. But to account for the behavior of the
persons in the following bits of idiocy is not so easy. An enthusiastic
Barnstable Come-Outer had a pig. A prophetess of his order told him
that he must kill it because the Devil was in it. He killed it, dressed
it nicely, and buried it, convinced that he was weakening Satan’s
dominion thereby. Not only pigs, but money might be the Devil’s abode.
A good woman acted as nurse for a sick friend and was paid a small
sum for her services. The friend who gave it to her remarked, with a
Come-Outer’s shudder, that the Devil was in it, whereupon the horrified
recipient threw it into Great Pond. The happy sequel to this anecdote
is not that she ever found the money again, but that she did regain her
wits and had many a laugh over the antics of her Come-Outer days.

The strange sect was flourishing during the years just before the
Civil War, and became curiously involved in the Abolition Movement
which was so active at that time. As has been explained in another
chapter, one reason why certain men and women withdrew from the various
regular churches was that the churches tolerated slavery. After they
had withdrawn, these persons sometimes called themselves Come-Outers,
whether or not they joined with those of the same name whose
actions have just been described. But Abolition became linked with
Come-Outerism, and slavery was strengthened thereby. In other respects
this eccentric spasm of religious possession did little harm. Many of
its victims recovered after a time; it vanished altogether after the
Civil War.

And what of recent religion on the Cape? There is not much to tell.
Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists broke down the bars, and at one
time or another during the last seventy-five years, every sect that
the ingenuity of man can devise has had its fling. Even those two
great churches which our ancestors called the harlots of Babylon--the
Roman Catholic and the Episcopal--to-day are given the right hand
of fellowship by the old-line Congregational parishes. Charles
Jenkins, the lively historian of Falmouth, was among the last of the
stand-patters when he wrote, in 1843, ‘Already do we hear that motto
so offensive to every true son of New England “No Church without a
Bishop.”’ But the Episcopal Church has been represented here since the
fifties, and the Cape is the better therefor. The shades of Bradford
and Lothrop, if they rise from their graves at the sound of the Te
Deum, rise to join in the Amen; for in the light of their abode, where
all secrets are revealed, they interpret anew the teachings of their
old pastor, John Robinson, who ‘still desired to learn further what the
good will of God was.’ It should be said, however, that the Episcopal
churches even to-day are attended almost exclusively by summer visitors.

The Church of Rome came with the Portuguese fishermen to Provincetown,
and spread with the prosperity of these hardy seafarers. Within
twenty years the Finns, whose numbers have increased amazingly in
the neighborhood of West Barnstable, have presented the Cape with
various sorts of Lutheran theology. The Universalists are everywhere
prospering. Some of the old Congregational churches, like that of
the East Parish in Barnstable, went Unitarian, but retained the name
and polity of the old organization. Here and there are Christian
Scientists; the Swedenborgians have a number of representatives. The
Mormons followed Greenwich Village to Provincetown; a dingy little
building in South Yarmouth echoed not long ago to the enthusiastic
activities of the Holy Rollers. A group of Dennis men, finding nothing
to their taste in existing theology, created for themselves the Free
Independent Church of Holiness, and some of their equally dissatisfied
neighbors anticipated the Provincetown Mormons by joining the
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, wherein, let
us hope, they found peace at the last.

‘Divide and conquer’ might well have been the Devil’s doctrine in
thus splitting into fragments the remains of a once vigorous piety.
To-day as one makes his way through the Cape villages, one sees in each
two or three great arks of meetinghouses, each of them big enough to
accommodate half the regular church-goers in the county, each of them
attended, if it is attended at all, by a handful of the devout, who,
like the preacher’s utterances, are lost among the hollow echoings of
empty pews. Some have closed their doors for good and stand as bleak
monuments to a transient enthusiasm. Truly as far as church-going is
concerned, man has divided, and the Devil has conquered. Perhaps, after
all, the despairing stanza of a pessimistic poet is close to the truth:

‘I dreamed that I went to the City of Gold,
To Heaven resplendent and fair,
And after I entered the beautiful fold
By one in authority there I was told
That not a Cape-Codder was there.’

CHAPTER XV

THE CANAL

As soon as Governor Bradford established an outpost at Manomet in
1627 for trade with the Dutch at New York, the route of the Cape Cod
Canal was virtually fixed. Nature had already done a large part of the
work; on the north, Scusset Creek wound inland through marshes and
low land, until it came within striking distance of Manomet River,
which flows south into Buzzards Bay. Then, too, this route cut off the
entire Cape--not part of it, as a canal farther east would have done.
The Indians used to carry their canoes across the mile or two that
separated the headwaters of the two streams; blockade-runners in the
War of 1812 did the same with their whaleboats. Every prospect pleased;
only man and machinery were needed.

Man was ready to undertake the job and was already talking about it
in 1676, as appears from an entry in the diary of Samuel Sewall--that
ubiquitous New-Englander whose active mind touched every phase of life
and thought. On this occasion he was visiting Mr. Thomas Smith in
Sandwich:

26 Octo’r, 1676. Mr. Smith rode with me and showed me the place which
some had thought to cut, for to make a passage from the south sea to
the north. He said it was about a mile and a half between the utmost
flowing of the two seas in Herring River and Scusset--the land very
low and level.... Moniment harbor said to be very good.

The project got no farther for the moment than to serve as a subject
for speculative conversation, but Smith was still interested twenty
years later, when the General Court ordered Mr. John Otis, of
Barnstable, and Captain William Bassett and Mr. Thomas Smith, of
Sandwich, to look the ground over and report what the cost of a canal
would be and whether the scheme was feasible.

Yet the subject was not dropped. Men were fascinated by it who had
never been on the Cape, and the chance traveler could hardly get
through Sandwich without being taken to inspect the route. Prince, in
1736, refers to ‘the place thro’ which there has been a canal talked
of this forty years.’ The King’s ships which hovered offshore during
the Revolution brought the matter up again with an urgency it had
never had before. The General Court sent a committee, consisting of
the Honorable James Bowdoin and others, to Sandwich to look into the
question and report. The committee very sensibly sought the advice of
local talent before deciding on anything, and invited Colonel Nathaniel
Freeman and others to join them in their labors. They were favorably
impressed with the scheme, and engaged a Government engineer, Thomas
Machin, to draw up plans and furnish an estimate of the expenses. But
Machin’s work was interrupted, as appears from a letter which General
Washington wrote to James Bowdoin at Boston:

NEW YORK, June 10, 1776

SIR,--Congress having requested my attendance in Philadelphia, I
was in that city when your letter of the 11th ultimo came to this
place,--this day’s post therefore, affords me the first opportunity
of acknowledging receipt of it.

I am hopeful that you applied to General Ward, and have received all
the assistance that Mr. Machin could give, in determining upon the
practicability of cutting a canal between Barnstable and Buzzard’s
Bay ere this, as the great demand we have for engineers in this
department, Canada, &c., has obliged me to order Mr. Machin hither to
assist in that branch of business.

I thank you most heartily for your kind congratulations on the
departure of the troops from Boston, and am, with very great esteem,

Sir, your most obedient, humble servant,
GEO. WASHINGTON

HON. JAMES BOWDOIN, BOSTON.

Before this order came, Machin had gone so far as to propose a canal
fourteen feet deep with two double locks at each end and two bridges.
The expense he estimated at £32,148, 1_s._, 8_d._--very nice figuring!

The struggling colonies had no money or men to spare for such work
during the next seven years; but almost as soon as the war was over,
they were at it again, this time sending young James Winthrop from
Cambridge to the Cape, first to examine the old route, and second to
survey a possible new course from Barnstable Harbor to the anchorage
at what is now Hyannisport, taking in the two Hathaways and Nine Mile
Ponds on the way. Winthrop submitted detailed figures for the Sandwich
Canal, but merely rode over the ground from Barnstable to Centerville,
took the Reverend Mr. Mellen’s word for the height of Kidd’s Hill,
and relied on local information as to the depth of the various ponds.
He rightly regarded the high ridge that runs all along that part of
the Cape as a discouraging obstacle, and gave the project of a canal
there no further thought. Mr. Mellen, who accompanied Winthrop over the
Barnstable-Hyannis course, mentions two others which were contemplated
at least as early as 1794. One led from the Bass Hole in Yarmouth to
the eastern part of Lewis Bay in Hyannis. This scheme apparently died
at birth. The other, which included Bass River, in South Yarmouth, was
so alluring that it was not abandoned for more than a century.

It had, indeed, much to commend it, for Bass River is the noblest
of all the tidal creeks which wind inland from the Sound, and it
terminates in a chain of ponds in Weir Village at no great distance
from White’s Brook, Yarmouth, which flows into the creeks that thread
the beautiful marshes of Hockanom on the Bay shore. Thus the high ridge
of the Cape that frightened Winthrop would be avoided, and the route,
though by no means straight, presented few obstacles to the engineer.
No less eminent a geologist than Professor Shaler thought that this
way through the Cape would be better than the Monument River route. He
points out that there were only four places where a canal might easily
be dug: Monument River, Bass River, Town Cove, Orleans, and Pamet
River, Truro. The last two he eliminated because vessels using them
would still have dangerous waters to navigate. Of the remaining two
he prefers Bass River because it could be used at the last minute in
case of bad weather by a vessel whose captain had planned, other things
being equal, to sail all the way round and save the toll. If the canal
was at Monument River, a captain would have to decide very soon after
leaving port whether or not to use it, for it would mean a different
course almost from the outset. Shaler’s arguments, however, went
unheeded, for the old route was still, in the opinion of most people,
the best one.

The citizens of Orleans and Eastham, with proper local pride, pinned
great faith to the course which Cyprian Southack followed in his
whaleboat in 1717. He crossed the Cape by water from the Bay to the
Ocean, using Boat Meadow Creek, Jeremiah’s Gutter, Town Cove, and
Nauset Harbor--all of which he found connected. This was unusual, but
certainly not unprecedented, for geological evidence indicates that
at a remote period the water had a free sweep through this cut, which
was then much wider. While a small canal at this point would have been
easy to dig and a great convenience for local traffic, it would have
eliminated neither the Monomoy Shoals nor Peaked Hill Bars. This wrote
its death warrant. It is said, to be sure, that the citizens of Orleans
and Eastham cut a passage through at this point during the War of 1812
to enable small boats to run the blockade, and five years later a more
elaborate canal was contemplated by a corporation known as the Eastham
and Orleans Canal Proprietors; but it was never dug.

Meanwhile, the old Monument River passage was receiving more attention
than all the others put together; and it will be wise to follow the
crowd back to it. On the strength of Winthrop’s report in 1791, the
Legislature was convinced that a canal was practicable and agreed to
authorize any person to construct it and charge a reasonable toll. But
it was one thing to ride over the ground with surveying instruments
and announce that the project was an easy one; it was quite another to
construct the canal. Every one, in fact, seemed anxious that a canal
should be dug, but no one seemed at all anxious to dig it. Wendell
Davis, in his description of Sandwich in 1802, urged it with exuberant
eloquence and asserted (on what authority he does not say) that the
owners were ready to _give_ the land along the proposed route to any
company that would undertake the work. At about the same time a certain
James Sullivan and twenty associates appeared at the State House in
Boston with a mysterious scheme which they declared was far better than
any of the old ones, and asked that they be allowed to incorporate
and put it through. Nobody paid much attention to them, and they
were heard of no more. Still the ground was surveyed every few years
by one person or another until, in the language of the late Senator
McCall, every grain of sand along the whole route had been made the
victim of an algebraic equation. In 1812, the strategic advantages of
such a waterway in time of war were repeatedly demonstrated by local
blockade-runners. Here was proof enough, said its supporters, that the
canal was necessary as a war-time measure, and in 1818 they sent Loammi
Baldwin to Sandwich to resurvey the ground that had been trodden hard
by the surveyors of a hundred and fifty years. But Baldwin’s report,
if he ever made one, inspired no more diggers than the reports of his
predecessors.

Thanks to the efforts of Senator Lloyd, of Massachusetts, the taverns
of Sandwich echoed in 1825 to the pompous tread of Government engineers
from Washington with Major Perault at their head. This officer’s
careful report was just as fruitful as all the others had been, and
for a generation after 1830 the legislators in the State House and
the Congressmen in Washington had a rest from the monotonous subject
of the Cape Cod Canal. The reason for the welcome silence was that
the merchants of New England had by this time worked up an impressive
foreign trade. Boston capitalists were thinking in terms of big ships
and long voyages; coasting was too small game for them, and without
their influence and support it was idle for the small fry, who would
have used the canal, to keep up the clamor. Short railway lines began
to cut into the coasters’ business. With the fifties came the clipper
ships. During all these activities, the project for a canal took a
long and well-earned nap. When in 1861 a few wise shipowners began to
realize that the days of sail were numbered, the scheme stirred for a
moment as though to awake, half listening to the favorable utterances
of Governor Banks in his inaugural message to the Legislature. It came
wide awake a little later when a committee arrived with the familiar
surveying instruments, but dropped off to sleep again as soon as it
saw the same old maneuvers and heard the same old technicalities. But
this committee struck one new note when it asked the coöperation of
the United States Coast Survey, and incidentally of the United States
Treasury. Henry Mitchell, a real authority on tides and their effect on
coast lines, was sent down by the Government, together with specialists
in other departments, and it began to look as if something might
happen at last. But the war drove the subject from everybody’s mind
for the next four or five years, and by the time Lee had surrendered,
the elaborate reports of Mitchell and his colleagues were of academic
interest only. It is significant that nobody, from Governor Bradford
in 1627 to the group of engineers who went over the ground in 1861,
ever reported that a canal was inadvisable or impracticable, but
that, almost without exception, they recommended locks rather than a
free-water passage.

After the war, in spite of the fact that considerable New England
capital began to head westward and that some was still tied up in
sailing ships, a group of enthusiasts in 1870 applied for and received
incorporation as the Cape Cod Canal Company with authority to raise
money and dig the ditch if they could. The Legislature further
suggested that the Federal Government might properly pay for the
construction of a breakwater at the end of the passage. Washington was
still in a friendly mood and sent General Foster to look the situation
over. He, like all previous engineers, found nothing to prevent
the construction of a canal, but unlike the rest, he recommended
a free-water passage rather than one that depended on locks. He
also declared that ‘its military value in time of war equaled its
commercial value in time of peace,’ but after seven years in irons, the
corporation had apparently done nothing. The Legislature ordered an
investigation of their activities or inactivities; the investigators
reported that it was doubtful whether that company would ever construct
a canal, but they seized the opportunity to add, with more truthfulness
than originality, that a canal would be a splendid thing for New
England! The State House gave the Cape Cod Canal Company three years
more to get started. Clemens Herschel, a distinguished civil engineer,
wrote a somewhat rhetorical pamphlet in behalf of the company in 1878,
entitled ‘The Cape Cod Ship Canal,’ but this seems to have been the
extent of the organization’s accomplishments.

Since nothing was done, a new charter was given in 1880 to Henry M.
Whitney and associates under the name of The Cape Cod Ship Canal
Company. Whitney’s engineer made a number of borings along the
route and reported great quantities of quicksand. This so alarmed
the corporation that they announced that the work would cost nearer
seven million than four million dollars, which was all their charter
authorized, and so stepped out of the running. Before they withdrew,
however, they made a futile, and as it turned out a disastrous, move
toward excavation by importing several hundred Italians from New York
and setting them to work with shovels and wheelbarrows. The Cape was
not so used to foreigners in the eighties as it has since become. The
arrival of even one or two strangers was then an event; the arrival
of five hundred was an earthquake. Before long trouble arose between
them and the townspeople. It has been alleged that the Italians were
not paid regularly and that they took it out on the town by breaking
into shops and terrorizing the inhabitants. Politicians called the
disturbance ‘the Neapolitan revolt’ and declared that ‘Sandwich was for
a week under arms; ... life and property were exposed to the hungry
mob, and the entire community terrified at the presence of an army
of houseless, starving, unpaid rampant foreigners.... The State came
to her protection and assisted in keeping the peace.’ Senator McCall
refers more mildly to the incident, yet speaks of the ‘depredations
committed by these Italians.’ It was at least a very unfortunate
incident and shows clearly enough the incompetence of the Whitney
Company’s management.

A new company filled the breach and was incorporated in 1883 under the
same name as Whitney’s--The Cape Cod Ship Canal Company. The chief
mover in this company was William Seward, Jr., and another member of
it was Samuel Fessenden, of Sandwich. They contracted with Frederick
A. Lockwood, head of a construction company in East Boston, to do the
work, and from this time on the organization was generally known as
the Lockwood Company, for the charter parties remained silently in the
background, leaving the whole arena to Lockwood.

They were very soon in trouble. The exact nature of their difficulties
does not appear, but the introduction to a reprint of Herschel’s
pamphlet, which they got out in 1884, states that: ‘The same delightful
selfishness which has in the past endeavored to maintain the undue tax
and impost it has so far collected from the public, is again opposing
the work which has been begun, and is seeking to throttle it, in the
selfish fear that its foothold for such undue tax and impost might
suffer a slight deterioration.’ The railroad had given Whitney trouble
in the Legislature, and was perhaps still clogging the wheels of
progress for the new company. But whatever the vague language quoted
above may refer to, the Lockwood Company met with two very definite
obstacles in the first year of its existence. One was a suit by a
certain Mr. Fox, of Montreal, alleging that he had had a contract
before Lockwood. The other was a suit for land damages brought by
one Briggs, who owned some land along the line of the canal and was
dissatisfied with the price that Lockwood had condemned it for. All
this litigation delayed the work, and the company had to apply for an
extension of their charter (the original terms had stipulated that the
work should be finished in four years). At the same session of the
Legislature, two other persons, Gerard C. Tobey, of Wareham, and Alfred
D. Fox, of Montreal, also applied separately for incorporation and
authority to dig the canal.

Here was a different state of affairs with a vengeance! Instead of
its being impossible to find a company that would tackle the job, as
had formerly been the case, the Legislature was now besieged by three
rival concerns, all clamoring for the privilege! Beacon Hill became a
battle-ground, resounding to the forensic endeavors in behalf of this
petitioner or that. Fox, the Montreal applicant, though his claim to a
contract antedating Lockwood’s had been denied by the Court, was now
applying to the Legislature for authority to incorporate separately.
The fact that he was a Canadian and relied at least in part on Canadian
capital told heavily against him in Boston and is one reason why his
application failed. Tobey, the Wareham applicant, was certainly a more
logical candidate for the job. He was familiar with the upper Cape
and was a man of wide business experience and varied interests. If he
and his associates had been given corporate powers on this occasion,
they would probably have done at least as well as Lockwood; but
because Lockwood was first in the field, already had a charter, and
was seeking only an extension of the stipulated time--a courtesy which
the Legislature had frequently shown on other occasions--he came off
victorious in the triangular bout.

It must be confessed, too, that though he did not accomplish great
things, yet he did more than any of his predecessors. At his works in
East Boston, he built a dredge specially designed to dig the canal.
It arrived off the Sandwich Beach in the early spring of 1884, was
floated through a cut in the beach, and began to eat its way through
the Scusset marshes while the whole town cheered. This dredge, more
than anything else, established Lockwood firmly in favor with the
citizens of Sandwich, but it achieved nothing remarkable. By spasmodic
activity it dug a deep ditch for a mile into the marsh. Then it stopped
for good; there was not money enough to keep its fires stoked, and the
dredge was sold where it stood, was quickly dismantled, and finally
sank into the grave its own bucket chain had dug, the hull remaining a
dilapidated landmark for years.

Fox meantime had formed a corporation which he said could get all the
money it wanted from Canada. Some estimable men were on its board.
Fox left them in Boston and went to Canada to raise the money; but
it was not forthcoming. The board had made pledges which they wished
to redeem; by degrees it became evident that they never could redeem
them if they relied on Fox. They therefore asked Lockwood to join them
and tackle the job again. This Lockwood did--apparently regarding his
contract with the Seward-Fessenden Company as dead. Seward instantly
bombarded Boston bankers with circulars alleging that his company
was the only legal and authorized one, and warning them to beware of
Lockwood. Judgment of the rights and wrongs of the question must be
sought elsewhere than in the pages of the present volume, for it is
quite beyond the author’s powers to decide them. If ever a strip of
land was a parade-ground for surveyors first and a battle-ground for
legislative vituperation afterwards, it was the route of the Cape Cod
Canal. One thing, however, is clear; Lockwood’s chances of actually
completing the job vanished when his dredge was sold. His activities
from then on were those of a minor capitalist, a solicitor and a
lobbyist, rather than an engineer. If he had lived longer, perhaps
he would have succeeded. But his health failed, and he died without
digging another cubic yard of sand on the Cape. His backers (among
them Colonel Livermore, Quincy A. Shaw, John M. Forbes, and Henry L.
Higginson) turned their energies into other channels. So ended the
long and complicated struggle among the three applicants, Fox, Tobey,
and Lockwood. Though Lockwood was for most of the time on the top of
the heap, yet he failed after all to accomplish what had become the
dominant desire of his life.

Two other companies were organized between 1892 and 1898--the
Massachusetts Maritime Canal Company and the Old Colony and Interior
Canal Company--but neither of them came anywhere near joining the
waters of the two Bays.

In 1898, in fact, the citizens of the Cape were commenting with amused
cynicism on the amount of activity and oratory expended in their behalf
on the floor of the State House. The Barnstable ‘Patriot’ voiced the
sentiment of the majority when its editor wrote, ‘No less than seven
projects for a Cape Cod Canal are to come before the legislature this
year. Meanwhile, despite all threats, the Cape hangs on the mainland
with the grim determination characteristic of its people.’

The beginning of the end came on June 1, 1899, when the Legislature
granted a charter to the Boston, Cape Cod and New York Canal Company.
The incorporators were William Flannagan, De Witt Flannagan, and other
New-Yorkers. They bought the land along the proposed route from Colonel
Livermore and spent several years in perfecting their arrangements,
while their engineer, Charles M. Thompson, of the old Lockwood Company,
camped on the ground that he already knew so well. They had moderate
success in arousing the interest of capitalists, but never until they
applied to Mr. August Belmont did they actually see their way clear
to constructing the canal. It was in 1906 that De Witt Flannagan
first brought the project to Mr. Belmont’s attention. Belmont became
so much interested that he consulted a group of the most eminent men
in the fields of engineering, transportation, and maritime affairs.
Mr. Belmont then spread all their figures before Mr. Barclay Parsons,
one of the greatest engineers of his day and a member of the Panama
Canal Commission, and requested him to go over the whole problem. Mr.
Parsons did so and then went to Sandwich, where he met Mr. Thompson,
who exhibited some samples that had been taken from borings along the
route under the Livermore régime. The samples contained quicksand, and
Parsons was dubious. But Thompson explained that all the borings had
been made in the lowest land along the line--the very central axis of
the future waterway--and that naturally all the quicksand in the valley
had accumulated during the ages along that line. This proved to be the
case; no other deposits of quicksand were found; Parsons reported
favorably to Belmont, and the work began.

Mr. Belmont’s reasons for embarking on the enterprise, in which so
many had failed, were numerous. Chief among them was the consideration
that if New England was to continue as a manufacturing center, it
was imperative for her to import raw material cheaply. Every vessel
wrecked involved not only loss of life and property, but in many cases
had a far-reaching effect on industry by diminishing the supply of
raw material for New England looms. Any means that would help to keep
the supply of coal and cotton large and regular deserved the support
of all who were interested in New England’s prosperity. This state of
affairs turned the Canal’s old foe, the Railroad, into a friend, for
its prosperity depended on the prosperity of New England.

Another element which had great weight with Mr. Belmont was the change
which had taken place in the method of coastwise transportation.
Coasting schooners, which had carried nearly all the freight that did
not go by rail, were being crowded out by barges in tow. The great
advantage of these lay in their regularity (provided the weather was
good), and in the enormous amount of material they could transport in
a single trip. Their disadvantage was that in rough water they were
helpless. The Canal would, therefore, be a blessing to them, and might
rely on doing a far bigger business than it would have done if the
coasting schooner had remained supreme. Furthermore, the Canal was not
an isolated and independent waterway, but was to be the northernmost
link in a contemplated ‘chain of improved inland waters from Panama
to Massachusetts.’ Here were reasons enough for Mr. Belmont. Capital
presented no difficulties to him. From now on the work was in the hands
of contractors and engineers.

The first block of granite for the breakwater was dropped on June 19,
1909; the first trickle of water flowed through a gap that the dredges
made in the last dam, on April 21, 1914; and on July 4, Mr. Belmont,
with his son and Mr. and Mrs. Parsons, rowed the first craft through
the finished breach. The Canal was officially opened on July 29, when
eight vessels went through. Its channel is 25 feet deep, 250 feet
wide at water level, and 100 feet wide on the bottom; the approaching
channels are wider, measuring 250 feet. Exclusive of these approaches,
the Canal is 8 miles long. Since its completion, the Canal has been
used increasingly. From moderate beginnings, its business by 1920
had reached a gratifying figure: in that year 120,000 passengers and
2,000,000 tons of cargo passed through it on 8140 vessels.

Almost as soon as it was announced that Mr. Belmont was to finance the
work, the report went round that the company intended to sell it to
the Government. Whether or not this was the case is a question of no
importance. The canal was built entirely by private capital, and its
financiers got back what money they could on their investment during
the fourteen years that it continued under their management. Finally,
Western oratory to the contrary notwithstanding, Congress voted to buy
it for $11,500,000. The transaction was completed during the winter
of 1927-28, and the Government officially took charge of the Canal on
April 1. The Cape as a whole favored the change, though it cost the
towns of Sandwich and Bourne the taxes on some $1,000,000 worth of real
estate.

Such at present is the status of this new waterway--new in reality,
old in the dreams of men. What the future has in store for it is a
question on which wise men prefer to hold their peace. One reads of
plans maturing in the Federal incubator, to spend $10,000,000 of the
Nation’s money to make the Canal wider and deeper. If events march as
slowly in the future as they have in the past, the present generation’s
grandchildren will see no change in the Canal. But the ways of
governments are past finding out. It would hardly be a surprise to the
older and shock-proof citizens of Sagamore and Bourne if they awoke
some morning to the tune of steam shovels and dredges; if they saw an
army of laborers swarming about the Canal, until they had made it big
enough for the Leviathan herself to sail through. In the mean time
it has its past which nothing can change; Bradford’s dream, Sewall’s
polite interest, George Washington’s letter, and Machin and young James
Winthrop at the head of a column of surveyors and capitalists that
stretches clear to Boston. At the end of the pageant come Belmont and
Parsons, each with a crown of laurel and a victor’s smile.

EPILOGUE

To-day the tide of old affairs has ebbed from the Cape shores and left
them high and dry. Not even sentiment can blow the breath of life into
the sails of the vanished fishing fleet nor call back the dead glory of
the clippers. No analysis of the sandy soil--however cheering--can lure
the young Cape-Codder back to the abandoned farms. Time will not turn
backward in its flight, nor can imagination swell the meager gleanings
of boat fishermen or the barrels of whiting in the freezers to the bulk
of the full fares of cod and mackerel that two hundred schooners piled
on the wharves of Wellfleet and Provincetown in the forties. Land and
Sea have failed the Cape-Codder; and the best of the rising generation
have moved away.

But what of the others--those whose years are ripe enough to recall
the salt works and the packets? Has the passing of the old and busy
days left them bitter and resentful, or, what is just as bad, are
they content to live on the flimsy basis of a prosperous past? They
have been saved from both fates by a whimsical sense of humor, half
revealed, yet ever present, which guides their sayings and doings
through the lean years. Where did they get it? asks the psychologist.
Certainly not from the stern brethren of Plymouth nor from the bitter
malcontents who left England after the Acts of Conformity. It did not
come to them unbidden from their early struggles with a sandy soil.
Rather it followed as the result of a true perspective--that great
prerequisite for a humorous point of view--and this perspective they
learned from seagoing fathers and grandfathers who had picked it up
in the far corners of the world: from Shanghai bartenders and San
Francisco crimps; from the sultry banks of the Ganges and from matching
wits with British captains in the Master Mariners’ Club at Calcutta;
they pulled perspective along with codfish from the rugged waters of
the Grand Banks and pursued it from Hatteras to Nova Scotia with the
mackerel. And though their sons and grandsons inherited no ships and
sailed on no far voyages, yet they caught the perspective that enables
them to-day to distinguish great matters from small, and so to look
at life with a humorous slant. The picture of the Ringleader, or the
Belle Creole, or the Leading Wind, which hangs over the stove in the
sitting-room, is the symbol of this saving and instinctive point of
view.

So the Cape-Codder feels no qualms about nailing up roadside apple
stands for the automobilists, or about filling his spare rooms with
transients for the night. Some have built shore-dinner restaurants or
converted the old barn into an antique shop for the summer visitors.
Others have set up a garage or a filling station. If whales no longer
visit their shores, rich city folk do, and with easy adaptability, Cape
men and women take the goods the gods provide them. What, they argue,
is the use of a proud history if it does not make them independent? Why
claim descent from the Pilgrims if they cannot serve tables without
losing their pride? And the twinkle in their eyes, which Grandfather
Howes brought from the ends of the world and handed down to them with
the teakwood blanket-chest--that twinkle appears for a moment as they
put the tourists’ money in the till, and they chuckle quietly at the
ways of the world.

THE END

NOTES

CHAPTER I

As is explained in the Notes to Chapter II, if such a headland
as Webb’s Island ever existed, it had vanished before 1606. In
fact, however, it must have disappeared centuries earlier. It is a
geographical monstrosity for two points to exist close together and at
right angles to each other on a coast like Chatham’s. The forces that
create one would demolish the other. The alleged Webb’s Island Point
was nearly at right angles to Monomoy Point, and close to it. The two,
therefore, could never have been in existence at the same time; Webb’s
Island Point must have been demolished before Monomoy was made. Monomoy
was there in 1606; we can only guess how old it was then; perhaps a
thousand years. But its age, whatever it was, must be subtracted from
1606 in order to get back to the date when Webb’s Island Point existed.

We are now confronted by the question whether or not, though the rest
of this headland vanished at a very remote period, the extreme easterly
end of it, Webb’s Island, was still above water in colonial times. An
article in the ‘Massachusetts Magazine’ (III, 1791, page 151) says
that such an island existed about 1700. This statement is said to be
corroborated in Morse’s ‘Universal Geography,’ _I_, 357, ed. 1793 (Amos
Otis, ‘Discovery of an Ancient Ship,’ page 10, note). To offset this
testimony we have only the negative evidence that Champlain failed
to mention such an island or to show it in his map. This oversight,
however, is not very significant. The chances are, then, that Webb’s
Island was visible when the first settlers arrived in Chatham, though
there had been blue water between it and the mainland for centuries.

CHAPTER II

Few authorities doubt that Gosnold’s Tucker’s Terror and Point Care
were parts of a point of land that formerly projected from the Eastham
shore. Captain John Smith, though he never saw this point, had been
told of its existence by the Indians, and named it Île Nauset. What
Gosnold called Tucker’s Terror was the surf on the north side of this
point, and Point Care was its eastern extremity.

As to identification of Point Gilbert, authorities differ. It has been
argued that this point was the end of another peninsula about nine
miles long, something like Île Nauset, that is said to have stretched
easterly from Chatham and terminated in Webb’s Island. It is possible
that such a peninsula existed at a very remote period, but certainly
it had vanished before 1604, when Gosnold arrived, for no trace of it
appears on the excellent map of the Chatham region that Champlain made
in 1606 (Champlain’s ‘Voyages,’ II, opposite page 122), only two years
later, and not even the most careless cartographer could have missed
such an important feature. The exponents of the Webb’s Island theory
for Point Gilbert cannot have seen this map, for they go on to say
that Monomoy Point had not been formed in Gosnold’s time. Champlain,
however, shows it on his map substantially as it is to-day. These
considerations eliminate Webb’s Island and its peninsula as a possible
identification for Point Gilbert.

There remains Monomoy, which answers all the requirements save one.
Archer, who accompanied Gosnold and wrote an account of the voyage,
estimated the distance from Point Care to Point Gilbert as six miles.
If he meant from headland to headland, this is too short. But none
of the distances recorded by early navigators are to be trusted.
Furthermore, it should be remembered that breakers do not confine their
attentions to the _end_ of Monomoy Beach; they break indiscriminately
along its whole length; and breakers were what occupied Gosnold’s mind
in connection with Point Gilbert. Six miles is near enough for a guess
at the distance between Île Nauset and the nearest part of Monomoy
Beach--which being white with breakers, like the rest of its length,
was from Gosnold’s point of view as much a part of Point Gilbert as the
southern end of it was. The actual distance is about eight miles.

Some authorities, disturbed by another discrepancy in distance, push
the whole scene of Gosnold’s activities farther west and make Tucker’s
Terror and Point Care, Monomoy instead of Île Nauset, and contend that
Point Gilbert was the southeastern corner of Great Island, off Hyannis
Harbor, now called Point Gammon. One statement supports this theory;
Archer says that the distance from Cape Cod to Point Care was twelve
leagues; and that is about the right distance from the outer Beach
at Provincetown to Monomoy. But, as has been suggested, we must be
very cautious in accepting any mileage mentioned by early mariners.
It is well known that distances are deceptive when men are navigating
unfamiliar waters and are constantly watching for something ahead. Even
so accurate a cartographer as Champlain calls the distance from Nauset
to Chatham eighteen miles, whereas in fact it is about six. If Archer’s
guess of twelve leagues was right, it is the only instance of its kind
in the history of early Cape Cod navigation.

Point Gammon, too, is high and rocky, and Archer mentions no rocks
until the expedition reached the Elizabeth Islands. Furthermore, he
writes as follows of Point Gilbert: ‘We sent forth the boat to sound
over a Breach (that in our course lay) of another Point, by us called
Gilbert’s Point.... The nineteenth we passed over the breach of
Gilbert’s Point in foure or five fadome.’ The phrase ‘the breach of
the Point’ means the breakers rolling in over shoals that lay off the
point. Such shoals, as every seaman knows, lie off Monomoy, and Gosnold
sent his ship’s boat to try the depth of the water on them. If it had
been blowing, this would have been a suicidal maneuver. But Archer
tells us that the day was ‘faire.’ There are no such shoals off Point
Gammon.

CHAPTER III

It is impossible to do much more than guess at these figures because
our ancestors, with tantalizing piety, regarded Praying Indians as the
only ones worth counting, and they did not begin to count even these
until late in the seventeenth century. Various estimates follow:

Date Authority No. of Praying Reference
Indians

1674 Richard Bourne, in About 500 (old 1 M.H.S. Coll.,
letter to Major Gookin and young) I, 196 ff.

1685 Governor Hinckley’s 944 (plus three 4 M.H.S. Coll.,
Report to Stoughton times as many V, 132 f.
and Dudley children)

1698 Rawson and 1100 (approximately 1 M.H.S. Coll.,
Danforth’s --exclusive X, 129 ff.
Report of children)

In 1763, the census of Indians of all conditions and ages shows a total
of 515.

The most useful of these figures are Hinckley’s for 1685, and Rawson
and Danforth’s for 1698, because they agree pretty well. It is safe
to say that by 1698 (the date of Rawson and Danforth’s Report) nearly
all the Cape Indians were at least nominally praying Indians, for John
Freeman, in a letter to Hinckley, dated Eastham, 1685, says that most
Eastham Indians do ‘frequent their meetings on the Sabbath, except aged
and decrepit persons and infants and some extravagant fellows that
run from one place to another.’ (4 M.H.S. Coll., V, 131 ff.) So if
the number of praying Indians was about 1000 at this time, the total
number, including praying and non-praying, could not have been much
greater. War, civilization, rum, and most of all pestilence, had been
at work reducing them to this number for the past eighty years or so.
I hazard the guess that during these eighty years their number had
been decreased by half, and therefore give 2000 as the pre-pestilence
population. Only adults are included in these figures. If children are
included, this number may be multiplied by four.

CHAPTER IV

1. Frequently warning out of town was a purely nominal performance,
issued with no expectation or desire that it would be obeyed. Its
purpose in such cases was to protect the town against the possibility
of having the warned citizen ever become a town charge. ‘Admitted’
men, if they fell on evil days, were entitled to support by the town;
but those who had been warned out had no such rights, though they
might continue to live as respected members of the community. The town
fathers were sometimes indiscriminate and warned out all newcomers;
sometimes they warned only those whom they judged likely to become
paupers. (See J. H. Benton, _Warning Out in New England_, Boston, 1911.)

2. Mashpee is an exception. This district was held as a sort of
Reservation for the Indians and was not therefore comparable to the
other towns. It had five thousand acres of Common Land as late as 1869.
(Hearing before Committee on Indians at Mashpee, 1869, House No. 502,
page 13.)

CHAPTER IX

This was the opinion of less austere persons than Her Majesty. A
certain William Clap, of Provincetown, in a letter to Governor Dudley
in 1705, expressed the same conviction. He wrote in part as follows:

CAPE COD, _July 13th, 1705_
SQUIRE DUDLEY.

SIR:--After all due sarvis and Respects to your honnor wishing you
all hapynes boath hear and hear after I mack bould to inform your
honnor that i have liveed at the Cap this 4 year and I have often
every year sien that her maiesty has been very much wronged of har
dues by these coutry peple and other whall men as coms hear a whallen
every year which tacks up drift whales which was never killed by any
man which fish i understand belongest to har majesty and had i had
power i could have seased several every year....

Your hombled and unworthy sarvant
WM. CLAP

The Governor gave Clap a commission as water bailiff and a warrant to
prize drift whales. Thus do tale-bearers prosper when they carry their
tidings to the high places.

CHAPTER XI

There was some justice in this rejoinder, for though throughout its
entire colonial history, the Cape had not a single lighthouse to bless
itself with, and though for fourteen years after we became independent,
sailors had to steer by the stars alone in skirting Monomoy and Peaked
Hill Bars, yet once they began, our Congressmen kept on voting money
for lighthouses until the coast was adequately illuminated.

The first to be built on the Cape was Highland Light. Its foundations
were laid in 1797 on what the Reverend Levi Whitman of Wellfleet called
‘a mountain which is of solid clay in Truro.’ It stood unchanged
while two generations of sailors kept a safe offing on even the
darkest nights. Then in 1857 it was re-built into one of the foremost
lighthouses of the world, a position which it has held ever since. Its
182,000 candle-power lantern is unequalled by any other oil burner on
this continent.

It was soon evident that the varied maritime activities of New England
were a source of great profit to the country. Everything that aided
navigation was therefore encouraged in Congress, and another lighthouse
was put up in 1816 at Race Point, back of Provincetown. The fact that
the next to appear (1822) was on Billingsgate Island, at the entrance
to Wellfleet Harbor, shows clearly what the Government thought of the
Bay shore fisheries. This light and its nearest neighbor on the Bay,
built at Sandy Neck, Barnstable, four years later, guided the destinies
of fishermen and packet captains through the busy decades that
followed. To-day, though weeks pass without a single sail to relieve
the monotonous blue of the waters of the Bay, these two lights still
blink reminiscently, cheered by the chance of guiding an occasional
lobsterman or yachtsman to port.

In 1823, the Government took a grant to a piece of beach grass and
sand on Monomoy Point and later erected a lighthouse which showed
Chatham fishermen the way home and which, with the Great Point Light on
Nantucket, gave coastwise vessels a cross-bearing through the dangerous
water of the Sound. Georges Bankers were guided in safety around the
very tip of the Cape by the Long Point Light, which made its appearance
in 1826. A dozen years later--thanks largely to the exertions of the
same Mr. Collins who gave Emerson the information about wreckers--three
lighthouses were put up on Nauset Beach about a mile north of the
entrance to the Harbor. These, with the twin lights of Chatham, and a
smaller one at Hyannis, handed vessels on from lighthouse to lighthouse
all the way from the Nobsque Point Beacon at Falmouth (built in 1828)
to deep water beyond Peaked Hill Bars and the Race. The old stone
tower on Point Gammon went out of business when Bishop and Clark’s was
put up three miles south of it on a ledge in the Sound. Two others
were erected somewhat gratuitously, one at Pamet Harbor, Truro, in
1849 and the other at Wood End, Provincetown, in 1873. The former was
discontinued after six years, when the harbor silted up to a mere
creek; but Wood End still fills the gap between the Race and Long Point.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL:

Bradford, _History of Plymouth Plantation_ (Mass. Hist. Soc. ed.
1912). Simeon L. Deyo (editor), _History of Barnstable County, Mass._
(N.Y., 1890). Dean Dudley, _Historical Sketches of Towns in Plymouth
and Barnstable Counties, Mass._ (Boston, 1873). Frederick Freeman,
_History of Cape Cod_ (Boston, 1858; printed for the author). John
Abbot Goodwin, _The Pilgrim Republic_ (Boston, 1888). Samuel Eliot
Morison, _Maritime History of Massachusetts_ (Boston, 1921). Mourt’s
_Relation_ (H. M. Dexter ed., Boston, 1865). Amos Otis, _Genealogical
Notes of Barnstable Families_ (Barnstable, 1888). _Population
and Resources of Cape Cod_ (Mass. Dept. of Labor and Industries,
Reprinted for the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, Boston, 1922).
Charles F. Swift, _Cape Cod_ (Yarmouth, 1897). Alexander Young,
_Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth etc._
(Boston, 1841). Files of the Barnstable _Patriot_ and the Yarmouth
_Register_.

TOWN HISTORIES:

Charles W. Jenkins, _Three Lectures on the Early History of Falmouth_
(Falmouth, 1889). Herman A. Jennings, _Chequocket or Coatuit: The
Aboriginal Name of Provincetown_ (Yarmouthport, 1885). Everett I.
Nye, _History of Wellfleet_ (Hyannis, 1920). Rev. Enoch Pratt,
_A Comprehensive History, Ecclesiastical and Civil, of Eastham,
Wellfleet and Orleans etc._ (Yarmouth, 1844). Shebnah Rich, _Truro,
Cape Cod, or Land Marks and Sea Marks_ (Boston, 1884). Rev. Nancy W.
Paine Smith, _The Provincetown Book_ (Brockton, 1922). William C.
Smith, _A History of Chatham, Mass._ (Hyannis, 1909-1913). Charles
F. Swift, _Old Yarmouth_ (Yarmouthport, 1884). The Town Records and
Proprietors’ Records of all towns on the Cape.

For additional information regarding:

GEOLOGY AND CHANGES IN COASTLINE:

Prof. Albert Perry Brigham, _Cape Cod and the Old Colony_ (N.Y.,
1920) which I have followed very closely. Prof. Nathaniel Shaler,
_Geology of the Cape District_ (from 18th Annual Report of U.S.
Geological Survey, 1896-97). Henry Mitchell’s Article and Charts on
Monomoy (U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, 1886). Amos Otis, _Discovery
of an Ancient Ship_ (re-printed from New Eng. Hist. & Geneal.
Register, Albany, 1864). _Mass. Magazine_, Vol. III, 1791. Timothy
Dwight’s Travels, Vol. III.

INDIANS:

Pub. of Col. Soc. of Mass., 1911-13, Vol. 14, Transactions. Winslow’s
_Good Newes_. Smithsonian Report for 1883, _Notes on Wampanoag
Indians_, by Henry E. Chase. _Purchas His Pilgrimes_, III, XIX
(Glasgow, 1906). M.H.S. Proceedings, XXIV. Mary Farwell Ayer,
_Richard Bourne, Missionary to the Mashpee Indians_ (Boston, 1908).
Timothy Alden, _Collection of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions_
(N.Y., 1814). Jedidiah Morse, _Indian Report_, 1820. Hearing before
Comm. on Indians at Mashpee, Feb. 9, 1869 (House, No. 502). 1 M.H.S.
Coll. V; 2 M.H.S. Coll. III; 1 M.H.S. Coll. I; 1 M.H.S. Coll. VIII; 4
M.H.S. Coll. V; 1 M.H.S. Coll. X; 1 M.H.S. Coll. VI.

EXPLORERS:

Capt. John Smith, _Works_, Part II, 696 ff. (Edward Arber, ed.,
Westminster, 1895). Sam’l Champlain, _Voyages_ (Prince Soc. ed.
Boston, 1880). James Rosier’s _Narrative_, 3 M.H.S. Coll. VIII.
_Purchas His Pilgrimes_, III (Glasgow, 1906). Mourt’s _Relation_
(H. M. Dexter, ed., Boston, 1865). B. F. DeCosta, _Cavo de Baros,
or the Place of Cape Cod in the Old Cartography_ (N.Y., 1881). All
but the last of these contain also valuable information on the early
coastline and the Indians.

THE FIRST SETTLERS AND LIFE IN THE COLONIAL PERIOD:

Official Proceedings of the Quarter Millennial Celebration of
Sandwich and Bourne (Falmouth, 1890). J. H. Benton, _Warning Out
in New England_ (Boston, 1911). Geo. H. Moore, _Notes on Hist. of
Slavery in Mass._ (N.Y., 1866). Plym. Col. Rec. V. 173 f; VI, 15;
IX, 71. Barnstable Probate Rec. IX, 6; VIII, 473; XIII, 490; IV, 549
f; etc., etc. Daniel Wing, _Old Cape Cod Windmills_ (Library of C.
Cod Hist. & Geneal., No. 14, C. W. Swift, Yarmouthport). James Brown
Scott, _Robert Bacon, Life and Letters_ (N.Y. 1923). Timothy Alden,
_Memorabilia of Yarmouth_ (1 M.H.S. Coll. V). Roy H. Akagi, _The
Town Proprietors of the New England Colonies_ (U. of Penn. Press,
1924). Edwin Crowell, _A History of Barrington Township and Vicinity,
Shelburne Co., Nova Scotia, 1604-1870_. Diary of Sam’l Sewall (5
M.H.S. Coll. VI). William H. Whitmore, _Origin of Names of Towns in
Mass._ (M.H.S. Proc., Vol. 12). John W. Dodge, _Hist. of First Cong.
Ch., Yarmouth, Mass._ (Yarmouthport, 1873). Yarmouth _Register_,
March 9, 1837.

REVOLUTION:

Wm. Tudor, _Life of James Otis_ (Boston, 1823). MS. Diary of Benj.
Percival, of Sandwich. M.H.S. Proc., Vols. 16 & 23. Augustus C.
Buell, _Paul Jones, Founder of the American Navy_ (N.Y., 1903).
Francis Tiffany Bowles, _The Loyalty of Barnstable in the Revolution_
(Pub. of Col. Soc. Mass., Vol. XXV). Gardner Allen, _Mass. Privateers
in Revolution_ (M.H.S. Coll., Vol. 77. 1927). Diary of Wm. Russell
in Old Mill Prison, Jan. 22, 1781 (quoted by Frederick W. Snow in
pamph., _Snowden, Orleans, Mass._, privately printed). Publications
of Naval Hist. Soc., Vol. III, 1913. E. A. Grozier, _The Wreck of the
Somerset_ (Provincetown, 1887).

REVOLUTION TO CIVIL WAR ASHORE:

MS. Papers of Capt. Job Chase. Thomas F. Hall, _Shipbuilding in
East Dennis_ (Lib. of C. Cod Hist. & Geneal. No. 11, C. F. Swift,
Yarmouthport, 1925). Constitution and By-Laws of the Barnstable
Lyceum (Barnstable, 1824). _Address Delivered before the Brewster
Lyceum, 1836_ (Barnstable, 1836). Half-Centennial Celebration of the
Yarmouth Institute (Yarmouthport, 1893). Commonwealth of Mass. Report
of Commissioners on Cape Cod and East Harbors, Jan. 5, 1853 (Senate
No. 6) and Jan. 16, 1854 (Senate No. 5). Report of Committee on C.
Cod Harbor, 1857 (Public Doc. No. 36). Report of Commissioners on
Provincetown Dike 1872 (Senate No. 5). Senate Report on Condition of
Province Lands, Jan. 1838 (Senate No. 6).

WHALING:

Alex. Starbuck, _Hist. of Amer. Whale Fishery etc._ (appended to
report of U.S. Commission on Fisheries for 1875-76). John R. Spears,
_The Story of the New England Whalers_ (N.Y., 1922). Chas. B. Hawes,
_Whaling_ (N.Y., 1924). Kendall, _Travels_. Pub. of Col. Soc. of
Mass. Transactions, 1904-06, Vol. X. M.H.S. Proc., Vol. 43. John A.
Cook, _Pursuing the Whale_ (Boston, 1926). B. L. Shurtleff, _Songs at
Anchor_ (privately printed, 1922).

FISHERIES:

M.H.S. Coll., VIII. MS. notes on Wellfleet vessels, found among
papers of late Everett I. Nye of Wellfleet. MS. recording bounties
paid on porpoise tails. Geo. W. Field, _Report on Shellfisheries of
Mass._, in 41st annual report of the Commission of Fisheries and
Game. David L. Belding, _Report upon the Scallop Fisheries of Mass._
for the Commonwealth of Mass., Boston, 1910. Thoreau, Cape Cod.
Winthrop L. Marvin, _The American Merchant Marine_ (N.Y., 1919).

STORMS, WRECKS, ETC.

Alexander Young, _Chronicles of Massachusetts_. _Autobiography
of Zachary G. Lamson_ (Boston, 1908). Dow and Edmonds, _Pirates
of the New England Coast_ (Salem, 1923). Bliss Perry, _The Heart
of Emerson’s Journals_ (Boston, 1926). _Accounts of Shipwreck_,
by a Friend of Seamen (Brunswick, Me., 1823). J. W. Dalton, _The
Lifesavers of Cape Cod_ (Boston, 1902). James Freeman, _A Description
of the East Coast of Cape Cod etc., etc._ (Boston, 1802). _Elegy
on the Death of Capt. Isaiah Knowles and his crew etc., etc._
(contemporary broadside, 1806). I. Morton Small, _Shipwrecks on Cape
Cod_ (No. Truro, 1925).

THE MERCHANT MARINE:

Francis W. Sprague, _Barnstable and Yarmouth Sea Capts. and
Ship-Owners_ (privately printed, 1913). J. Henry Sears, _Brewster
Shipmasters_ (Yarmouthport, 1906). Octavius T. Howe & Fred’k C.
Matthews, _Amer. Clipper Ships_, 1833-58 (Salem Marine Research Soc.,
1926). _Old Shipping Days in Boston_ (State St. Trust Co., Boston).
_Some Merchants and Sea Capts. of Old Boston_ (ditto). _Other
Merchants and Sea Capts. of Old Boston_ (ditto). F. W. Howay, _John
Kendrick and His Sons_ (Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 4,
Dec., 1922). F. W. Howay, _A Ballad of the North West Fur Trade_
(New England Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, Jan., 1928). Chas. G. Loring,
_Memoir of Wm. Sturgis_ (M.H.S. Proc., VII). _Elijah Cobb, a Cape Cod
Skipper_ (Yale Univ. Press, 1925). Basil Lubbock, _The Western Ocean
Packets_ (Boston, 1925), _Colonial Clippers_ (Glasgow, 1921). Arthur
H. Clark, _The Clipper Ship Era_ (N.Y., 1910). Samuel Eliot Morrison,
_The Old Merchant Marine_ (_Landmark_, Vol. V, No. 12, Dec., 1923).

CIVIL WAR:

Parker Pillsbury, _In Memoriam_, an address in memory of Capt. Prince
S. Crowell, delivered in East Dennis, Dec. 11th, 1881 (Clague &
Wegman, Rochester, N.Y.). R. B. Forbes, _To the Naval and Military
Committees_ (broadside in Harvard College Library).

THE CHURCH:

_Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission_
(Sam’l Rawson Gardiner, ed.; printed for the Camden Society).
_Proceedings and Result of an Ecclesiastical Council, ex-parte_,
which met at West Barnstable, Mass., 27th Oct., 1868, to advise in
the case of Mr. Joseph Bodfish and Family (Boston, 1868). Nath’n’l
Morton, _New England’s Memorial_ (Boston, 1855). _Declaration
of Ministers in Barnstable Co. relating to the late Practise of
Itinerant Preaching_ (Boston, 1745). _Mortuary Record from the
Gravestones in Old Burial Ground in Brewster_ (Chas. Mayo, ed.,
Yarmouthport, 1898). _The Old Cemetery, Sandwich, Mass._, a paper
read before the Sandwich Hist. Soc., Oct. 20th, 1908. MS. Notes on
the Barnstable Come-Outers. _Cape Cod in Poetry, an Anthology_,
Joshua Freeman Crowell and Florence Hathaway Crowell, ed.

THE CANAL:

Numerous Arguments by S. W. McCall, E. C. Carrigan, Richard Olney,
and Robt. M. Morse, Jr., delivered before various Legislative
Committees relative to one Canal petitioner or another, 1887-91.
J. W. Miller, _Cape Cod and its Canal_ (1914). J. W. Dalton, _The
Cape Cod Canal_ (Sandwich, 1911). William Barclay Parsons, _Cape Cod
Canal_, an address delivered before the Boston Chamber of Commerce
May 25th, 1910. Senate, No. 241, 1883. Senate No. 218, April 9th,
1880. House, No. 459, 1882. _Report of the Joint Committee of 1860_
upon Proposed Canal etc., etc. (Pub. Doc. No. 41, printed, Boston,
1864). This volume is also extremely valuable for its statistics on
shipwrecks. James Winthrop, _Journal of a Survey in 1791 for a Canal
across Cape Cod etc._ (Boston Public Library Hist. MSS., No. 3,
1902). This journal is also interesting for overland travel before
stage-coaches.

INDEX

Abelino, 255

Abolitionists, 257, 289

Acadians, 105

Acorn, 237

Active, 223

Acts of Conformity, 304

Adams, Rev. Chas. S., 145

Adams, Rev. Hugh, 82, 283, 286

Adams, John, 66, 115, 129

Adams, Dr. Samuel, 120

Agenor, 255

Agrey, Thos., 146

Alden, John, 53

Alden, Rev. Timothy, 45, 283, 287

Alert, 250

Alexandria, 223

Allen, Capt. Howard, 255

Allen, Jolly, 130

Allen, Priscilla, 270

Allen, Wm., 270

Allen, Zachariah, 64

Altair, 191

American Hero, 141

American Navigation Club, 250

Amsterdam, 265

Anabaptists, 268

Anchor-dragging, 221

Andros, Edmond, 96

Antietam, 261

Anti-Slavery Riot, 257

Anti-Slavery Societies, 260

Anti-tobacco Society, 145

Archbishop of Canterbury, 267

Archer, 250

Archer, Gabriel, 308

Arctic, 254

Arctic Whaling, 178

Arminius, 285

Arrival, 191

Aspinet, 35

Atahualpa, 241

Atkins, Capt. David, 227

Atkins, Freeman, 74

Atkins, Captain Henry, 171

Atlantic, 148

Atlantic (Collins’ liner), 254

Atlas, 148

Atwood, D., 204

Atwood, H. & R. Co., 204

Atwood, Captain Nath’n’l, 159, 200

Atwood, Richard, 191

Awashonks, 173, 175

Azor, 255

Bachelors, penalized, 63

Bachiler, Stephen, 54

Bacon, Capt. Dan’l C., 240, 250, 252

Bacon, Edward, Esq., 117, 127

Bacon, John, 64, 79

Bacon, Judah, 80, 249

Bacon, Nath’n’l, 78, 80

Baker & Morrill, 254

Baker, Capt. Ezekiel C., 255

Baker, Capt. Isaiah, 193

Baldwin, Loammi, 296

Baltic, 254

Baptism, 268, 275

Baptist Church, 259

Baring’s Island, 175

Barlow, George, 270

Barnstable, 9, 12, 39, 55, 83, 91, 96, 126, 183, 188, 277

Barnstable County, 96

Barnstable Harbor, 9, 10, 16

Barrell Sound, 239

Barrington, N.S., 108, 128, 184

Bass Hole, 188, 294

Bass Pond, 56

Bass River, 29, 188, 205, 294

Bass Rock, 14

Bassett, Capt. Wm., 292

Battersly, James, 110

Baxter, Capt. James, 78

Baxter, Capt. Rodney, 249

Baxter, Thos., 74

Bay of Biscay, 92

Bay de Chaleur, 186, 198

Bearse, Augustian, 205

Bearse, Benj., 205

Bearse, Capt. Frank, 249

Bearse, Jas., 170

Bellamy, Sam’l, 216

Belle Creole, 305

Belle of the West, 149

Belmont, August, 301

Bering Strait, 178

Betsy, 139

Billingsgate, 60, 94, 170

Billingsgate Island, 9

Billingsgate Light, 310

Billingsgate Point, 25

Billington, John, 34

Bills of Credit, 107

Biscay shallop, 14

Bishop & Clerk’s Light, 311

Bishop of London, 267

Bishop of St. David’s, 267

Bishops, 266

Bitter water, 153

Blachford, Wm., 132

Blackfish, 165, 167

Blackfish Creek, 195

Blackfriars, 267

Blackwater Bay, 95

Blockade-runners (in Revolution), 124

Blockade-runners (in 1812), 141

Blockhouses, 79

Bloomer, 193

Boat fishermen, 185

Boat Meadow Creek, 218, 295

Bodfish, Asenath, 274

Bodfish, Benj., 274

Bodfish, Joseph, 274

Bodfish, Sylvanus, 274

Body of the People, the, 116

Booths, early houses, 76

Boston, Cape Cod & N.Y. Canal Co., 301

Bound Brook Island, 9

Bounty on cod, 185

Bourne, 30, 283

Bourne, Jos., 50

Bourne, Richard, 43, 283

Bourne, Shearsjushub, 50

Bourne, Thomas, 146

Bowdoin, Hon. James, 293

Boyter, Rev. Chas., 284

Braddock, defeat of, 106

Bradford, Wm., 10, 22, 31, 36, 58, 68, 208, 265, 292

Bravas, 51

Bray, 147

Brewster, 61, 135

Bridgewater, 47, 102

Bristol Co., 96

Brown, Capt. in British navy, 240

Brown, Wm. Wells, 259

Brutus, 230

Bryant & Sturgis, 241

Burgess, Benj., 148

Burgess, Capt. Nathaniel, 181

Burgess, Capt. Wm., 249

Burke, Capt. Edmund, 255

Burke, Edmund, 97

Burnell, 61

Bursley, Capt. Ira, 246, 250

Bursley, Capt. Joseph, 255

Buzzards Bay, 13, 15, 18, 52

Buzzards Bay Glacier, 4

Cabot, John, 13

Cabot, Sebastian, 13

Cahoon’s Hollow, 217

California trade, 250

Calvin, John, 285

Camel, 139

Camp Meetings, 282

Canada Expedition, 103

Canal, the, 206, 231, 292

Canootus, 64

Canton, trade with, 135

Cap Batturier, 17

Cap Blanc, 16

Cape Cod, 14, 94, 263

Cape Cod Canal Co., 297

Cape Cod Glacier, 4

Cape Cod Ship Canal Co., 298

Cape James, 19

Cape Race, 254

Cape Verde Islands, 51, 239

Caroline, 241

Casco Bay, 107

Cassidy, Dan’l, 222

Catholic Church, 290

Cattle, 71

Cedar, 16

Cedar Creek, 262

Centerville, 91

Cezer, 65

Challenger, 249

Champlain, Sam’l, 16, 37, 307

Chancellorsville, 262

Chariot of Fame, 246

Charming Betty, 146

Chase, Capt., Harwich abolitionist, 259

Chase, Job, 147

Chase, Job, Jr., 148

Chase, Capt. Josiah, 192

Chatham, 7, 89, 95, 184, 188, 216

Chatham & Harwich Mfg. Co., 146

Cheever, Rev. Edward, 288

Child, Richard, 61

China trade, 136

Chipman, Capt. Chas., 261

Christian Scientists, 290

Christopher Hall, 149

Church, the, 265

Church, Rev. A. J., 154

Church, Capt. Ben., 64, 101

Church Discipline, 273

Church of England, 265, 290

Church Music, 284

Cincinnatus, 191

Circuit Courts, 84

City of Columbia, 255

Civil War, 257

Clams, 200

Clap, Wm., 93, 310

Clara Bell, 224

Clark, Rev. Edgar, 281

Clark’s Island, 25

Clay Pounds, 4, 7, 212

Clifton, Richard, 265

Clinton, Chas., 214

Clinton, De Witt, 214

Clinton, Gov. Geo., 214

Clinton, Gen. Jas., 214

Clipper Ship Era, 248

Clothing, 71

Cobb, Capt. Elijah, 144, 242

Cobblers, 71

Cobb’s Hill, 277

Cod Fisheries, 182

Coggin, Henry, 64

Coggswell, Dr., 280

Cold Storage, 199

Cole, John, 217, 227

Collins, of Nauset light, 221

Collins, Benj., 65

Collins, E. K., 247, 253

Collins, Gamaliel, 171

Collins, Capt. John, 142, 144, 211, 246, 253

Collins, Jonathan, 222

Collins Line, 253

Columbia, 239

Columbus, 230

Combatant, 40

Come-Outers, 257, 260, 278, 288

Comet, 236

Commissioners of the Crown, 89

Commodore Hull, 234

Commodore Morris, 177

Common Land, 68

Communism, 67, 69

Concord, 14

Confidence, 230

Congregational Church, 57, 266, 271

Congress, 175

Conqueror, 255

Constitution, 144

Conventicles, 267

Cook, John, 144

Cook, Capt. John A., 173, 178, 181

Copeland, John, 269

Coppin, Rob’t, 24

Coquette, 249

Corn, 23, 72

Cornhill, 24

Cotton, Rev. John, 64, 276

Cotuit, 15, 42, 91, 204

Cotuit Neck, 91

Covenant, of Congregational Church, 266

Creole, 220

Cressy, Capt. Josiah P., 250

Crocker, Loring, 152

Crocker, Capt. Rowland, 244, 246

Crocker, Capt. Sam’l, 114

Crocker, Wm., 61

Crocker & Warren, 250

Crocker’s Tavern, 141, 156

Crosby, C. Worthington, 147

Crosby, Herbert, 147

Crosby, Horace, 147

Crosby, H. Manley, 147

Crosby, Wilton, 147

Crow, John, 54, 79, 84

Crowell, Elisha, 147

Crowell, Capt. Isaiah, 243

Crowell, Jeremiah, 148

Crowell, Capt. Prince, 149

Crowell, Capt. Seth, Jr., 249

Crowell, Thos., 108

Crown Point, 98, 105

Cudworth, Jas., 271

Cumberland, 130

Cummaquids, 28

Curtis, Paul, 248

Cushman, Robt., 67

Dabney, Chas., 255

Dalmatia, 191

Damon, Rev. Jude, 287

Danforth, Capt., 223

Dangerfield, 92

Davenport, Addington, 65

Da Verrazano, Giovanni, 13

Davis, Nicholas, 91, 205

Davis, Thos., 217

Davis, Wendell, 295

Davis Straits, 171

Dead Man’s Hollow, 130

Declaration of Independence, 126

Declaration of Rights, 84

Deerfield, 104

Delano, Warren, 249

Democracy, 60

Dennis, 11, 88, 135, 188, 277

Dennis, Rev. Josiah, 135, 283

Depreciation of currency, 106

Deputies, 83

Dermer, Thos., 14, 33

Deville, Wat., 61

Dexter, cand. for Gov., 139

Dexter, Rev. Henry M., 275

Dexter, Philip, 76

Dill, Nathaniel, 111

Dillingham, houses, 78

Dillingham, Capt. James S., Jr., 249, 251

Dillingham, Simeon, 146

Dimmock, Jos., 125, 129

Dimock, Thos., 56, 84

Dinah, 65

Doane, Edmund, 108

Doane, Col. Elisha, 172

Doane, Freeman, 219

Doane, Joseph, 217

Doane & Knowles, wreckers, 220

Dogtown, 154 & note

Donald MacKay, 251

Dover Cliff, 15

Dover, 246

Dramatic Line, 142, 247

Drew, Benj., 14

Drift Whales, 164, 287, 310

Duck Creek, 195, 198

Duck Harbor & Beach Co., 146

Dudley, Gov., 93

Dutch, 292

Duxbury, 53

Dwight, Rev. Timothy, 155, 233

Dyer, Capt. Solomon H., 211

Eagle’s Flight, 235

East Dennis, 148

Eastham, 7, 11, 16, 25, 39, 58, 83, 87, 92, 94, 173, 184,
188, 277

East Harbor, 11, 23, 159, 170

Eastham & Orleans Canal Proprietors, 295

Eel River, 102

Elders, 266

Eldredge, cartographer, 212

Eldredge, Capt. Marshall W., 228

Eldredge’s shoal, 212

Eldridge, Capt. Asa, 246, 250, 254

Eldridge, Capt. John, 246, 250

Eldridge, Capt. Oliver, 246, 249

Eldridge, Robt., 80

Eliza, 241

Eliza Adams, 175

Elizabeth Islands, 4, 15, 124, 209

Ellen Sears, 149

Ellis, Abner, 148

Ellis, Seth, 229

Embargo, 136, 234, 244

Emeline Charlotte, 222

Emerson, R. W., 221

Emery, Rev. Stephen, 287

Emigrations, from Cape, 107

Emulous, 147

Episcopal Church, see Church of England

Epsom salts, 153

Exit, 148

Express, 204

Falkland Islands, 172, 239

Falmouth, 88, 91, 124, 140, 173, 175

Fanny, 238

Farmer, 225

Fessenden, Rev. Benj., 283

Fessenden, Samuel, 298

Fessenden’s tavern, 156

Feudalism, 127

Fifth N.Y. Volunteers, 262

Finns, 79, 201, 290

Firing the woods, 31

First Discovery, the, 23

First Encounter, the, 25

Fish, Rev. Phineas, 51

Fisheries, 109, 182

Fishermen, 108, 190

Fish-flakes, 186

Fish Weirs, 198

Fitzpatrick, 228

Flannagan, DeWitt, 301

Flannagan, Wm., 301

Flax, 233

Fleetwing, 249

Florida, 254

Flying Cloud, 250

Flying Dragon, 249

Flying Scud, 249

Forbes, John M., 300

Forbes, R. B., 261

Fort Duquesne, 98, 105

Fort Washington, 240

Foster, Stephen, 258

Fox, 223

Fox, Alfred D., 299

Francis, 222

Franklin, 148, 230

Franklin, B., 169

Franklin, Benj., 129

Fredericksburg, 261

Freddie W. Alton, 147

Free Independent Church of Holiness, 291

Freeman, Abigail, 115

Freeman, Edward, 53, 84

Freeman, Fred’k, 142

Freeman, Jas., 50, 152, 225

Freeman, John, 50, 309

Freeman, Joshua, Jr., 255

Freeman, Col. Nath’n’l, 114, 116, 119, 293

Freeman, Maj. Nath’n’l, 151

French and Indian Wars, 102, 277

Friends, see Quakers

Friendship, 129

Gambrel-roofs, 78

Game Cock, 252

Garnet, 209, 247

Garrett, Richard, 36

General Arnold, 128

General Court, 83

General Leslie, 129

Geology, 3

George, Sachem, 60

George and Ann, 212

George Shattuck, 237

Georges Banks, 5, 188, 197, 209

Gettysburg, 262

Glaciers, 3

Glass, Jas., 64

Glauber Salts, 152

Glidden and Williams, 150

Glory of the Seas, 255

Gookin, Maj., 309

Gorham, Col. David, 104

Gorham, John, 65, 184

Gorham, Capt. John, 100, 108

Gorham, Lieut. Col. John, 102

Gorham, Col. John (Grandson of Capt. John), 104, 108

Gorham, Col. Shubael, 104, 107

Gorham, Me., 107

Gorham, Sturgis, 126

Gorhamtown, see Gorham, Me.

Gosnold, Bartholomew, 14, 18, 33

Gosnold’s Hope, 15

Government, 83, 97, 273

Grand Banks, 104, 184, 189, 198

Grampus Bay, 25

Gratitude, 255

Gravina, 249

Gray, Capt. Robt., 239

Great Awakening, the, 277

Great Herring Pond, 206

Great Island (Wellfleet), 9

Great Island (West Yarmouth), 308

Great Marshes, 79, 91, 156

Great Point Light, 311

Great Pond, 289

Green, Rev. Joseph, 283, 287

Greenleaf, Rev. Daniel, 169, 283

Greenwich Village, 159, 291

Griffith’s Island, 9

Guerrière, 144

Habbamock, 40

Half-way Covenant, 275

Halifax, part of Plymouth, 102

Hall, Christopher, 149

Hall, Capt. John Turner, 255

Hall, Henry, 75

Hall, Samuel, 204, 248, 252

Hall, Thos. F., 150

Hallett, Capt. Alvin S., 249

Hallett, Andrew, 80

Hallett, Capt. Ansel, 235

Hallett, Col. Enoch, 123, 130

Hallett, Timothy, 142

Hamblin, Capt. Caleb, 174

Hamblin, Mrs. Caleb, 175

Hamblin, Gen. Joseph E., 262

Handy, Capt. Wm., 147

Harding, Samuel, 217, 219

Harlow, Ed., 14

Harper, Robt., 272

Harwich, 91, 95, 135, 173, 184, 188, 277

Hatch, Capt. Freeman, 249, 253

Hatch, Jonathan, 64, 205

Hathaway Ponds, 293

Hatherly, 271

Hawaiian Islands, 240

Hawes, Ebenezer, 81

Hawes, Deacon Jos., 110

Hawley, Rev. Gideon, 50

Hay Grounds, see Great Marshes

Head of Pamet, 210

Hector, 65

Hector’s Nook, 65

Hector’s Stubble, 65

Henry Trowbridge, 174

Herring, 71, 187, 206

Herring Cove, 209

Herring River (Wellfleet), 195

Herring River (Sandwich), 292

Herschel, Clemens, 297

Herschel’s Island, 179

Higgins, R. R. & Co., 204

Higginson, Henry L., 300

Highanos (Hyannis), 123

High Head, 7, 23

Highland House, 223

Highland Light, 310

High Pole Hill, 280

Hinckley house, 78

Hinckley, Ebenezer, 64

Hinckley, Capt. Frank, 255

Hinckley, Deacon John, 12

Hinckley, Jos., 64

Hinckley, Capt. Matthias, 234

Hinckley, Gov. Thomas, 88, 90, 95, 100, 109, 270, 273, 309

Hippogriffe, 149

Hippogriffe Rock, 149

Hip-roofs, 78

Hobbamock, 38

Hockanom, 147, 294

Hog’s Back, 170

Hog’s Back Meetinghouse, 192

Holbrook, Capt. Jesse, 172

Holder, Christopher, 269

Holland, 265

Holway, Jos., 166

Holy Rollers, 291

Hope, Mary Ann, 148

Hope’s Lady, 148

Hopkins, Nathaniel, 147

Hopkins, Stephen, 54

Hottinger, 246

House of Commons, 97

Houses, 76

Howes, Alvin, 260

Howes, Capt. Benj. P., 254

Howes, Thos., 54

Howes, Capt. Wm. F., 150

Howland’s Tavern, 156

Huckins, Thos., 61, 82, 183

Hudson, Henry, 13

Hull, Rev. Joseph, 56, 76

Humbert, Capt. Wm., 280

Hunt, Capt. Thos., 19, 35

Hyannis, 91

Hyannis Light, 311

Hyannisport, 91, 147

Île Nauset, 6, 15, 19, 307

Importer, 255

Impressment, 135

Indian Neck, 24

Indians, 27, 53, 59, 104, 308

Ipswich, 52

Itinerant preaching, 278

Iyanough (spelled also Yanno), 34, 91

Jacob, Henry, 57

James II, 96

James Baines, 251

Jane, 242

Java, 220

Jefferson, Thos., 135, 137

Jenkins, Chas., 290

Jenkins, Capt. Chas. E., 249

Jenkins, Capt. Weston, 140

Jenny Lind, 221

Jeremiah’s Gutter, 218, 295

Jew and Gentile, 148

Joel, 64

Johnston, R.I., 30

Jones, Captain of Mayflower, 23

Jones, Edgar, 236

Jones, Capt. Silas, 173, 175

Josephus, 222

Julian, John, 217

Juries, 115

Karlsefne, Thorfinn, 13

Kauai, 240

Kelly, Capt. David, 249

Kelly, Hattil, 151

Kendall’s _Travels_, 155

Kendrick, Capt. John, 238

Kidd’s Hill, 294

Kiehtan, 40

King, Dr., Bishop of London, 267

King Philip’s War, 28, 39, 46, 98

King William’s War, 98, 103

Kit Carson, 149

Klondike, 255

Knowles, Capt. Allen, 246

Knowles, Capt. Isaiah, 230

Knowles, Capt. Joshua, 209

Knowles, Capt. Josiah, 255

Knowles, Capt. Winslow, 142

Knowles, Zack., 210

Kutuzoff, 141

Labrador, fisheries, 186, 198

Lady Hope, 148

Lady Washington, 239

Lake Erie, battle of, 144

Lamson, Zachary, 216, 225

Landowners, 53

Land problems, 55, 61

Latter Day Saints, 291

Law Courts, 84

Lawrence, Gov. of N.S., 109

Leading Wind, 255, 305

Leddra, I. I., 268

Leddra, W., 268

Lee, Rev. Jesse, 280

Leif the Lucky, 13

Leonard, Geo., 124

Lewis Bay, 15, 91, 205, 294

Lewis, Rev. Isaiah, 287

Lewis, John, 170

Lewis, Richard, 147

Leyden, 265

Liberty poles, 118

Life-saving, 221, 226, 231

Lighthouses, 224, 310

Lightning, 251

Linnel, Robt., 71

Livermore, Col., 300

Liverpool, 247, 250

Liverpool, N.S., 109

Liverpool packets, 245

Lobsters, 187

Lockwood, Frederick A., 298

Lombard, 57

London, 230

Longfellow, 237

Long Island, 204

Long Point, 9, 11, 22

Long Point Light, 311

Lopar, Jas., 164

Lothrop, Capt., 213

Lothrop, Capt. Ansel, 255

Lothrop, Barnabas, 97

Lothrop, Rev. John, 57, 62, 267

Louisburg Expedition, 98, 104

Love, 148

Lovell, Geo., 260

Low, John, 225

Loyalists, 113, 119, 124

Lubra, 254

Luella Nickerson, 203

Lutherans, 290

Lyceums, 157

Lyford, John, 62

Lyman, Theo., 241

Lynn, 52

Lysander, 148

Macao Roads, 241

Machin, Thos., 293

Mackerel-catching, 187, 192

Mackoachy, 217

Madison, James, 141

Magee, Capt. James, 128

Magee storm, the, 128

Mail, 157

Mail, 234

Majestic, 137

Making fish, 184, 186

Mallebarre, 16

Mann, Rev. Isaiah, 273

Manomet, 9, 36, 52, 208, 292

Manomet River (called also Monument River), 52, 206, 292

Manomets, 28

Marblehead, 109

Marchant, Crocker, 147

Marianne, 238

Mariner, 191

Marshes, 10, 53

Marston, Nymphas, 127

Marston, Judge Nymphas, 274, 288

Martha’s Vineyard (Gosnold’s), 15, 18, 42, 124, 129

Marvellous Strands, 13

Mary Anne, 216

Mary Dunn’s Road, 28, 260

Mashpee, 43, 49, 309

Massasoit, 28, 32, 34, 38

Massachusetts, 220

Massachusetts Bay Colony, 98

Massachusetts Humane Society, 224

Massachusetts Maritime Canal Co., 301

Mather, Cotton, 277

Mattakees (also Matacheese, etc.), 28, 55

Mattaquason, 60, 89

Matthew, Rev. Marmaduke, 285

Maushop, 42

Mayflower, 6, 20, 26

Mayflower Compact, 21

Mayo, 57

Mayo, Elmer, 228

Mayo, Capt. Isaac F., 224

Mayo, Capt. Matthew, 142

McCall, Hon. S. W., 295, 298

McFingal, poem, 118

McKay, Donald, 246, 248, 255

Medford rum, 243

Medicine men, see Powahs

Mellen, Rev. John, 294

Memnon, 249

Menhaden, 193

Merchant Adventurers, the, 62, 84, 265

Merchant Marine, 232

Metcalfe, Rev. Joseph, 285

Methodists, 280

Middleboro, 99, 102

Militia Companies, 82

Millennium Grove, 282

Miller, Rev. John, 285, 287

Millers, 74

Mills, 73

Mitchell, Henry, 296

Modena, 236

Monomoy, 7, 15, 17, 208, 213, 228, 295, 307

Monomoy Light, 311

Monomoyick, 89

Monomoyicks, 28

Monument River (see Manomet River)

Mooncussers, 130, 214

Mormons, 291

Morton, Nathaniel, 272

Mount Hope, 101

Mourt’s Relation, 10, 24

Mutual Council, 275

Nantasket Beach, 252

Nantucket, 42, 109, 124, 129, 140, 164, 173

Nantucket Shoals, 5, 188

Nantucket Sound, 216

Napoleonic Wars, 135

Narragansett No. 7, 108

Narragansetts, 30, 100

Nauhaught, Elisha, 45

Nauset, 58

Nauset Beach, 7, 208, 212, 216

Nauset Harbor, 8, 16, 29, 211, 218, 295

Nauset Light, 221, 311

Nausets, 28, 38

Naushon, 15

Naushon, 237

Neutral Trade, 135, 242

New Amsterdam, 30

New Bedford, 164

New Lights, 278, 280

Newcastle, 139

Newcomb’s Tavern, 119

Newfoundland, 184, 187

Niagara, 98, 105

Nickerson, Carleton, 203

Nickerson, Capt. Eldad, 108, 184

Nickerson, Wm., 89

Nimrod, 140

Nina, 212

Nine-Mile Pond, 206, 236, 293

No Horns, 148

Nobsque Point Beacon, 311

Nootka Sound, 239

Norsemen, 13

North Brewster, 29

North Kingston, R.I., 100

North Star, 250

North Truro, 6, 23

Northern Light (packet), 233, 237

Northern Light (clipper ship), 249, 253

Northwest Fur Trade, 238, 240

Norton, Humphrey, 272

Nott, Chas., 191

Nova Scotia, 99, 105, 188

Nye, Everett, 95

Oahu, 240

O’Brien, Ed., 61

Ocean, 173

Old Colony & Interior Canal Co., 301

Old Mill Prison, 128

Old Moll, 65

Old Town Harbor, 129

Old Worden, 61

Oldham, John, 62

Onions, 233

Orleans, 7, 9, 95, 135, 187

Orissa, 230

Osborn, Dr. John, 164

Osborn, Rev. Samuel, 285

Osterville, 147

Ostrich, 147

Otis, 244

Otis, Col. James, Sr., 116, 119, 132

Otis, James, Jr., 66, 106, 112, 132

Otis, John, 292

Otis, Col. Joseph, 114, 118, 123, 126, 130

Oyster Island, 91, 205

Oysters, 91, 187, 203

Pacific, 254

Packets, 233 (See also Liverpool Packets.)

Paddock, Ichabod, 164

Paine, Elisha, 222

Paine, Elisha, (Baptist preacher), 278

Paine, Gamaliel S., 191

Paine, Henry, 191

Paine, Jonathan, 65

Paine, Joshua Caleb, 211

Paine, Thos., 74

Paine, Thos., Jr., 92

Palisades, 79

Palmer, Capt. Nathaniel, 248

Palmer, Rev. Samuel, 66

Pamet Harbor, 196

Pamet Light, 311

Pamet Proprietors, 92

Pamet River, 24, 147, 294

Pamets, 28, 92

Parker Cook, 177

Parker, Henry, 155

Parker, Joseph, 285

Parker’s River, 74

Parliament, 97

Parsons, Barclay, 301

Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 98, 105

Peace of Paris, 99, 105

Peace of Ryswick, 103

Peace of Utrecht, 98, 104

Peaked Hill Bars, 7, 130, 208, 222, 224, 295

Peaked Hill Bars L.S.S., 227

Peat, 12, 285

Peg, 65

Pell, Rev. Edward, 280

Penniman, Capt. Edward, 173

Penniman, Eugene, 173

Penobscot Bay, 102

Pepperell, Sir Wm., 105

Pequot War, 63

Perault, Major P. H., 296

Percival, Benj., 120

Percival, Capt. Thos., 234

Peruvian, 222

Perry, Commodore, 144

Phantom, 249

Philanthropic, 148

Phinney, Capt. John, 108

Phipps, Sir Wm., 97

Pierce, Capt. Ed., 199

Pierce, Capt. John, 101

Pilgrim, 255

Pilgrims, 11, 20, 265

Pillsbury, Parker, 258

Pirates, 255

Plague, 47

Plains of Nauset, 5

Plymouth, 52, 58, 63, 67, 83, 102

Plymouth Colony, 52, 83, 95

Plymouth County, 96

Pocknet, 51

Point Care, 15, 307

Point Gammon, 17, 308, 311

Point Gilbert, 15, 307

Poke, 31, 42

Pomona, 211

Pomp, 65

Pond Village, 23

Ponds, 5

Pooke, Sam’l, 149, 250, 253

Poole, 94

Poponesset, 205

Population, of Cape, 263

Porpoise tails, 184

Port aux Huitres, 16

Port Fortuné, 18

Porter, Capt., 140

Port Royal, 104

Portland storm, 212

Portuguese, 93, 290

Postboy, 234

Post-riders, 156

Poutrincourt, 16

Powahs, 40

Pratt, Rev. Enoch, 215, 287

Praying Indians, 44, 51, 308

Pnieses, 40

Primrose, 191

Prince, Thos., 88, 90, 95, 272

Prince, Rev. Thos., 292

Proprietors, 69, 85

Province Lands, 162

Provincetown, 9, 11, 92, 104, 121, 137, 160, 172, 182,
186, 188, 194

Purchasers and Old Comers, 58

Quahaugs, 202

Quakers, 88, 91, 268, 273, 279

Quebec, 104

Queen Anne’s War, 98, 103

Queen Charlotte Islands, 239

Quit-rent, 96

Quivet Creek, 188

Race Point, 7, 209

Race Point Light, 310

Race Run, 7, 162

Radiant, 236

Ragget, Commodore, 137, 142

Railroad, 154, 236

Rasière, 30

Raven, 249

Rawson and Danforth’s report, 309

Rebecca, 148

Red Jacket, 149, 250

Rehoboth, 47, 101

Reign of Terror, 242

Reindeer, 143

Resolution, 128

Retaliation, 140

Revenue, 149

Revolution, the, 112, 133, 172, 182, 185, 188

Rhode Island, 100

Rich, Daniel, 167

Rich, Elisha, 191

Rich, Joseph, 191

Rich, Lucy, 122

Rich, Capt. Matthias, 209

Rich, Capt. Reuben, 144

Rich, Shebnah, 263

Rich, Wm., 191

Rich, Capt. Zoeth, 234

Ringleader, 305

Robespierre, 242

Robin Hood, 249

Robinson, Isaac, 269

Robinson, Rev. John, 265, 284

Rochester, 116

Rock Harbor, 139

Rogers, Henry, 147

Rogers’ Shoal, 212

Rolla, 219

Roosevelt & Joyce, 250

Roscius, 142, 211, 247, 250

Royal Arch, 236

Royal Hope, 148

Russell & Co., 249

Russell, Rev. Jonathan, Jr., 277

Ryder, Deacon, 45

Rye, 72

Rymer, Capt., 212

Sagamore, 148

Sailor’s Creek, 262

St. Johns, 243

St. Suzanne de Cap Blanc, 16

Sally, 130

Salt-boxes, 78

Salt works, 138, 150, 187, 233

Sandalwood, 240

Sandwich, 39, 52, 83, 87, 123, 125, 145, 173, 276

Sandwich Glass, 145

Sandwich Guards, 261

Sandy Neck, 9, 69, 156, 169

Sandy Neck Light, 310

Sanford, Ephraim, 142

Santuit River, 42

Sarah, 64

Sarah Fort, 224

Sassafras, 16

Saugus (see Lynn)

Sausamon, 99

Savage Rock, 14

Saxuant, 64

Schools, 109

Schott, Capt., 225

Scituate, 52, 57, 102

Scorton Hill, 156

Scrooby band, 265

Scudder, Daniel, 289

Scudder, Hon. Zeno, 190

Scudder’s Lane, 184

Scusset Creek, 52, 292

Scusset Marshes, 300

Sea Serpent, 169

Sealing, 174

Seals, 184

Sears, Capt. David, 149

Sears, Capt. Dean, 236

Sears, Capt. Elisha F., 255

Sears, Capt. John, 155

Sears, Capt. Joseph H., 236

Sears, Capt. Joshua, 249, 252

Sears, Reuben, 151

Sears, Richard, 56

Sears’ Tavern, 156

Second Discovery, the, 24

Second Massachusetts Regiment, 104

Seekonk, 101

Selectmen, 84

Separatists, 278, 280

Sesuit, 148

Seventh Massachusetts Regiment, 104

Sewall, Samuel, 65, 292

Seward, Wm., Jr., 298

Shakespeare, 247

Shaler, Nathaniel, 294

Shaving-mills, 125

Shaw, Rev. Philander, 288

Shaw, Quincy A., 300

Sheep, 71

Shipbuilding, 146

Shiverick, Asa, 148

Shiverick, Asa, Jr., 148

Shiverick, David, 149

Shiverick, Paul, 149

Shiverick, Samuel, 273, 285

Shoal Hope, 14

Shooting Star, 249

Shootflying Hill, 12

Shore whaling, 167, 171

Shovelful Shoal, 228

Shute, Gov., 218

Siddons, 248

Silva, John, 224

Simpkins, Rev. John, 276

Simpkins, Rev. Nathaniel, 158

Skinnaquits Fishing Co., 146

Slavery, 63

Small, Isaac Morton, 7

Smith, Archelaus, 108

Smith, Daniel, 289

Smith, David, 171

Smith, Hezekiah, 128

Smith, Capt. John, 19, 307

Smith, John, 269

Smith, Jonathan, 108

Smith, Samuel, 65

Smith, Solomon, 108

Smith, Thos. (of Sandwich), 292

Smith, Thos. (of Orleans), 217

Snake Hole, 148

Snow, Ambrose, 191

Snow, Ambrose, Jr., 191

Snow, David, 122

Snow, John, 170

Snow, Capt. Nathaniel, 143

Snow Squall, 249

Somerset, 8, 121, 130

Somerville, 263

Southack, Capt. Cyprian, 218, 294

South American, 150

South Channel, 210

South Channel Glacier, 5

Southern Cross, 249, 254

South Sandwich, 120

South Sea, the, 91, 204

South Side, 20

Sparrow, Lieut., 101

Sparrowhawk, 35, 212

Spencer, 137

Spencer, Sarah, 111

Sprague, Capt. Caleb, 249

Spring Hill Beach, 9

Squadron system, for schools, 109

Squanto, 34

Staddles, 69

Stagecoaches, 155, 233

Stage Harbor, 17

Standish, Capt. Miles, 22, 32, 38, 53, 55

Star of Peace, 255

Stevens, Capt. Levi, 249

Stewart, Joseph, 213

Stocks, 86

Stone, Lucy, 258

Storms, 128, 191, 208

Stout’s Creek, 23, 225

Straits of Belle Isle, 187

Stubbs, J. A., 204

Studley, Luther, 147

Sturgis, Capt. Sol., 173

Sturgis, Capt. Wm., 144, 240

Succonessitt, 90

Succonessitts, 28

Sullivan, James, 295

Superb Hope, 148

Surinam, 136

Swallowtail Line, 246

Swamp Fort, 100

Swedenborgians, 291

Swift, Chas. F., 262

Symon, 64

Tanners, 71

Tarpaulin Cove, 124, 140

Taunton, 47, 102

Taverns, 81, 119, 141, 145, 156, 213

Telegraph, 204

Temperance Society, 145

Thacher, Anthony (settler of Yarmouth), 54, 61

Thacher, Anthony (shipbuilder), 147

Thacher, Ezekiel, 260

Thacher, Capt. John, 169

Thacher, John, 156

Thacher, Capt. Joseph, 104

Thacher, Thos., 170

Thayer, Dr. Wm., 122

Thievish Harbor, 25

Third Discovery, the, 24

Thomas, Geo., 250

Thompson, Chas. M., 301

Thoreau, Henry, 206, 233

Thornton, Rev. Thos., 276, 283

Thornton, Thos., 275

Thornton, Timothy, 237

Thorwald, 13

Tidal Wave, 212

Tisquantum, see Squanto

Titan, 250

Titles, 62

Titus, 66

Tobacco, 31

Tobey, Gerard C., 299

Tories, see Loyalists

Town Cove, 218, 294

Train, Enoch, 247

Trawling, 190

Treat, Rev. Samuel, 44, 278, 283, 288

Treaty of Ryswick, 98

Trout Grave, 43

Trumbull, 226

Truro, 7, 23, 44, 92, 94, 121, 171, 183, 189, 196, 263

Try-Yard, 69

Tucker’s Terror, 15, 307

Tupper, Rev. Thos., 283

Tuskaloosa, 251

Two Friends, 140

Twin Lights, Chatham, 311

T. Y. Baker, 198

Ulysses, 230

Union Wharf Co., 146, 195

Unitarians, 290

Universalists, 290

Upham, Rev. Caleb, 120

Vancouver Is., 239

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 250

Varnum, Jos. B., 139

Vesper, 210

Victory (schooner), 142

Victory (ship), 255

Vineyard Sound, 124

Viola, 179

Virginia Company, 21

Volusia, 230

Wadena, 228

Walley, John, 97

Walley, Rev. Thos., 47, 272

Wallfleet oysters, 95

Wampanoags, 28

Wampum, 30

Wanderer, 181

War of 1812, 135, 142, 237, 245, 295

Ward, Artemus, 267

Wareham, 116

Warning out, 60, 309

Warwick, Earl of, 52

Washington, Geo., 293

Water power, 73

Water Witch, 209

Watson, Amelia, 73

Webb, Rev. Benj., 288

Webb, Wm. H., 248

Webb’s Island, 6, 307

Webfoot, 149

Weekes, Jonathan, Jr., 71

Weir Village, 294

Wellfleet, 7, 9, 16, 25, 94, 172, 187, 189, 195, 198, 203

Wellfleet Manufacturing Co., 145

Wessagussett, 38

West Barnstable Brick Yard, 4

West Dennis, 147

West, Fred, 179

Westervelt, Jacob A., 248

West Indies, 104, 107, 134, 148, 184, 194

Weymouth, 56

Weymouth, Geo., 14

Wezzle, Mrs., 130

Whale, 171

Whaleboat fleet, 103

Whaling, 129, 164, 187

Whaling Grounds, 68, 70, 168

Whaling Song, 164

Wheat, 72

Wheat, Joseph, 191

Wheelwright, Lot, 148

Whidaw, 216

Whirlwind, 249

Whitcomb, John, 147

White, Peregrine, 24

White, Thos., 191

Whitefield, Rev. Geo., 277

White’s Brook, 294

Whitman, Rev. Levi, 310

Whitney, Henry M., 297

Wickford, 100

Wild Hunter, 149, 249, 252

Wilkes, 215

William and Mary, 97

Williams, Rev. Abraham, 66

Williams, Rev. S., 158

Willie Swift, 147

Winchester, Titus, 66

Windmills, 73

Winged Arrow, 249

Winslow, Ed., 38, 40

Winslow, Kenelm, 80

Winslow, Josiah, 59, 95, 273

Winthrop, James, 155, 293

Wiswall, Rev. Ichabod, 272

Wolftrap Neck, 145

Woodbury, Peter, 225

Wood End, 11

Wood End Light, 311

Woods, 10

Woods Hole, 13, 125

Wreck Cove, 213

Wreckers, 220, 231

Wrecks, 212

Writs of Assistance, 66, 113

Wright, 61

Yarmouth, 34, 39, 54, 83, 188, 196, 277

Young, Elisha, 184

Young Tell, 236

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