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PUBLISHED BY
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A GARDEN ROSARY.
THE HOUSE OF FRIENDSHIP.
OUR COMMON ROAD.
CAPE COD NEW AND OLD. Illustrated.
CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
CAPE COD
New tS'O/d
AGNES EDWARDS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
LOUIS H. RUYL
BOSTON AND NEW YOaK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Cbe
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CAPE COD
New (Sold
BY
AGNES EDWARDS
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
LOUIS H. RUYL
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
Wat Slibersibe |@re«< Canrtnrftae
COPYRIGHT, I918, BY AGNES EDWARDS PRATT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published May iqj8
• •••:••• »• ••• ••••••• 1 -• « •••••,
To him whose feet have so often tramped the Cape Cod moors and beaches: whose hands have wrought beauty in many of her neglected places; and whose spirit has become one with the sunshine and simplicity of this wide horizon —
TO MY FATHER
JOHN JAY ELMENDORF ROTHERY
this book is affectionately dedicated
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CONTENTS
The Lost Road: A Foreword . . . xi
I. The Cape Cod Canal 1
II. Bourne and the Cape Cod Canal . . 4
III. Sandwich — The Oldest Cape Town . 22
IV. Barnstable — The County Seat . . 39 V. Yarmouth and Cape Cod Methodism . 59
VI. New Industries and Old in Dennis . 72
VII. Brewster and Cape Cod Architecture . 88
VIII. Orleans 101
IX. Eastham and the Agricultural Future
OF THE Cape 116
X. Wellfleet and Cape Fishing . . . 126
XI. Truro . . . 139
XII. Provincetown 149
XIII. Chatham and the Life-saving Service . 170
XIV. Harwich and the Cape Cod Schools . 187 XV. Falmouth the Prosperous .... 198
XVI. By a Cape Cod Pond 216
XVII. A Forgotten Corner of Cape Cod . . 226
ILLUSTRATIONS
Provincetown from Town Hill . . Frontispiece
An Old Windmill at Cataumet . . . . xi
The Crossways, Cataumet xvi
The New York Boat in the Canal ... 1
A Brewster Clipper 3
Richard Bourne teaching the Indians . . 4
The Author's Home at Cataumet, with Old
Mill,, facing 4
The Tupper House in Sandwich .... 2^
The Old Church in Sandwich, /acm^ . . 36
An Old Cape Cod House 38
Cape Cod Types: Indian, Puritan, Portuguese,
Finn, Summer Resident ..... 39
The Barnstable Marshes, /ocm^ .... 56
Seafaring Men 59
Yarmouth's Main Street, /acmgr .... 60
Dennis Bird-Houses 72.
Cranberry-Pickers, /actwgr 84
Salt-Works at Dennis 87
An Old Fireplace 88
A Brewster Doorway, /acmgr 90
A Cape Cod Stagecoach 101
X ILLUSTRATIONS
Duck-shooting, /acinar 106
Early Camp-Meeting . . . . . . .116
Agriculture, /ociVigr 116
Celery-growing 125
Building a Whaling-Ship 126
The Wellfleet Man is First of All a Seaman,
facing 126
Leaving Provincetown 138
Grand View Farm, Truro 139
On the Truro Highway, /acinar . . . . 140 Provincetown Sand-Dunes 149
The Pilgrim Memorial Monument at Province- town, facing 152
The Twin Lights of Chatham . . . .170
The Life-S a vers, /aczw^ 182
An Old Salt ......... 186
A Cape Cod School 187
A Street in Harwich, /acm^ 192
Through Pine- Wood Roads 197
Shiverick Pond, Falmouth 198
Village Green, Falmouth, /acmgr . . . .198
An Old-fashioned Garden 215
A Cape Cod Pond 216
Mashpee Indians 226
Canaumet Neck, Mashpee ....
THE LOST ROAD
A FOREWORD
IT was not so very long ago — only ten or fifteen years — that every spring and fall witnessed a picturesque and fragmentary pageant, winding its leisurely way along the sandy road from Boston to Cape Cod. First there would come a couple of well-bred horses, driven either by a gentleman who continually and impatiently shook the thickly settling dust from his cloak, or by an imperturbable groom in livery. Behind these there would be
xii THE LOST ROAD
another horse, or may be two, being led from the back seat. Possibly there would be another carriage attached to the first. This entourage was being engineered to or from one of those charming summer places on Cape Cod which — more rare then than they are to-day be- cause of their inaccessibility — had something of the air of feudal estates. It was quite neces- sary to bring your own tea and tacks and cut sugar and glue in those days, for the village stores furnished no such luxuries and few ne- cessities. Now the mail comes three times daily, and the automobile has brought the summer cottage within a few easy hours of Boston. To-day, on Saturday afternoons, the well-oiled highway is alive with glancing cars, and on the great drawbridge over the canal at Buzzard's Bay on holidays two traffic police- men are kept busy from dawn to dusk.
We will not say that the modern way is not as good or even better than the old way; that the thermos bottle does not fulfill its mission as acceptably as did the chafing-dish, which we were wont to set up in a meadow, and make
THE LOST ROAD xiii
our tea upon; or that the frequent garage does not prove as friendly as did the rambhng livery stable where the gentleman used to stop at midday, and see that the horses were properly rubbed down, fed and watered, before the twenty-mile drive in the afternoon. But the old way was a charming way, and we who knew it well recall it with affectionate memories. Memories that, like ribbons at a children's party, if followed to their proper conclu- sion, reveal a sugar plum at the end. Mem- ories of a little town in which we once found ourselves quite as inexplicably as in the town in a dream — although, perhaps, the devious turnings of the unmarked roads were respon- sible for our straying. Here a river ran one side of the village street; white cottages, hedged by lilacs, dotted the other. Children, shy-eyed and wondering, gazed at us, and the old ladies, like the decent country dames in a rural English shire, looked soberly forth. We stopped and asked for a drink of water, and while we were drinking, peeked surreptitiously at the thrifty little house, with its well-kept
xiv THE LOST ROAD
bits of ancient furniture — fain to linger longer; but ashamed of the obviousness of our excuse. At last, reluctantly, we drove away, and never again, in our subsequent searchings, did we ever find that village on any trip, either to or from the Cape. Perhaps when the sign-boards were put up at the crossways, directing trav- elers "To All Points on the Cape," the minia- ture hamlet saw its opportunity of withdraw- ing into its idyllic seclusion. Memories, too, of large old mansions, which originally stood near the sea, and from whose carved and fan- lighted doors sea captains issued grandly forth. But when we discovered them, we found a desolate marsh where once the sea had been, and in the dim, echoing house only a few de- caying relics of the past. You might occasion- ally purchase genuine antiques, a decade ago, if you were not too proud to carry them away, secured with a hitching-rope to the back of your wagon. Memories of picnics in apple orchards where the drowsy silence was un- broken by any shriek of the passing motor . . . When I close my eyes in reminiscence of those
THE LOST ROAD xv
semi-annual journeys to the Cape, I seem to feel again the gentle jog of the yellow-wheeled dogcart, in which Joe Jefferson of fragrant memory on the Cape had driven many miles, and which followed, quaintly enough, on the heels of our old gray mare. Automobiles were becoming more frequent then, and many of them, as they whizzed by, paused to smile at our gypsy paraphernalia, packed naively on behind our open cart. The blue eyes and peachblow face of my sunny-haired friend be- side me probably did not detract in the least from the picture we presented. Who has time, to-day, to notice whether the tourists to the Cape are blue-eyed or brown, or whether it is a coffee-pot or an automobile kit that is slung on behind?
The old road to the Cape is lost — and with it much of the dust, both of reality and ro- mance. But a new road has opened, bring- ing every year hundreds and hundreds of automobiles; and literally thousands of men and women who would otherwise never breathe the balmy air or see those windswept moors.
XVI
THE LOST ROAD
Surely, we old Cape-Codders must and do greet them all hospitably. It is for their special welcoming that this little book is written. And if, perhaps, it is touched too fondly by the spirit of reminiscence, that fault may be for- given by the newcomers, and may endear it more to those who are not strangers to Cape Cod.
CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
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CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
Chapter I THE CAPE COD CANAL
O a stranger, strolling in the evening along the pleasant Bournedale Valley, the hour of nine is heralded by a spectacular phe- nomenon. From far down the narrow strip of water, which is called the Cape Cod Canal, but which seems, from this secluded spot, as quiet as a country brook, there flashes a piercing, boring, burrowing shaft of light: a terrifically powerful incandescence — spring- ing from an unseen source, and cleaving a dazzling path for miles ahead. Then, as if awakened from " the first sweet sleep of night" by the unnatural sunrise, there vibrates the roar of a foghorn, which, in turn, arouses
^^^^>^XA1^E/€0D NEW AND OLD
echoes far and near. On the bridge at Buz- zard's Bay bells ring and ring, and ring again; red lights appear; the two mighty jaws of the drawbridge slowly rise and stand open, darkly silhouetted against the sky. People gather at the crossroads ; automobiles, halted by the lifting of the bridge, rapidly form a string of twinkling beads upon the incline. And then, slowly, irresistibly, majestically, the New York boat — gleaming white and hung with lights like a fairy ship — appears. It is strange to see this floating palace coming through the Cape Cod meadows; strange to hear, as if at our very doorsteps, the laughter and scatter- ing voices of people that crowd the open decks. And strangest of all, to be, for one brief instant, sucked into the orbit of that great searchlight, which, like the peering eye of some monstrous Cyclops, flings its penetrating ray here — there — up — down — illuminating as in a blazing noon the shyest path and the tiniest cottage that comes within its ray.
As the boat steams between the lifted sec- tions of the bridge, voices on the shore call out
THE CAPE COD CANAL 3
greetings, and voices from the boat respond. For a moment there is that curious inter- change of human intimacy that may only pass between strangers.
The boat steams on and out. The jaws descend and clamp together, the bells cease ringing, the automobiles speed across the bridge, and the idlers disperse along the country road. The New York boat has passed.
Chapter II
BOURNE AND THE CAPE COD CANAL
THE town of Bourne, from which the famous canal starts, marks the geographi- cal beginning of Cape Cod. Strangers in this part of the country are frequently puzzled by the colloquial use of the word " town," for each Cape town — of which there are fifteen
— usually contains half a dozen or even a dozen small hamlets within its confines, each one with its separate name, post-oflice, railway station, and distinctive personality. These smaller settlements might very easily be called " towns," but the local way is prettier: they are " neighborhoods." Major-General Leonard Wood was born in Pocasset; the yellow house
— square and vine-clad, on its wide lawn — ■
.^^i-'-'^i^.
^ '44.
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 5
stands at the crossroads. And Pocasset is a neighborhood in the town of Bourne. So ako Buzzard's Bay — from which the canal ac- tually starts — is a neighborhood in the town of Bourne.
The name of Buzzard's Bay is perhaps bet- ter known than that of the mother district. Buzzard's Bay is a railroad center and a sum- mer resort. It is at this point that the first Cape coolness strikes through the train, rumbling down from Boston laden with sum- mer folk and heat; it is from here that cars connect for Provincetown and Chatham, and to and from Wood's Hole; it is here that Joseph Jefferson and Grover Cleveland had their summer homes, — Crow's Nest and Gray Gables, — as well as a score of other eminent men before and since. But in spite of its prominence. Buzzard's Bay is only a small portion of Bourne, which existed before there was any Joseph Jefferson, or any railroad to the Cape, or any canal.
As you glance out from your car window, or from your flying automobile, even if you
6 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
alight and look around, you may not find here, at first, anything that seems particularly unique. There are characteristic Cape Cod houses, of course, — gray or white, shingled or clapboarded, a few with porches, but most of them without, a story and a half high, with the beauty of simplicity and the lure of modest content. The extraordinarily good roads that criss-cross here are part of the network that threads the whole Cape and makes it possible to spin from one end to the other as smoothly and cleanly as on a magic carpet. There are telephones, a public library, and high school and town hall — all the paraphernalia of a modern and comfortable Cape town. For Cape Cod is very prosperous these days: her hard struggle wresting a living from the sea is over. Now she gets her bread and butter from her cranberry bogs, and more and more fre- quently a goodly coating of jam from the per- quisites from the summer people. Of course it is the canal that gives Bourne her present emi- nence, but the present is built upon a past both honorable and charming. So before we
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 7
investigate the canal, it might be well to stroll down the quiet streets, and hear something of those far-off days when Jonathan Bourne, for whom the town was most felicitously named, gathered under the mantle of his preaching all the Indians from Middleboro to Province town.
This good man was a friend of Eliot, and taught almost one hundred and fifty of the red men to read the Eliot Bible. He began his labors in 1658, and thirty years later the num- ber of praying Indians — praying under his tutelage in twenty-two different places on the Cape — had reached a thousand and fourteen, including six hundred warriors. One likes to read of his patient and loving labors among these aborigines who had received — and were about to receive — anything but loving treatment from the hands of their white brothers. One likes to remember that the town was named after him, and that his de- scendants still live in it. There is a story that several years after his death a child of his was stricken by a mortal disease and given up by
8 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
the doctors. But the faithful Indians, who cherished a reverent and faithful memory for the pastor of their souls, came from miles around with their medicine men, and, begging the mother's permission, treated the child with wizardry and incantation and herbs and simples, working hour after hour with zealous fanaticism. The story is concluded — and we have no reason to doubt it — that the child recovered. And, after all, there have been stranger revelations of faith and its healing fruit.
The good Jonathan Bourne finally went to live with the Indians at Mashpee, and died there — after a long and singularly exalted life. The serious chronicle comes down to us with a few amusing irrelevancies. We hear that at one time Bourne hired an Indian to build a stone wall around a portion of his land, promising him a barrel of rum when it was finished. It was no meager estate, for legend has it that he had been presented by the In- dians with all the land he could blaze between sunup and sundown — which made him the
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 9
owner of the large area which bears his name and which extended from Falmouth to Ware- ham and infringed a trifle on both. However, the Indian, spurred on by the waiting reward, worked with a vengeance — and worked for years. But when he got within a few hundred yards of the end, he fell dead, and so he never got his drink, after all. The stone wall still runs through the woods, and although it no longer bounds anything, it is in a fair state of preservation.
The whole history of Bourne is associated with this family. Ruins of the original home- stead may still be seen near the banks of the canal, and from the private graveyard, not so very long ago, a thigh bone was dug up, twenty- seven inches long, the last earthly reminder of some eight-footer. As a matter of fact, the en- tire digging of the canal was complicated by old legends and curious fragments of the past. At the curve near Bournedale there was a tradition of a slave buried with a barrel of money, and with the assurance that if his bones were disturbed the offender would be
10 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
cursed. The money did not materialize during the excavation; but the curse did. It is a curi- ous fact that practically all the difficulties in- cident to the building of the canal, and all the accidents in it since then, have occurred at this very spot.
Ever since the earliest days there has been speculation concerning such a waterway as has at last been achieved. The reason is ob- vious. The Cape stretches out to sea, sixty- five miles on the north shore and eighty on the south. The hook at Provincetown has caught thousands of unwary and unfortunate ves- sels : during the last sixty-five years alone more than two thousand vessels were wrecked in the waters of the Cape and seven hundred lives lost. It was evident that a canal would not only minimize the danger of that terrifically rough route, but would shorten it immensely. Many places through which to cut such a wa- terway have seemed tempting, but the line be- tween Buzzard's Bay and Barnstable Bay was through an alluvial deposit only eight miles in width, with a surface elevation of twenty-nine
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 11
feet above tidewater — which points finally won for it its selection. The Pilgrims, educated to the convenience of canals by their sojourn in the Low Countries, had vainly tried to com- plete one across the Cape. The old charts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indi- cate the possible routes they considered. Later the High Court of the Colony ordered an ex- amination and survey. Then George Wash- ington decreed that " the interior barrier should be cut in order to give greater security to navi- gation and against the enemy." Later the canal project was vigorously agitated by Gen- eral Knox, Secretary Gallatin, Winthrop, and Thorndike. In 1860 the Legislature of Massa- chusetts published an exhaustive report set- ting forth the feasibility of such an undertak- ing. The agitation was incessant and fruitless : it was not until 1909 that anything was actu- ally done. Then Mr. August Belmont, who was born on the Cape and has always had an affec- tion for the place, conferred with Mr. William Barclay Parsons, who had been a member of the Panama Canal Commission and had also
U CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
constructed the New York Subway, and three years later, with flags and floats and bells and lights, the canal was opened.
The casual traveler who pauses upon the drawbridge at Buzzard's Bay or at Sagamore, and gazes up and down the peacefully curving stream, seeing the little vessels slide under his feet, while the great jaws of the bridge open for the passage of the taller ones, has hardly more conception of the value of this waterway than might an Indian, returning from his happy hunting-grounds after three hundred years, and standing awe-stricken as the vast " white- winged birds," as he called all ships, float through his level pasture land down to the great ocean.
Most tourists are amazed to learn that the canal — following the line of Bournedale Val- ley — is thirteen miles long, and that on each side runs a flawless automobile road; that it is a hundred feet wide at the bottom and three hundred at the top; that it saves seventy miles of the distance between New York and Bos- ton. That is probably as far as they care to
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 13
follow the statistics. It means little to them to be told that this is the only large canal — ex- cept those of Suez and Manchester — which has been built by private enterprise (incident- ally, the majority of the Suez Canal stock is now owned by the British Government and that of the Manchester Canal by the city of Manchester); or that it cost twelve million dollars; or that while it is not deep enough for warships of the battleship class, it could be made deep enough, and that it is pledged to surrender itself for Government use in time of war; or that twenty-five thousand vessels, carrying approximately twenty-five million tons of freight, used to pass around the Cape through Vineyard Sound — a tonnage equal to that of the Suez Canal. While it is not possible even yet to estimate the precise tonnage pass- ing through the Cape Cod Canal, and while the great boom of prosperity which it promised to bring has come more slowly than was expected; nevertheless, this canal ranks with one of the most important in the world, and if it had been cut through sooner might have gained a
14 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
marine supremacy equal to that of the Hudson River.
The work was first undertaken with suction dredges, but great boulders, some of them weighing twenty tons, barred the way. The natives recalled the old legend about the Devil, who came down the Cape one fine day step- ping from one hill to another to keep from get- ting his feet wet. His apron was full of bould- ers, and as he entered the town of Bourne a chickadee laughed at him. In a rage he seized a boulder from his apron and started to throw it at the bird. But he stumbled and fell, and the boulders landed in Bournedale and are pointed out from one generation of children to the other as the place where the Devil broke his apron strings. However that may be, the huge boulders were there when the suction dredges were installed, and shovels and locomotives were set to tugging at them, — mammoth dental instruments against a colossal mouth, — each one bringing up twenty thousand tons of earth a day, or as much in every scoop as could be shoveled by one man working ten
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 15
hours. The material was dumped upon scows and deposited in deep water. Two machine shops had to be set up, — one at each end of the canal, — as the work necessitated con- stant repairs and the making of new imple- ments. Two dikes, something like the Gam- boa at Panama, were built, and the central part of the canal was dug with steam shovels. Elec- trically driven pumps kept the water down when the men were working below tide. When the work was completed the dikes were dy- namited, and the two bays brought together. The canal is a sea-level one, and is constructed without a tidal lock, the necessity for one be- ing obviated by the three hours' difference in time between the periods of slack water on the two sides of the Cape.
It is easy to see for one's self any of the most interesting features of the canal. The three drawbridges — one at Buzzard's Bay, one at Bourne, and one at Sagamore — open spec- tacularly in a prodigious yawn at the passing through of all tall vessels. The double line of lights curve with the curve of the canal,
16 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
making a sort of brilliant Broadway across the quiet landscape. There is a complete tele- phone and telegraph system; a transatlantic cable; and signals to blow and sparkle in time of fog and when the bridges are lifted. These precautions are not too many, for the ghastly accident of a few winters ago is still vivid in many minds. It was during a blinding snow- storm, and an automobile was on the draw- bridge when it opened. Imagine the horror of the occupants when they felt rising under them a sheer vertical wall, as impossible to scale as the side of a house, and saw gaping be- hind them a deadly chasm, between the shore end of the draw and the bridge. For only a moment could the brakes hold to that per- pendicular surface. To jump was immediate death; to stay was to defer the end only a few seconds. Slowly at first and then with terrific speed the auto slid backward down the incline, reached the opening and crashed through the darkness to the black rocks and rushing water forty feet below . . .
Down toward Sandwich one can see the mas-
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 17
sive breakwater, three thousand feet long, and containing three hundred and fifty thousand tons of granite. At the Buzzard's Bay end the passage out has been deepened for five miles, in the same fashion as the Panama Bay on the Pacific side of the Isthmus.
As the franchise gave the Canal Company the right to buy or condemn property if neces- sary, in order that it might have a canal zone of one thousand feet at each end, and six hun- dred feet through the central part, this even- tually resulted in several lawsuits. In one of these. Gray Gables, the home of former Presi- dent Cleveland, was involved. The canal also divided several villages — in Bournedale the railroad station is on one side, and the vil- lage is on the other, and one must cross by means of a ferry. A relocation of several miles of railroad was necessary, to which the rail- road officials showed no objection, realizing that whatever cheapens water communication benefits the mills, and that products of the mills will be shipped over the railway. And mills and factories are confidently expected
18 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
to line the banks of the canal at some future date.
We who idly stand watching the trafiic of the world pass along this little stream of water, or who come up in automobiles to see the New York boat pass through, have almost forgot- ten — if we ever heard of it — the first trad- ing-station made upon this spot. On the south bank of the Manomet River, — the Indian name has been changed to Monument by care- less use, — halfway between Gray Gables and where the railway station was built in 1880, the Pilgrims placed a trading-post in 1627. Here it was that on September 2 of that year Miles Standish sailed up from the Scusset River to meet the sloops of the merchant De Rasieres, who had been sent out by New Amsterdam to answer the starvation call of the English pio- neers. Here a trading-post — or pinnance — was established, where the colonists exchanged sugar and linen stuffs and other goods with the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the colonists of Virginia. There was no settlement there: only a rude station, as the forerunner of the
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 19
communication that now flows so easily along the whole Atlantic Coast.
There is another tale to be told about Bourne and the Manomet River; perhaps the most strange, surely the saddest, of all. It was in 1756 that a company of people, speaking French, appeared here in seven two-masted boats. They landed, and came wearily ashore, explaining, as best they could in their broken patois, that they wished to have their vessels and their women and children carted across the land to the opposite bay. One can pic- ture them, gathered in a wistful group on the sands, the men with stocking caps and the women with white kerchiefs on their heads, while the children, like and unlike the sober little Puritans who wondered at them, held tightly to a paternal hand or maternal petti- coat.
These ninety souls were the last remnant of the seven thousand Acadians who had been driven from the exquisite Annapolis Valley by the British, and, after a heart-breaking period of exile, were now making one despairing bold
W CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
rush for home again, snatching at any hand to help them.
There is extant a letter from Silas Bourne to Colonel Otis concerning them, which says: " They profess to be bound for Boston and want their boats carted across to the opposite bay. They have their women and their children with them, and they say were last from Rhode Island, but previously from Nova Scotia. I fear they may continue, when once in the ocean, to miss Boston, and think it safe, there- fore, to detain them."
Thus it was that the pitiful little band — Papists and strangers in a strange land — were distributed in lots among the various towns for *'safe keeping" — not to mention regeneration. In due time the court ordered their boats sold. It is safe to presume that none of these pathetic wayfarers ever reached home, or came in touch again with any of their own kin, who were also in "safe keeping" in other coast towns. Not a trace of them remains on Cape Cod: not a name on a hill or path. There are no descendants to preserve even the faint-
BOURNE AND THE CANAL 21
est tradition of the past. The whole band seems to have been completely obliterated — swallowed up forever by the congregation of *'the Lord's people." It was in the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, that a great storm shifted the sands near Scusset Neck and revealed traces of what might have once been a French settlement. Here it was, in all probability, that the unfortunate Acad- ians had gathered; near the harbor where they could look out over the wide waste of water that separated them from all that they held dear — from Grand Pre and the noble river. A pathetic folk, doomed to live and finally to die, among a hostile people: foreigners, igno- rant of the language about them; Romanists without a priest — their homesickness and despair are better told by Longfellow in his sad and gentle story of "Evangeline." But we, to-day, untangling the strong, plain threads that made up the warp and woof of simple Puritan life in Bourne, pause a moment as our fingers touch this solitary silken strand — so rudely broken, long ago.
Chapter III
SANDWICH— THE OLDEST CAPE TOWN
SANDWICH, Yarmouth, and Barnstable all date their incorporation from 1639, but Sandwich stubbornly insists that she is the oldest of the three. And she is right.
Although, as explained in the previous chap- ter, there had been a trading-post established on the southern shore of the Manomet River in 1627, yet there was no English settlement on the Cape until April 3, 1637, when ten men from Saugus were magnanimously given per- mission by the court at Plymouth to "have the liberty to view a place to sit down in, and have sufficient land for threescore families." It is rather amusing to hear of liberty to "sit
SANDWICH 23
down " granted to a people who, from the be- ginning of their history, have shown anything but a desire to "sit down," but rather a most determined disposition to range from pole to pole, either by sea or land. However, these ten men, — perhaps glad to "get up" from Plymouth, — after hunting around a little while, selected a place of residence, and named it Sandwich, after a seaport in Kent.
The names of these ten men are noteworthy, not only because of the distinction of the orig- inal bearers, but because of the perpetuation of them in Cape Cod records ever since. They were Edmund Freeman, Henry Feake, Thomas Dexter, Edward Dillingham, William Wood, John Carman, Richard Chadwell, William Almy, Thomas Tupper, and George Knott. Sir Charles Tupper, the last of the fathers of the Canadian Confederacy, who died in Lon- don in 1916, was a direct descendant of this "man from Saugus."
Soon after the settlement was begun, the ever-vigilant Plymouth Colony sent two com- missioners to Sandwich to set forth the
24 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
"bounds of the land granted there." They were commanded to go "with all convenient speed," which probably averaged about three miles an hour; and it quickens school-day memories to know that their names were Miles Standish and John Alden. They evidently did their duty according to directions, for the lit- tle town immediately entered upon a thor- oughly regular and decorous career: so deco- rous, indeed, that it fared ill with any but the strictest, as the records of two hapless bachelors who had innocently undertaken to "sit down" shows. They had no families, and although they were diligently laboring to clear the ground for future uses, they were promptly arraigned in Plymouth for "disorderly keep- ing house alone," which throws another light upon the desirability of winning a Priscilla in those days.
Church was established; laws rigidly en- forced; meadow-land which had previously been laid out was again "divided by equal proportion, according to every man's estate"; a common for the pasturage of young cattle
SANDWICH 25
was decided upon. And then, having safely found a secure and pleasant place which they could call their own, and in which they could enjoy the pleasure of individual freedom more easily than at Plymouth, they unanimously decreed that ''no other inhabitants would be received into the town, or have lands assigned to them by the committee, without the con- sent of Mr. Leverich [the minister] and the church " — SL complacent narrowness entirely characteristic of the early records of our fore- fathers.
Sandwich — that village which lies so dreamily around its willow-shaded pool, with the peaceful graveyard basking in the sun, one of the sweetest of all the Cape towns, es- pecially to those who know the way of ap- proach through the woods, and to whom the sylvan clearing blooms forth in ever lovely, ever fresh surprise — was a stern place in those early days. The winters were severe. The settler had to modify his English ideas of agriculture, and to feed his cattle on the wild grass of the salt marshes. He lived in
26 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
a thatched hut, and worked from morning till night. He fought blackbirds, crows, and pigeons in swarms. He raved against the wolves and they raved back at him, until the last one was shot by a teamster from his load of wood in 1839. ^
Before there was a gristmill in Sandwich, men either had to walk to Plymouth and back with a grist of corn on their shoulders, or to follow the Indian fashion of pounding corn in a mortar. There was no sawmill nearer than Scituate.
As though they did not have trouble enough with the elements and the inevitable difficul- ties of pioneers, as soon as these intrepid first settlers had subdued their surroundings enough to enable them to draw breath, they turned themselves to an energetic campaign against the Quakers.
1 At one time Sandwich, in despair about these fierce ma- rauders, proposed a paUsade fence, ten feet high, to run from Buzzard's Bay to Massachusetts Bay, so as to keep out the wolves. Objections were made quite strenuously by the peo- ple on the other side of the fence, who, with good show of reason, did not relish the idea of being deliberately penned up with the brutes, even for the sake of accommodating their neighbors.
SANDWICH 27
Cape Cod has been entirely free from the witchcraft mania which swept the North Shore, but her behavior toward the Quakers fills a page as shocking as any hangings on Gallows Hill in Salem. There was more trouble in Sandwich than in the other towns of Barn- stable County, not necessarily because there was more bitterness, but because there were more Quakers. The persecution began in 1657 and lasted for four years, until Charles the Second put an end to it. The laws were exces- sively cruel and were cruelly enforced. En- tertaining a Quaker — even for a quarter of an hour — cost five pounds, the year's pay of a laboring man. If any one saw a Quaker and did not inform the constable, — even if he had to go six miles for the purpose, — he was pun- ishable at the discretion of the court. For allowing preaching in one's own house, the fine was forty shillings: in addition the preacher was fined forty shillings, and each auditor forty shillings, although no one of them might have spoken a word. The Quakers were fined for every Sunday that they went to their own
28 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
meeting-house, and for every Sunday that they did not go to that of the Puritans. In three years, besides other punishment, there were taken from them cattle, horses, and sheep to the value of seven hundred pounds. The fines of William Allen alone amounted to eighty- seven pounds. In addition to this, they were flogged, banished, and had their ears cut off.
And yet the people of Sandwich insisted then — and maintain to this day — that they personally had no animosity toward this per- secuted sect, but were forced to these extreme measures by the Plymouth Colony. The facts, indeed, seem to substantiate this claim. There are many records of a Quaker having to be sent to a neighboring town for punishment, local feeling running so high against such treat- ment in Sandwich. Ultimately so many of the citizens were fined for expressing sympathy with Quaker views that the town constable could not perform his duties and a special marshal from Plymouth was appointed to fill his place ! This marshal — Barlow — would have inspired Dickens with material for an-
SANDWICH 29
other Squeers of Dotheboys Hall. When sent to levy on the goods of a Quaker he used to seize the article which could be least spared, — such as the family kettle, — thus revealing a malignity only equaled by its ingenuity.
In order to understand the vindictive in- tolerance of the Puritans toward a people who, all agreed, were inoffensive enough in their personal lives, one must realize that a com- munity like this was built upon the belief that the ministerial office was sacred. The church organization was an essential part of the social and ethical life. Therefore, any people who merely followed what they called the "inward light," and who had no consideration for paid preachers, believing that the Divine Revela- tion comes to all alike, were dangerous, not only religiously but civically. This, coupled with the irritation we always feel toward a thing which we do not quite understand, ex- plains in a measure the Puritans' determina- tion to drive the Quakers out of the colony. And it accounts, also, for the difference be- tween this and the witchcraft mania: for while
30 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
the latter was due to individual hatred and terror, the former was based upon a system- atic policy of government.
Like many apparently yielding people, the Quakers were tenacious. Floggings, ear-crop- pings, and fines did not discourage them. They neither gave up their beliefs nor their habita- tions, although many of them did leave Sand- wich, for Falmouth, where they were kindly received, gently treated, and where they have a meeting-house of their own to this day.
Sandwich, besides being typical of this sec- tion of Massachusetts in much of its early his- tory, and in much of its characteristic scenery, in which woodland, moor, pond, and ocean blend in ever-charming, ever-changing vistas, is also typical in that it was once the seat of manufacturing as well as maritime activities. The glass-works, which were established in 1825, were among the then largest in the world. There are still, in many Cape Cod parlors, specimens of this Sandwich glass : colored gob- lets, engraved pitchers, lamp globes, a sugar bowl made by hand for a wedding gift, mir-
SANDWICH 31
rors, funny little glass animals in their natural colors, blown inside a glass bell, — a perpetual mystery to the children who occasionally crept into the sacred room to steal a look at the marvelous curiosities. There are doors in some of the old houses of the old glass-workers with engraved glass inset as panels, and many a humble cottage glitters with an array of cut- glass, for which the blanks were made at Sand- wich. There were flint-glass-works in Sand- wich, too, the most important industry in the county, and a tack factory which was de- stroyed by fire in 1883.
To-day the large manufacturing plant which one sees at Sagamore, — one of the ''neighbor- hoods" of Sandwich, extending over a mile in length, and with the usual accompaniment near by of employees' houses, — is the largest freight-car plant in New England. This Keith Car and Manufacturing Company was estab- lished as early as 1864, when Sagamore still bore the Indian name of Scussett, and the founder, Isaac Keith, started the building of wagons. Many of the prairie schooners which
32 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
traveled over the Western desert in '49 were built here, notably the one in which Captain Sutter had sallied forth to find his spectacular fortune of gold. Now ten thousand freight cars can be turned out in one year and shipped to all parts of the world. And with the Cape Cod Canal at its door, the cars may be shipped di- rectly from the plant and delivered to their destination.
There is an old wood road, barely visible now, which runs straight from Sandwich to Falmouth. No automobile could go through it: in fact, no automobilist would notice its faint traces. But horseback riders, and those few folk who love to tramp through the Cape woods, know it well. This is the Turpentine Road, down which used to be carted the tur- pentine made from the pines in this region. Those tall pines have fallen under the tongues of flames, which have lapped the Cape so many times, and scrub oaks have sprung up in their place. The turpentine industry is gone, and this ancient road, with its three ruts, is fast fading into eternal obliteration.
SANDWICH 33
It is wholly fitting that the oldest town on the Cape should boast the oldest house. If you are interested in antiques it will pay you to take the Canal Road on your way from Saga- more to Sandwich, and make the little detour that will bring you to the Tupper house.
You will recognize it immediately, for its sagging framework and small-paned windows betray its age as clearly as do the bent form and dimming eye of an octogenarian. It was built in 1637, and is, without question, the oldest house in America, in spite of the claim so often made for the old stone Van Rensselaer manor house near Albany, New York. It is not merely because its years are many that the Tupper house deserves a respectful survey: it is because they have been honorable as well. When you stand under the shadow of the venerable door, your feet are resting on the very sill where a hundred and thirty-five years after the landing of Columbus, Thomas Tup- per stood when he became a householder in the new little town of Sandwich, and where, only this year, there was picked up by a work-
34 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
man a coin marked 1609. The seven genera- tions of Tuppers who have Uved there suc- cessively for two hundred and sixty-seven years have been prominent in the ministry, the army, the navy; in medicine and peda- gogy. Sir Charles Tupper, who won for him- self not only a place in the British peerage, but also among the list of Canadian benefactors, was only one of this remarkable family, scat- tered throughout the length and breadth of the land, and which has recently formed itself into the Tupper Family Association, to restore the old homestead and turn it into a museum. Look well at this venerable house. Note the chimney — almost twelve feet square. Note, too, the mark of the axe on the timbers that are exposed, and the good workmanship re- vealed in the corners and the ceilings. Houses like this one were built without studs, the sheathing being nailed perpendicularly to the framework of the house. Pick up one of the old shingles lying at your feet. It was split by hand three hundred years ago, and fastened by a hand-inade nail. See how the lower, weather-
SANDWICH 35
beaten half is worn to half its original thick- ness — and yet the shingle is still good. To- day we think a wooden shingle that will last twenty years is exceptionally solid, while our modern nail often rusts out in half that time. Few modern houses, no matter how costly, can claim the beauty of fine workmanship which distinguishes this simple homestead.
There are other points of interest in this vicinity: the Daniel Webster Inn, where that eloquent statesman used to put up when on his frequent and well-loved fishing trips to the Cape, and the grave of Joseph Jefferson, the actor whose summer home, ''Crow's Nest," was for many years at Buzzard's Bay. Jef- ferson's grave, in the Bayview Cemetery by the side of the country road, is marked by a great rough boulder, with a bronze medallion of his keen, kindly profile on one side, and on the other his own words: ''And yet we are but tenants; let us assure ourselves of this, and then it will not be so hard to make room for the new administration, for shortly the Great Landlord will give us notice that our lease has expired."
36 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
At Sagamore Beach, where there is quite a settlement of summer folk, is also the summer headquarters of the Christian Endeavor As- sociation, and a favorite place for many con- ferences of a progressive nature.
At East Sandwich the State maintains a fish hatchery which is restocking many of the ponds of Massachusetts with trout, and also experimenting with land-locked and Chinook salmon.^
The Cape Cod Farm Bureau, which, with the assistance of the United States Depart- ment of Agriculture and the Agricultural Col- lege, is endeavoring to stimulate and instruct the farmers of the Cape, not only in the latest and best methods of planting and marketing, but in cooperation, was organized at Sand- wich, and maintained there until its recent re- moval to Hyannis. In the Bureau there is a Home Economics Department also; so, not only the men may profit by the demonstration lectures in spraying, pruning, milk-testing,
1 For a more detailed account see the pages about the Cape fisheries, chap. x.
SANDWICH 37
soil-testing, compounding fertilizers, packing and grading apples, etc., but the boys and girls are urged to join garden and canning clubs, and the women are assisted in their special problems of household management, sanita- tion, etc.^
These things you can read about when you return home. But there is one thing in Sand- wich which you cannot read about; that you must go to see for yourself, or forever lose. Do not leave Sandwich without straying to the little graveyard that lies on the sloping hill- side, jutting into the lake. You will see the ancient stones peacefully slanting against the rays of the setting sun, bearing inscriptions almost obliterated by the finger of time. You will see the willows fringing the tranquil waters, and a spire that will remind you of the best of Sir Christopher Wren's fine modeling, white against the soft blue sky. You will see two dark, thimble-shaped linden trees, curi- ous accents against the paler background.
^ For a more detailed account of the Agricultural Awaken- ing of the Cape, see chap. ix.
38 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
And as you linger in the quiet yet cheerful spot you will, perhaps, see the prettiest of white boats slip out from a bridge that might have been copied from a Chinese plate and slide across the water.
You will see these things, and then, if you will close your eyes and open your spirit, you will feel the peace that comes from a place ineffably lovely, ineffably serene. A place which men chose as beautiful and set aside as sacred three hundred years ago, and where for three throbbing centuries good men and good women have been laid reverently to rest.
Chapter IV
BARNSTABLE — THE COUNTY SEAT
IF you should imagine a long picture gal- lery — three centuries long, and as wide as from the Atlantic to the Pacific — hung with American types, from the Indian and the Puritan to the twentieth-century business man, you would, if you had a correct view of such a gallery, notice that not an inconsider- able portion of it would be occupied by the New England type, in various phases of its development. And you would be struck by even a more detailed classification: the Cape Cod type. Perhaps, however, in order to study this specialized group, it would be better to transfer our imaginations from a national pic- ture gallery to a local one; and what more suit-
40 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
able place than the gracious and sedate county seat of Barnstable?
Barnstable has been the home of many dis- tinguished men: James Otis, Samuel A. Otis (member of Congress and father of Harrison Gray Otis), Solicitor-General Davis, Samuel Shaw, Mr. Palfrey (the historian). Governor Hinckley, and Nymphas Marston among them. If we step inside the handsome, gray- pillared court-house, we shall find here, in looking over the ancient records and the yel- lowing pictures, portraits from which we our- selves will evolve an imaginative gallery.
First of all we shall hang the portrait of the Indian; not only because he was the first in- habitant of this region, but because he still persists upon it. You may see him any day — not in pure-blooded impressiveness, to be sure, yet with the straight black hair, the erect car- riage, and the numberless small traits which characterize the people of Mashpee.^
Next we shall hang the pioneer: of pure Eng- lish descent, of high order of intelligence;
1 See chap, xvii, "A Forgotten Corner of Cape Cod."
BARNSTABLE 41
grave, severe, upright. Perhaps we may be forgiven if we now put two smaller pictures close to this one; for, after all, the Puritan was not the only man who came to the new colo- nies. Looking back to those early days we are very apt to forget that there were along with the band of sterner personages a number of wits and scamps and wags, seeking adventure rather than religion, and freedom from re- sponsibility rather than assumption of it. After the Revolution the reaction against the Puritans encouraged more and more recruits to this jolly crew. They had big Saxon hearts; they tasted wine with Yorick at the tavern, and afterward went their way to Yorick's fate in the graveyard. As they did not write the records, we learn of them chiefly between the fading lines of fines and trials. They were never stanch upholders of the Church, in an age when not to be so was a decided disgrace. Stalwart and rollicking, they infuse a certain ruddy tang into the austere color of those early days. Let us give them some remem- brance in our gallery.
42 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
And beside them a small portrait, but a definite one — the high-bred eccentric, sent over to the colonies by some distracted family, glad to find an asylum for a peculiar member. "Characters" they were often called, and their successors still flavor many a New England village.
Another portrait, too frequently neglected by the historians, must hang in this line: a dark face, laughing and yet sorrowful, — the face of the negro. The people of Massachusetts have liked to believe that slavery had a very light and very brief hold upon this soil. Rec- ords, however, testify all too distinctly that our Puritan fathers, doubtless considering themselves the elect to whom God had given the heathen for an inheritance, not only en- slaved captured Indians, but sold them to work in the tropics, where they died almost immediately; that they obtained negroes by importation, purchase, and exchange; that they condemned criminals into slavery as punishment; and that they even enslaved the Quakers at one time. Neither was this a priv-
BARNSTABLE 43
ate speculation, but an enterprise of the au- thorities of the colony, and existed for over a century and a half without serious challenge. Cotton Mather illustrates the temper of the times toward the Indians in his "Magnalia," in which he explains: "We know not when or how these Indians first became inhabitants of this mighty continent, yet we may guess that probably the Devil decoyed these miserable savages hither, in hope that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ would never come to de- stroy or disturb his absolute Empire over them."
In the will of John Bacon, of Barnstable, made in 1730, we get another inimitable speci- men of the inconsistency then current. This John Bacon gives to his wife the ''use and im- provement" of the slave Dinah for her life- time, and if "at the death of my said wife, Dinah be still living, I direct my executors to sell her, and to use and improve the money for which she is sold in the purchase of Bibles, and distribute them equally among my said wife's and my grandchildren."
44 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
About 1780 slavery became unprofitable and therefore unpopular in this climate, but it was not until President Lincoln's Proclama- tion that it was entirely abolished — a fact which it would be salutary for many a too emphatic New England abolitionist to remem- ber.
Before we leave this era let us place one more vivid and forever romantic picture against the wall : it is of a young woman, seated upon a scarlet blanket upon a snow-white bull. Before her walks the newly made bridegroom, for this is a bridal procession, and John Alden is leading his wife — she who was Priscilla Mullen of Barnstable — back to the Plymouth Colony; surely a picturesque flash in the som- ber annals of that early history.
If we pass over two hundred years we shall recognize anew many of the qualities which distinguish the first settlers. The portraits we place against the wall are still of those of pure English descent. They have married and inter- married until nearly every one calls nearly every one else by his or her first name. Uncle
BARNSTABLE 45
Simon and Aunt Lizzie and Cousin Abbie are as frequent here as colonels in Kentucky. They are thrifty, law-abiding, Jntelliggit. Ijheir^ humor is as sharp and dry as the sand on which they live.VThey are excellently well in- formed. And why not, when every other family boasts a member who has sailed around the world and kept his eyes open as he went, bringing back more than silk and fans and coral from his visit to distant shores? In 1880 a case was tried in Barnstable, for which a lawyer from a distance was summoned. Dur- ing the course of his argument he implied that probably none of the jury knew of procedures beyond their own dooryards. Rather nettled by the assumption, some one took the trouble to inquire about that particular jury, and found that eleven out of the twelve had been all over the world, either as masters of their own ves- sels or in some business capacity. The twelfth was a substantial farmer. And such an as- sortment of men was by no means an extra- ordinary thing.
We do not over-estimate the intelligence of
46 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
these Cape-Codders. Practically every ener- getic man took long sea voyages, coming back with new ideas and broad opinions. In 1839 two hundred and fifty of its citizens were masters or mates of some of the finest ships in the Union. They not only raised the mental standard of the community to which they so faithfully returned and to which they brought so generously of their cosmopolitan collec- tions, but they were judges of tea and silk and coal and manufactured goods. They were commercial pioneers: they gambled on car- goes, and sometimes made a fortune on a single voyage. They were the forerunners of the Americans who have conceived the big commercial ideas and carried them out; who later built railroads across the continent, and laid telegraph wires under the sea. It was a Cape-Codder who sent a ship-load of babies' cradles around the Horn in '48 to California, and sold them at fabulous prices to serve as *' rockers" for gold mines, just as the first fever of '49 began. And it was another who sent ice to the tropics where such a thing had
BARNSTABLE 47
never been heard of and where profits of one thousand per cent were made. Besides their inteUigenee, the Cape-Codders^^have always been a conspicuously law-abiding folk. Thor- eau observed when he passed through Barn- stable that the jail was **to let." It might fre- quently have been marked so, for it is hard to imagine communities less inclined to htigation and more habituated to minding their own business and not interfering with their neigh- bors. There are, of course, opportunities of disputes concerning cranberry flowage statutes, fishing and beach privileges, etc. But not- withstanding their admirable record for valor both on the seas and in fighting the enemy, their respect for order has always prevailed.
In spite of their good behavior at home — possibly because of it? ^ they were rovers. One cannot scour the globe and hug one s hearthstone at the same time. But although they sailed away, — and, when the sailing and fishing interests declined, went away by land to seek fame and fortune and to find it, they never forgot the smell of the salt marsh in
48 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
haying-time, or the cool of the misty moors; the traiHng arbutus in spring, or the sight of the "white-winged birds" as the Indians love to call the sailing vessels. Just as the merchant from Detroit comes back to his native birth- place at Hyannis or Bourne, so his grand- father and his great grandfather found their way back after their trips to India and Ceylon, and settled down to end their days within sight of the tranquil shore.
This is the Cape-Codder that the historian has delighted to honor; that the novelists have eagerly depicted; that the cartoonists have jocularly portrayed with web feet combing his hair with a codfish bone. Until 1895 ninety per cent of the population of Cape Cod was native-born of pure English stock, maintain- ing to a remarkable degree the quintessence of New England characteristics with the wider virtue of Americanism.
But with the influx of summer people — about fifteen or twenty years ago — a change has crept through the veins of the race. The most radical ethnical change that has occurred
BARNSTABLE 49
since the beginning of her history is in process, and it is coming about in such a silent, incon- spicuous way that even those it affects most vitally have as yet hardly realized it. The time has come to hang another portrait on the walls of the picture gallery : that of a newcomer with physiognomy and complexion quite as different from the Anglo-Saxon as the Anglo- Saxon from the aborigines.
Would you be surprised to know that, in a certain graduating class in a public school in the township of Falmouth, fifty of the children were Portuguese and but ten were American? Would you be surprised to know that there are Roman Catholic churches in Barnstable where only Portuguese attend, and Protestant ones where Finns are the only communicants.^ One sixth of the population is foreign in the town of Barnstable; in certain neighborhoods, one half. What a change from the old days when a dark-skinned newcomer was a curios- ity!
With the exception of Provincetown, Barn- stable has probably the greatest number of
50 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
Portuguese of any town on the Cape, their advent here being similar to their advent in many of the small towns where they have now firmly established themselves.
The newcomers are usually a small group, say half a dozen single men, who appear in the press of the cranberry season when their serv- ices are gratefully accepted. They find ac- commodation in some old barn or shed, where they live peaceably enough, the sound of danc- ing and of a crude guitar on a summer eve- ning being the only thing which proclaims their presence. They buy milk from a near-by farmer and are punctilious in their payments. Once established, they proceed to make them- selves extremely useful. They pick strawber- ries, blueberries, cranberries, and beach plums in due succession. In the winter they gather shellfish. And in the spring they import a wife and children from Sao Miguel or from Lisbon, buy some abandoned farmhouse, and move in. The land that has lain fallow for a decade is coaxed into fertility. Besides tending their garden patches and their houses they work all
BARNSTABLE 51
day like beavers. The man teams, fishes, goes out for "day's work," and picks berries. A quick Portuguese can earn as much as three dollars a day in blueberry season. The wife goes out scrubbing or takes in washing. Every single child hies to the woods and picks berries like mad all summer and goes to school all winter. And presto! in half a dozen years the village, which was almost deserted, resounds to a voluble dialect. The school which boasted ten pupils has twenty-five — more than half of them with unpronounceable, three-syllable names. Gradually the community which sur- veyed the intruders with resentment succumbs to force of numbers. The Portuguese youth, educated side by side with the Yankee maiden, falls in love with her, and marriage is the sequel.
It is largely a matter of numbers. Where there are few Portuguese, as in neighborhoods in Bourne, they have no social standing. The natives even refuse to pick berries on the bogs with them at cranberry-time. But where they outnumber the original inhabitants, as in
52 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
Provincetown, we get the other side of the shield. They become storekeepers; the girls go to normal school and attain a teacher's diploma, and intermarriage follows quite na- turally.
While the Portuguese are scattered all over the Cape, the Finns are gathered chiefly in Barnstable. They are a quiet and industrious people, with a desire and capacity for educa- tion; and they bring with them many of the admirable traces of their own civilization. Their entrance into a village is similar to that of the Portuguese, but it is doubtful if they will ever reach such large numbers. They are so intelligent and thrifty that some of the most progressive farmers from other towns have found it worth their while to import them — giving them house-room for the sake of serv- ices which later they may hire from them and their numerous children.
Thus, as the sons and daughters of the Cape have wandered inland, as their progenitors wandered seaward, to win fame and fortune, a comely and a quiet race has humbly taken pos-
BARNSTABLE 53
session of the deserted houses and is patiently and with infinite persistence making the Hght but productive soil to blossom like the rose. So, to the Portuguese and the Finn must surely be granted the next place in the picture gal- lery of the Cape.
The final place in the gallery would belong to a group affording quite an amusing con- trast — that of a prosperous business man, his well-dressed wife, and a group of young folks, children and guests, with tennis rackets, riding-whips, and the other insignia of sum- mer recreation. For popular as all the Cape is, and permeating as are the presence and in- fluence of the summer colonists throughout the county, yet the spacious township of Barn- stable is especially favored, not so much with boarding-houses and hotels, but with hand- some estates and substantial summer homes of a large and cosmopolitan population. Hyan- nis, with its fashionable shops, where you may buy Italian furniture or Brittany pottery or Japanese novelties; Osterville, Centerville, Wianno, — about a dozen or so progressive
54 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
villages, — are all part of Barnstable, and are rich with modern houses, shaven lawns, and commodious garages. You may travel for miles through them along a well-oiled highway catching glimpses of well-kept gardens and hospitable residences across the white fences or the vine-clad stone walls.
Hyannis, although technically a village in the town of Barnstable, is such a thriving place that one cannot slip over it with a mere men- tion. Its original Indian name of lyannough, in honor of the young sachem who first re- ceived the colonists, has passed through the modifications of Janno, lanno, Hyanno, to the present Hyannis, which pleasantly recalls the Indian syllables. With its all-the-year- round population of 4500; with its Board of Trade, Women's Club, Sunday Evening Lec- tures, and its world-famous Normal School,^ it is a place of modernity. The headquarters of Barnstable Council Boy Scouts of America is at Hyannis. The Boy Scouts on the Cape number sixteen troops, with an enrollment of
^ See chap, xiv, "Harwich and the Cape Cod Schools."
BARNSTABLE 55
two hundred and sixteen boys and eighty men. The headquarters of the Barnstable Y.M.C.A. have recently been removed from Sagamore to Hyannis, and the Cape Cod Farm Bureau has made the same change from Sandwich. For the rest, there are summer hotels, golf courses, tennis courts, moving pictures — quite an amazing development for a village which in 1850 had only nine letter boxes in its post- office. One should not leave Hyannis without a trip to Shoot Flying Hill, five miles away, from which, on a clear day, one may see all Cape Cod, and the entire mainland as far north as Plymouth, stretching out in a living map at one's feet.
Thus the long picture gallery of Barnstable brings us up to the present day. First the pioneer, both the Puritan and the adventurer; then the thrifty, intelligent "first inhabitants" with their sea captains and sailors and patriots, whose descendants live on to this day in the old homesteads; then the voluble Portuguese and the industrious Finns; and finally the generous army of summer folk, who, although
56 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
they return in the fall to distant cities from Boston to St. Louis, still love to call the Cape "home."
Besides being the center of the racial melt- ing-pot, Barnstable has some fair sights, chief among them being the sweep of the marshes — green in summer, russet in the fall — from which the town received its original name of "Great Marshes." The court-house, too, standing on its dignified eminence, is of goodly proportions, and is the inspiration and reposi- tory of many legends. It was built in 1832, and has been twice enlarged. The bell which the first edifice — the court-house — bore was east in Munich, and bore the inscription, "Si Deus pro nos, quis contra nos, 1675," recalling the tragedy of Captain Peter Adolphe, who had been cast away on the shore in 1697 or '98, and whose body was recovered and buried at Sandwich. His widow, in grateful remem- brance of the reverent rites accorded her hus- band, — who had been a stranger in a strange land, indeed, — presented the citizens with the bell, which hung in the tower of the old
BARNSTABLE 57
meeting-house for thirty years. In 1703 it was sold to buy a larger one. Barnstable County purchased it, and it is now preserved in the office of the clerk of the courts, where visitors may admire its lovely shape and exquisite chasing. The court-house overlooks the very harbor where, in July, 1621, a party of men from the Plymouth Colony came in a shallop, commanded by Miles Standish, in search of a boy who had been lost in the woods. This lad had fallen in with a group of Indians who had taken him to Nauset, now Eastham. This same group of Indians conducted the searching party to Eastham also, found the boy for them, and took a courteous farewell. j
After this Barnstable was often visited by the Plymouth colonists on their expeditions to buy corn, until it was definitely settled in 1639 on the usual conditions and with the cus- tomary restrictions. The church was estab- lished early, and although no building was erected, tradition points to a place on the high- way between Barnstable and West Barnstable where once stood a huge rock. Here, under the
58 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
shadow of the roadside oaks and pines, the devout met and worshiped — more Uke Greeks in their leafy temples than they probably realized.
It is pleasant to recall that although Barn- stable was christened in memory of the sea- port in Devonshire near the Bristol Channel, yet the name of the young sachem who first received the colonists, lyannough, is still per- petuated in the town of Hyannis, an incident that recalls that, after all, the first portrait to lead the picture gallery is that of the red man, who, before Pilgrim or Portuguese or summer visitor, gazed out over the wind-licked marshes of the spacious town of Barnstable and called them his own.
Chapter V
YARMOUTH AND CAPE COD METHODISM
YARMOUTH, named for a seaport in Norfolk, England, is the elbow town of the Cape: from here, Barnstable County be- gins to widen and the soil to thicken. And here, too, we find various phases of Cape his- tory sharply accented.
Although Yarmouth is the third oldest town on the Cape, — being incorporated with Sand- wich and Barnstable in 1639, its Revolutionary history stirring, and the record of its various industries of whaling and seafaring most vigor- ous, — yet it is neither through its civil nor economic history that Yarmouth has won its
60 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
special fame. That fame rests on its being the great camp-meeting center of Cape Cod. Here, in the Millennium Grove, every year for a week, men, women, and children* congregate in a sort of extended revival meeting, getting and giving fresh impetus to religious progress, and to the progress of Methodism through all New England.
It was South Wellfleet that held the first camp meeting on Cape Cod. This was in 1819, and was followed by religious revivals in Prov- incetown and Eastham. In 1826 the encamp- ment was held at Truro, and two years later it moved to Eastham. It is from this latter place that the history of the Methodist Epis- copal Church on Cape Cod really dates, and as we see the white-spired churches, dotting the scattered hamlets all through Barnstable County, we cannot help but be struck by the significance of the religion which ever since its inception has been unbrokenly characteristic of this region.
The early days at Eastham were marked by fervor and discomfort. One who decided to
YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 61
attend the camp meeting first had to drive to Barnstable; from there take a vessel to East- ham; row from the vessel to shallow water; be carted through the shallow water by a farm wagon; and then walk a mile through the sand to the Camp-Meeting Grounds. There were no cottages; no tabernacle. The seats were of bare planks without backs, and the preachers slept on the floor — on straw — in a wooden shack. There was but one well on the grounds, and one man was commissioned to do all the pumping for those who wanted water. In the morning one saw the reenactment of ancient Biblical scenes, in the scores and scores of per- sons, waiting with their bowls and pitchers to be served with the water that was to last them through the day.
Strenuous as this regime was, nevertheless the Camp-Meeting Ground at Eastham held its own for thirty years. Then it was moved to Yarmouth, the extension of the Old Colony Railroad down to this point making it an accessible gathering-place. In August, 1863, the first camp meeting at Yarmouth was
62 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
held, and they have been held there ever since without interruption.
The past always, merely by becoming past, gathers a halo of romance around it. The stern old pioneers who trudged through both sand and water to get to Eastham; who sat on bare planks to listen to the long discourses, and who slept without a murmur on the straw; who waited interminably in the morning for their portion of fresh water — doubtless viewed with contempt the softer accommodations of Yar- mouth. But we, to whom the first Yarmouth days are almost as far away as the first East- ham ones, look back at them both with curi- osity.
To-day there are cottages and concrete walks and booths at the Camp-Meeting Grounds. There is a keeper's house, and an association building, and a commodious wooden taber- nacle which holds about five hundred people. But there are plenty of Cape-Codders who will tell you of the days when there were no such conveniences. It was only thirty-odd years ago that camp-meeting season saw a whole
YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 63
host of tents, dotting the grounds Hke mush- rooms. People came from far and near — fathers, mothers, children, aunts, and grand- mothers. They brought their own tents and huge boxes full of provisions — roast chicken and cookies and apples and sandwiches — enough to feed them during their entire ten days' stay. Those who did not own their own tents were apportioned off into those of their church; for nearly every church had its tent, divided down the middle, with accommoda- tions for the men on one side of the dividing line and for the women on the other. Then followed revivalists' meetings, prayer meet- ings, experience meetings. There were conver- sions and sermons and rousing chorus singings. It was the fashion for good church members to come every year, bringing their entire families, from infants in arms to helpless old folk.
It is changed now. The tents have given place to cottages, built in the curious jigsaw architecture characteristic of such edifices. After the camp-meeting season is over, and
64 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
before it begins, the cottages are rented by the association to people who may or may not have reUgious aflfiliations. There is less spectacular exhortation, and more of the tone of a serious conference. The picnic spirit has waned some- what : most of the children are left at home, and many of the merely curious have had their curiosity satisfied by now, or go elsewhere for excitement.
And yet we must not underestimate the value of the camp meeting to the vital life of the Cape. One cannot appreciate the caliber of a people, their temperament, nor their ma- terial progress without understanding some- thing of their religion. Methodism began to gather power in this section of the country in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as a reaction from the formalism of the Church of England. The austere meeting-houses and the impassioned preaching were the expressions of a people to whom dignified ritualism and Old- World conventionalities had grown wearisome. What these Cape-Codders wanted was ''relig- ion in earnest," as Southey said, and that is
YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 65
what they got. People who traveled great and diflfieult distances to hear a preacher were entirely willing to listen to him for a long time. Two and three hour discourses were not in the least boresome to them. Obviously no summary of the Cape is complete without mention of this strong and simple religious feeling which sustained a strong and simple people so admirably for two hundred years.
Besides its camp-meeting activities Yar- mouth has always maintained a conspicuous church life. The inevitable concomitant of small rivalries, schisms, etc., although they fill many pages of the early records, are hap- pily forgotten by now; and although many di- visions have grown out from the original organi- zation, the essential only has been preserved, and its growth has extended with the years. It is characteristic that the first church build- ing antedated the incorporation of the town- ship by several months. It stood on the place called Fort Hill, and was merely a log house, thirty feet by forty, with oiled paper in place of glass in the windows. Hither the faithful
66 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
were summoned by the beating on a drum, and those who were not faithful, but "denied the Scriptures to be the rule of life," received cor- poral punishment at the hands of the magis- trates. People came from miles around to at- tend church: in storm as well as in sunshine. At first they came on foot, but as animals in- creased the better conditioned came on horse- back. The old custom, which still exists in certain primitive parts of the South of "riding and tying," was part of the quaint Sunday morning procession in those days. The hus- band and wife started out together on the same horse, he with his musket and she riding be- hind him. At the end of a few miles, they dis- mounted, tied their horse, leaving it for the couple behind them, and walked on. When the second pair caught up with them they in turn dismounted, and walked on, and the first cou- ple rode again for a certain distance, leaving the horse behind as before. Thus one horse transferred four saddle passengers to and from the place of worship. The first minister here was Marmaduke Matthews, the eloquent
YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 67
Welshman who was matriculated at All Souls' College at Oxford, and who came to New Eng- land in 1638 — a proof that culture was not lacking on the Cape in those early days. But culture was not exclusive. There were two hundred praying Indians here between 1667 and 1699, under the ministry of the Reverend Thomas Thornton and two native preachers. They had their own meeting-house, northeast of the "Swans Pond," just above a spring where Eliot preached to them. In the southern part of Yarmouth there was an Indian Reserva- tion, and as late as 1779 there was a small cluster of wigwams in the southeast part of the town, which were inhabitated by the Paw- kannawkut Indians. The original name of Yarmouth was an Indian one, Mattacheese, which is an Indian name signifying " old lands" or "planting -lands." When the terminal was added, it meant "by the water." Thus, Mat- tacheeset meant "planting-lands by the border of the water." For years the northeast sec- tion of the town was known as "Hokkanom." And certainly one of the best proofs of the
68 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
salutary influence of the church life is that these red men were uniformly well treated in the town.
The first church was followed by a second and a third, this last with a high pulpit and a sounding-board and pews — marks of prog- ress. It stood on the county road, and during the Revolution was decorated with a tower- ing liberty pole. Later this building fell into temporal use, being used for a store and a post- office, but its steeple remained an important landmark for vessels. It was finally burned, and in 1870 the present Methodist Church was built. There are five churches in Yarmouth to-day, among them a Roman Catholic, — the Sacred Heart, dedicated in 1902, — a Univer- salist, and a Swedenborgian. (What would the first settlers say to that, one wonders!) And the town also has the honor of forming, in 1817, the second temperance society in the country.
Many eminent men are associated with the history of Yarmouth: not only admirable sea captains and shipmasters whose names are
YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 69
chiefly remembered by their descendants, but men like Timothy Alden, direct descendant of John. He occupied for nearly sixty years the pulpit left vacant by Marmaduke Matthews. Joseph White, the grandson of Peregrine White, lived at Yarmouth and died there in 1782 in his seventy-ninth year, leaving behind him a staff, about three feet long, with a brazen foot and a wooden head, which one of the com- pany of our forefathers had in his hand when he stepped on the well-known rock at Ply- mouth.
When the town was incorporated in 1638, by settlers from Saugus, there were eight college graduates among them. John Miller, who is mentioned in Mather's "Magnalia" as one of the eighty-seven ministers who had been in the ministry before embarking to America, was probably the first minister at Yarmouth. John Cotton was settled here iri 1693 — dying here twelve years later. Anthony Thatcher — famous through Whittier's poem, the ''Swan Song of Parson Avery" — came to Yarmouth in 1639, and for eight generations his descend-
70 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
ants have continued to exercise a wide influ- ence in the affairs of town and State. John Crow, whose name began to be written " Crow- ell" in the third generation, was also one of the first settlers, as were the gallant sailor Asa Eldridge, Thomas Howes, Andrew Hallett, William Eldridge, Thomas Hatch, and others whose names are still conspicuous all over the Cape.
Besides distinguished men, Yarmouth has its quota of fine houses. The Chandler Gary house, which was torn down in May, 1899, after reaching the goodly age of two hundred years, revealed bullets embedded in the walls. If any house was ever worthy of this distinction surely this was, for it was here that the loyal mothers and daughters of Yarmouth gath- ered on the night preceding the march to Dorchester Heights, and melted up their pew- ter dishes into bullets to supply their husbands and sons. And the next day saw eighty-one men, half the effective force of the town, marching to Boston under the leadership of Captain Joshua Gray.
YARMOUTH AND METHODISM 71
The common schools at Yarmouth were among the first on the Cape, and were — and still are — uniformly excellent. Whaling, cod- fishing, turpentine gathered from the forests, and salt manufacturing brought good business to the town for fifty years. Then, because of the abolition of duties on foreign salt and the development of source and supply in our own country, this industry ceased to be profitable.^ Fishing and shipbuilding came to an end with the Civil War, the latter partly because of the exhaustion of the timber supply.
The record of Yarmouth is an honorable one. Famous fishers of men and famous fish- ers of the deep have both left their clean rec- ords, their self-respecting descendants, and their substantial houses. Worldly wealth has descended in many instances, and accounts for the air of easy-going comfort in the place to tell us of the past. And the treasure in heaven, for which this community so zealously labored, has also gathered interest, and still accrues to the glory and the credit of the town.
^ See chap. vi.
Chapter VI
NEW INDUSTRIES AND OLD IN DENNIS
THOUSANDS and thousands of years ago — so the fable runs — there was an enor- mous eagle, quite as enormous as the roc in Sinbad the Sailor's tale. He used to hover over the South Shore of Cape Cod, and when- ever he saw little children playing, he would pounce down upon them and carry one away in his terrible iron talons. Maushope was an Indian giant — gentle and huge. Unlike most of the giants of folk-lore, he loved little boys and girls, and the onslaughts of the eagle en- raged him. He brooded and brooded over them, and one day as the eagle flapped away with a screaming child in his claws, Maushope started
INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 73
to chase him. The bird flew out to sea, and the giant strode after him. Farther and farther flew the bird: deeper and deeper waded the giant — but, of course, since he was a giant he could wade into the very depths of the ocean. By and by he came to Nantucket, which until that time had never been known to the in- habitants of the mainland. And there, under a tree, he found the bones of all the children the eagle had devoured. He sat down beside them and grieved for a long time. Finally he thought he would feel better if he had a smoke, but he searched the island in vain for tobacco. So he filled his pipe with poke — a weed that, ever since that time, the Indians have used as a substitute. He smoked and he smoked, and the smoke drifted back across the sound to the mainland. That was the beginning of fogs on Cape Cod, and that is what the abo- rigines meant when they said, "Old Maushope is smoking his pipe."
The moist fumes of Maushope's pipe pene- trate every corner of Cape Cod, but at Dennis they come less frequently than at most other
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places. For Dennis is high, — Scargo Hill is the highest elevation in Barnstable County, — and this is probably the reason that Dennis was among the first of the Cape Cod towns to attract summer people.
It is an interesting coincidence that the two largest industries on the Cape to-day — sum- mer people and cranberries — had their ori- gin in the very place where the two earliest industries — fishing and salt-making — were also conspicuously vigorous. This placid little town of Dennis, which automobilists whiz through without special attention, had, in 1865, a fishing fleet of forty-eight vessels and seven hundred and twenty-two men, represent- ing one hundred and seventeen thousand dol- lars of capital. There was a coastwise fleet also of eighty-five vessels and four hundred and forty-five men. Nearly twelve hundred men sailed from this one port alone, and thirty years before one hundred and fifty skippers sailing from various American ports all claimed Dennis as their home. They often took their wives with them in those jovial days, and came
INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 75
back with jars of Chinese sweetmeats, shim- mering Indian stuffs, tamarinds, coeoanuts, parrots, fans, feathers, spicy wood, and great shells. One likes to picture the friendly com- motion which such advents and departures caused in the little village. Fast and famous clippers were built here, also, by the Shiver- icks; more than one of them noted for their swift voyages from Calcutta to San Francisco.
But although Dennis made an excellent and honorable livelihood out of the ocean, this does not distinguish her from half a dozen other Cape towns. It is her experiments with solar evaporation of sea-water for salt and her dis- covery of the value of the cranberry that give the quiet hamlet a place in the economic his- tory of the country.
In 1855 there were one hundred and sixty- five salt manufactories on Cape Cod, and eighty-five in Dennis alone, turning out thirty- four thousand bushels of salt annually. All over the Cape, and especially around this region of Dennis, there stood on the hills which overlooked the sea windmills which pumped
76 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
sea-water into wooden vats for the making of salt. On the lowlands were acres of these vats, their conical-shaped roofs contributing an odd touch to the landscape. When it rained there was a great stampede to close the vats and keep out the fresh water.
It all started in 1776 when Captain John Sears, from that part of Dennis which went under the attractive name of "Suet," con- structed the first experimental salt vat on Cape Cod. His experience was similar to that of most inventors: the first year the works leaked, and every one laughed at them, call- ing them "Sears's Folly." The second year he obtained thirty bushels of salt; the fourth year a hand pump was introduced in place of the buckets which had formerly been used to pour water into the vats. In 1785 a wind pump was contrived with the assistance of Captain Nathaniel Freeman, of Harwich. Eight years later Mr. Reuben Sears, of Harwich, invented the shives, or rollers, for the covers which pro- tected the vat from the rain. After that com- petition sprang up fast and furious, and im-
INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 77
provements were constantly made — greatly to the chagrin of the original inventors, but highly advantageous to the community. The industry assumed significant proportions; the salt produced by this system of solar evapora- tion resembling Lisbon salt — pure, strong, and free from lime; also Glauber's salt from crystallization in winter. It took three hun- dred and fifty gallons of sea-water to make a bushel of salt, and at one time — in 1783 — salt sold for eight dollars a bushel. Three years before this the General Court tried to encourage the idea of manufacture by offering a bounty of three shillings for every bushel produced. At one time there was over two million dollars invested in these various salt- works. And then the decline came. This was partly due to the increased value of the pine which came from Maine, necessary for mak- ing the vats. As the various salt-works went out of business the lumber was taken and con- verted into buildings. And more than one possessor of a barn or shed, constructed of these timbers, may still be heard complaining
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because no nail will last long in the salt-soaked wood, but rusts out in short order, even after all these years.
Unfortunately, the policy of the National Government was not consistent toward this industry, sometimes encouraging it by placing a high duty on imported salt, and at other times reducing the impost. The bounty of- fered by the State in the infancy of the indus- try was afterwards withdrawn. The develop- ment of salt springs in New York and other places also tended to make the business less profitable. Thus it gradually and steadily declined.
But exciting as the invention of the salt- works was to the small town, which suddenly found itself in competition with Russia and Sicily, it was the land and not the water which bestowed upon Cape Cod her most modern and permanent financial status. This was the cultivation of the cranberry, which was first thought of by Henry Hall, an inhabitant of Dennis, about eighty years ago.
Every visitor to the Cape has been struck
INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 79
by the strange and singular beauty of the low flat bogs, perfectly level, covered with a thick, close vine, with red berries gleaming against the white sand in autumn, and the vines red- dening, too, as the season advances, giving a unique touch to the landscape, dear to the heart of the Cape-Codder. You see them everywhere — these bogs : tucked under the protection of a hill; skirting a stream; lying in winding valleys below the level of the carriage roads, and suddenly appearing — trim rec- tangular clearings, walled about by a dense swamp growth — in the very midst of the woods. When you see one of these bogs — even, thrifty, level — you are looking at the consummation of an industry which has been indissolubly linked with the name of Cape Cod since 1677. For it was in that year that his loyal subjects in Massachusetts presented Charles the Second with a gift of three thou- sand codfish, two hogsheads of samp, and ten barrels of cranberries! These historic ten barrels were filled with the wild cranberry, which has always grown freely in certain re-
80 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
gions of the Cape. Nearly two hundred years elapsed before it occurred to any one to ex- periment scientifically with the piquant fruit. Then Mr. Hall, selecting an old peat swamp of practically no value, cleared it of trees and bushes and set out cranberry vines, which he tended with the solicitous care we associate with exotics. His success was immediate, and instantly the whole town set to work clearing out the numerous swamps and planting wild cranberry vines. And then, like some benign enchantment, money in the form of scarlet berries began to pour out of the ground. Fami- lies which had been struggling with poverty found themselves independent; widows, of whom there are always an unconscionable number in any seafaring place, became the surprised and grateful recipients of a few hun- dred — sometimes a few thousand — dollars a year. And more than one old sea captain scratched his head in bewilderment when he realized that he was getting richer from an old swamp where he used to chase foxes than he had ever been as master of a vessel.
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Cape Cod is, without question, the best re- gion for cranberries in the whole world. E very- variety may be grown here more easily and better than anywhere else. And as there is no substitute for the odd little fruit, it is likely that the Cape will always hold the supremacy.
The culture has now been reduced to an ex- act science. A swamp is cleared from its wild growth, leveled like a floor, and six inches of clear sand are carted over the heavy bog soil; or a pond or marsh may be filled up and cov- ered with sand in the same way. Trenches are cut, a dike is thrown up, and a brook turned so as to run through it. It has gates, so that in the spring the land may be flooded to kill the insects, and in the fall to protect against the frosts. Sometimes one sees a row of bird- houses beside a cranberry bog, to encourage the insect-eaters to take up a permanent habitation there. Vines are placed at regu- lar intervals, making such a solid mat that weeding is hardly necessary, after the third year. It costs from two hundred and fifty to a thousand dollars to make a cranberry
82 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
bog, and it takes three years for it to come into bearing condition. But, once started, the profits are large. In very good years the interest on money so invested is one hun- dred per cent. In very poor years the crops may be a total failure. But an average return of thirty per cent is not high: fifty per cent is probably nearer accurate. One bog of sixteen acres not far from Dennis netted in one year eight thousand dollars. Half an acre at Har- wichport yielded in one season ninety-eight barrels. It is easy to see how the possession of a good bog will carry a thrifty Cape-Codder through the year.
But the traveler through this region will probably be more struck by the picturesque than the economic value of the cranberry bog. Now that the Portuguese are coming in such numbers — sometimes almost doubling the native population during the cranberry sea- son — much of the distinctive flavor of the festival has been lost. The gayly colored fig- ures, kneeling in long lines and picking rapidly and patiently all day long, make as decorative
INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 83
a scene for the outsider as ever. But to the native the season no longer holds its charac- teristic charm. For in the old days it was the custom of everybody, storekeeper and house- keeper and children, — for whose convenience the school season was conveniently regulated,
— the minister and his wife, a city cousin or two, young lovers making plans for the future
— all to congregate on the bogs. The hay wagons were converted into impromptu trans- portation carts, and the family with a horse stopped at the door of the family without one
— giving the children and old folks a friendly "lift" on the way. And while the young peo- ple picked for dear life, resuscitating old gibes and jokes that had been put away since last cranberry time, their mothers sat under huge umbrellas keeping *Hally," and their fathers loaded the crates upon the wagons. There was even work for the very aged. One could be eighty and half blind, but if one had "screened" (sorted the good berries from the bad over a long screen) for twenty-five years, one could still earn a dollar and a quarter a day in the
84 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
gossipy atmosphere, and at the not too strenu- ous labor of the ''screening-house." It was all very jolly : there was much amiable competition and rivalry, and he who achieved a hundred measures — or six hundred quarts — in a day earned ten dollars, and made, besides, a rec- ord that was not forgotten until it was ex- celled.
That was when all the picking was done by hand, and was paid for at the rate of ten cents a measure. Now the picking is done by the aid of a scoop, and one can get a hundred measures much more quickly; but he will only get paid six or seven cents a measure — so the advantage and disadvantage run quite evenly.
There are still towns on the Cape where the noon hour is a picnic and the whole cranberry season partakes of the nature of a festival. But every year they are fewer. The ever-industri- ous Portuguese are good pickers, and honest. The natives, however, who came as much for the fun as for the money, feel that cranberry- ing is no longer a family affair. One cannot
-''-^-r"-"! j (^,
INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS 85
picnic with the same freedom with strangers as one did with friends.
But the industry continues, although the sociabiHty is gone. The cranberry flourishes, and will probably continue to do so as long as we gather around the Thanksgiving table with a turkey imperatively demanding this partic- ular condiment.
One cannot leave Dennis without a mention of that other source of income which is even more lucrative than the cranberry — the sum- mer people. The whole Cape is gradually be- coming the recreation portion of New Eng- land. The balmy air, the warm salt water, the healthfulness and the quaint atmosphere of both the landscape and the architecture will always be worth a cash return to the city dwellers. And where summer people go they create a different set of standards — some good and some bad. It is stimulating to the natives of a seashore place to come in contact with people from the outer world. The way in which the country homesteads bloomed out with flower gardens and window boxes as soon
86 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
as the summer visitors initiated these touches on their own rented or bought or built resi- dences is a pretty proof of the value of example. Friendships are made, too, and all sorts of pleasant ties are established. For the Cape- Codder is by no means a dull rustic, but a shrewd, intelligent, and frequently delightful character — who can give more things than butter and eggs to the city folk who come to know him.
But the annual influx has some effects not so admirable. And one must admit that the stranger within the gates of a Cape village is often uncomfortably conscious of being preyed upon as well as served by the community. More than one proprietor of the "general store" has an uncanny similarity to the spider in his hole — waiting until his victims appear, then sucking them dry, and retiring for eight months to digest the gains of his too-closely driven bargains.
But good roads and good hotels, well-built houses and progressive shops — these are with- out question of great value to any township.
INDUSTRIES IN DENNIS
87
And this is what the summer people have brought and are bringing, — more and more of them every year, — and to such an extent that one feels quite justified in calling them at present the most profitable source of income to the Cape.
Chapter VII
BREWSTER AND CAPE COD ARCHITECTURE
IT is impossible to pass through Brewster ^ without being impressed by its air of mod- est prosperity, of tidiness, of lack of poverty and absence of pretension. Neat, adequate, homelike — the small farmhouses repeat the same general line and style of architecture, and give evidence of a people thrifty, self-re- specting, and comfortable.
The architecture of the Cape differs radi- cally from that of Maine, of Connecticut, of northern Massachusetts, or of the South, even
1 Brewster was originally the North Parish of Harwich. It was named for an old Pilgrim pastor who came over in the Mayflower.
BREWSTER 89
although built at the same time and under similar conditions.
These men came from the south of England and in their minds and memories was the sim- ple. Devon or Cornish cottage which uncon- sciously influenced their hands when they fash- ioned in wood their home in the new land. Their common sense suggested that the house should nestle under a hill or behind a sand dune, out of the way of the winter winds, while their love of the sea usually found a way to get a glimpse — from side door or back window — of the dark-blue water. And so we still find them, all over the Cape: a story and a half, shingled, gray, and weather-beaten, nestled in a nook, across a meadow, or haK hidden under trees of a newer growth, or in decent lines on either side of the undisturbed streets of the town.
Although individual houses may be slightly modified, yet the majority of them adhere to one general pattern — as integral a part of the Cape landscape as the galleried and pillared mansion of Virginia is to that lovely region.
90 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
This general pattern is a story and a half, ab- solutely unadorned: there is no gable to break the perfect slope of the roof; no porch or even hood to mar the utter simplicity of the door. This well-proportioned portal is flush with the lintel : it does not project nor is it recessed, and rarely has side or fan lights. It is a brave, strong door, to shut out the storm and let in the stranger.
It opens into a tiny vestibule, with a fair- sized room on either side. One of these rooms is the parlor, with a three-ply carpet, a horse- hair sofa, a corner cupboard, on which are arranged sea shells and strange bits of coral which "grandfather" brought back from some round-the-world voyage. A hair wreath, which incorporates the black tresses of maturity with the blonde curls of infancy and the white locks of old age, — laboriously worked into the gruesome semblance of flowers, — hangs above the excellently built mantel. This room is used rarely: the chairs do not suggest com- fort; its two windows facing the street and its one window facing the side yard are never
BREWSTER 91
opened, except once a year at the time of spring house-cleaning.
On the other side of the narrow entry is the downstairs bedroom: perhaps it is "grand- ma's" room; perhaps it is the guest-room. With its dark, chintz-covered wing chair, and the httle Ught-stand close to the four-posted, cherry bedstead with a patchwork quilt, it is a quaint and not uncomfortable room. But there is no luxury nor elegance nor superfluity here. The Cape-Codders have always been a plain and thrifty folk.
Behind these two rooms, and reached by passing through one or the other, is the "mid- dle room" running almost the length of the house. It usually has a side door leading di- rectly out into the yard, without even the pause of a landing, — a meager enough little side yard, too, with a picket fence and a few perennials in unformed beds. At the opposite end is the buttery, its shelves filled with dishes and food; and close against the buttery — between it and the guest-room — is the little "kitchen bedchamber," a place of warmth and
92 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
refuge in winter and of stifling contraction in summer. This "middle room" is the principal room of the house. It serves as dining- and sitting-room in summer, and as kitchen and dining-room in winter. To its side door the neighbors come, seeking to borrow a broom or three eggs. Strangers are the only ones who go to the lilac-crowded front door. The big cen- tral chimney has its widest open fireplace in this "middle room," a crane with hanging hooks, where, aforetimes, the family food was cooked on Saturday to last a long week. By many of them still hang the long-handled shovels, the tongs, the bellows, the three-legged pots, and queer Dutch ovens — curious relics of a housewife's duties long ago.
Besides the two front rooms and the mid- dle room, there is almost invariably an ell or lean-to, of one story, where the summer kit- chen holds its own, and which is woodshed and general utility place in winter.
The steps — which are as plain as a ship's ladder and almost as steep — rise, unadorned by baluster or newel post, either directly out
BREWSTER 93
of the tiny front vestibule or out of the middle room by the fireplace. They lead to the upper story where there are usually three bedrooms — the two smaller ones possibly unfinished, and the large one paneled in white pine. This large bedroom was originally used by the old sea captain, and it may be fashioned some- thing like a ship's cabin with a slightly curved ceiling. The narrow doors which open out of the bedrooms lead directly on to the precipi- tous stairway — and one early learns to put out a foot with caution when emerging from one's room.
In each of the old towns and ''neighbor- hoods" stands a "great house" or several "great houses," two stories and a half, square, flat-roofed, or, like their lowlier neighbors, pitch-roofed. They are handsome edifices, — gray-shingled or clapboarded and painted white, — with shutters, a side porch, steps at the side door, and with a large story and a half ell. But in spite of their added dignity, they are still typically Cape houses, and not in the least like the old-fashioned mansions in Ports-
94 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
mouth or in the Berkshires. It was here that the selectmen Uved, where the mail was de- livered once or twice a week, and where the peripatetic missionary spent the night. Many a quiet caucus was held in the big back kitchen, with a mug of hard cider to help the talk along. But the majority of these finer houses were built by Brewster sea captains — for Brewster's aristocracy was composed of these shrewd and daring men, who made fortunes, many of them the beginnings of larger ones, for their de- scendants of to-day in Boston, New York, and the West, and who built substantial homes and planted dignified trees that still shade them. In the old Brewster houses were ivory carv- ings and Japanese silk hangings, sandalwood boxes and alabaster images of the Coliseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa. On each side of the grand, unused front doors were mam- moth sea shells of curious shape. In the closets, on the ''what-nots," and ranged on the shelves of the little cabinets, were boxes of other shells picked up on tropic beaches or purchased in the bazaars of Calcutta or Mauritius.
BREWSTER 95
There is another distinctive feature of Cape architecture, now passing fast, — the wind- mill, — like a witch with a peaked cap and outstretched arms and a slanting broomstick, reminding us that the Pilgrims came from Holland. Capping half a hundred hills they used to dominate the landscape. The farmer drove his heavy, creaking wagon up to them by a winding path, and haggled for coarse or fine grain and the price of it. The hood was turned by oxen, slowly, until the sails were ad- justed to catch the wind. These inimitably quaint relics have outlived their usefulness, although in many of them the beams and timbers pegged together with wooden pegs are still stanch. Not a few have been converted into tea-houses, curiosity shops, or a guest- house on a summer estate — a pampered old age for those crude and sturdy helpers of a Puritan age.
The men who built these houses and these mills were a conspicuously fine lot. Many of them were engaged in privateering and whal- ing: of the thirty-two soldiers whose graves
96 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
are marked in the old burying-ground, as hav- ing served as soldiers in the Revolution, a great number of them were sailors. More ship- masters engaged in foreign trade went from the town of Brewster than from any other town or place in the country in proportion to its size. From a population numbering about a thousand people, we have names of one hundred and fifteen shipmasters living there since 1840. In 1850, the height of the town's prosperity, there were over fifty living there at one time.
Those to whom architectural relics of the past are precious must always be interested in an event of the War of 1812, which preserved the town intact. A demand was made by the British commander upon the people of Brew- ster for four thousand dollars for immunity from invasion and destruction of property. A meeting was held, a delegation waited upon the British commander, and finally, after a vain argument, it was decided best to give security for the sum. Measures were taken to tax salt-works, buildings of all descriptions,
BREWSTER 97
and vessels owned in town or frequenting the shore. The day before the term of grace ex* pired, the four thousand dollars was paid and the safety of the town guaranteed. While the inhabitants of Brewster were severely criti- cized for their action in this matter, they con- tended that as the National Government had left them in a defenseless condition, they were impelled to do the best they could to avert the destruction of the town.
It is impossible to discuss the architecture of the Cape without a word of the Italian villas and bungalows and English manors and seashore "cottages" which mark the trail of the summer visitors. Occasionally some sum- mer resident will have the taste and sentiment to remodel an old homestead so carefully that it will retain its perfect line and contour in the landscape, while accommodating a family who demand the modern comforts of living. But these renovations are not common. Most of the summer colonies are ugly enough: a blot upon the landscape and the seascape, forever unrelated to the homely soil and the brooding
98 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
hills, against which the Devon and Cornish transcripts fitted so lovingly.
Besides the homes, the great house, the summer colony, and the windmill, there are the church and the schoolhouse, both distinc- tively of the Cape, neither influenced nor marred by the swarm of summer visitors nor by the rising tide of Portuguese.
The "little gray church on the windy hill" is usually small, and if it stands on the edge of a graveyard it is apt to be picturesque and quaint. But if it is unadorned by trees, it is cold and uninviting. Methodist or Baptist — the horror of Popery — has divorced it from the charm of the churches of Old England, and even from the best of New England. The Cape churches are not as a rule as attractive as the Cape houses.
The schoolhouse, on the other hand, is often quite pleasing. It is usually an unpretentious, one-story, useful structure, with two front doors, although the boys and girls use both or either, with flagstaff and well-tramped yard. From it pour out groups of merriest children,
BREWSTER 99
red and brown and black in indiscriminate mirth. It is rather singular that, in spite of the conspicuously high educational standard of Barnstable County, the school yard is rarely well kept. One does not see the window boxes and the flower beds that brighten many a school yard in western or northern Massa- chusetts.
The last earthly habitation of the native is perhaps the most beautiful of all. The grave- yard, — selected with care, either for the view or for convenience or economy, — while poor in lofty monuments or cypress walks or decora- tive beds, is usually indescribably charming. It is not crowded: the rounded mounds sink drowsily into the green grass. Here and there are stones which commemorate men lying in graves that never have been digged — under the lapping waves. Their families placed the gray slate slab or table to be a record, then felt their duty done and turned to the care of the living. Of course, each graveyard — however small — has its soldiers' monument, for the Cape gave right royally of her sons in time of
100 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
war; and in or near the family plot stands the shaft to Ephraim, Noel, or Ebenezer, and his comrades who fell for their country — and rose again.
To one with imagination and leisure these moss-grown stones have a tale to be read. Yonder slanting slab has a pathetic pair of hands in rude bas-relief, and tells us that here lies Mary Jane, aged forty, the third wife of Reuben — and all else is obliterated by the finger of time!
The Cape-Codders have builded well: their homes and public buildings follow lines of dignity and comfort; the windmill strikes a piquant note upon the hill. And when one stands upon their final resting-place, — often by the slope of a willow-fringed pool, slumber- ing, too, amid the late afternoon shadows or in sight of the unforgettable beach with its silver expanse glittering for a mile and a half at low tide, — one feels that their selection of a last habitation was the best of all.
Chapter VIII
ORLEANS
THE early settlers loved to give the names of their home villages in Devon, Kent, and Cornwall to the villages which they hewed out in the New World, and thus we have the familiar English titles dotting every corner and crevice of the Cape. But Orleans, al- though originally part of Nauset, or Eastham, being the terminus of the French Atlantic Cable from Brest, caught a lasting reminder of its Gallic affiliations in the name it took at its incorporation in 1797, and remains the unique example of a foreign title among the Cape Cod towns.
'jm. -C^;PE C;pD NEW AND OLD
To the passing automobilist Orleans may seem rather less interesting than some of its neighbors, but that is because he is looking at mere topography. A glance at the vital his- tory of this town reveals incidents, imagina- tion, and quite an amazing amount of spirit of a lively sort. It was Orleans which, when an offer of indemnity from destruction for consideration of a tribute was made by the English fleet, as had been done at Brewster,^ immediately and indignantly rejected it and successfully repelled all efforts of the enemy to land. They displayed the same pluck when a British barge entered Orleans Harbor and took possession of the schooner Betsy and the sloops Camel, Washington, and Nancy. Two of the sloops being aground were set on fire by the enemy, and the fire was promptly and triumphantly extinguished by the inhabi- tants. The British got the Betsy under way, but the midshipman, being unacquainted with the coast, put the only American on board in charge of the vessel upon his promise to carry
1 See p. 96.
ORLEANS 103
it to Provincetown. But the canny Yankee ran it into Yarmouth, where it was recaptured by the natives and the crew made prisoners and sent to Salem, where they met the course of justice reserved for them. There was even a pitched battle in these very streets of Or- leans, which are so placidly traversed to-day, resulting in the death of several of the enemy — a fray which has ever since been dignified by the name of "The Battle of Orleans."
The town had plenty of initiative in regard to civil enterprise as well. In 1804 a canal from Town Cove to Boat Meadow River, nearly on a boundary line between Orleans and East- ham, was dug by a company empowered by the two towns. The Legislature was petitioned for authority to create a lottery in aid of the pro- ject, which suggests that perhaps the French idea had gone a little deeper than merely the name in this town. However, the strict old Puritan Government granted no such frivolous concessions, and either for that or for other reasons the canal was never completed.
There is a lively legend about this canal.
104 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
When Captain Southack sailed out to cap- ture the pirate Bellamj^ (whose story is given in more detail on page 173), the sea, lashed by the storm, forced a passage through the Cape along the very line chosen later for the Orleans Canal, and the captain sailed with a whale- boat through from the Bay to the Atlantic Ocean. Those who would cast a doubt on the authenticity of this trip need only confer with any native of Orleans, man or child. For every one knows that when a storm is brewing a mirage is plainly visible in the sky. Then it is that we can see again Captain Southack's whaling-boat sailing once again across the meadows of Orleans, — following the old route which legend grants him, from the Bay to the Atlantic Ocean, — and disappearing in pursuit of the pirate ship!
However, neither dazzled nor discouraged by the strange fate of her first canal, Orleans tried a similar enterprise again in 1818. Being largely engaged in the manufacture of salt, the town united with Chatham in the construc- tion of a canal through the beach, below Strong
ORLEANS 105
Island, for the benefit of the salt meadows. The canal was cut, but the sand choked it and made the enterprise a failure. But though un- fortunate with its canals, Orleans was a flour- ishing town, having in 1855 four whaling ves- sels of one hundred and fifty-five tons each, employing a hundred and twenty-five men and securing oil worth $19,250. To-day one of its most valuable industries is also connected with the water, but in a more highly intensive fash- ion. The Mayo Duck Farm at Orleans, which hatches about fifty thousand ducklings in a season and gives employment to a score of men, is justly famous.
But the duck business which brings most pleasure, if not most profit, in this region is of quite another stripe. Duck shooting is one of the favorite Cape sports, and late into the sea- son one hears the shots of the gunners and meets them in the woods, brown and smiling, their booty slung across their shoulders. If you can afford it, you own your own gunning-stand, either by a pond or by the ocean. If you can- not own, you may hire. These stands are
106 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
merely low shanties, covered with a thatch that makes them practically invisible. The French and English soldiers could teach no camouflage of this sort to a genuine Cape Cod duck hunter. Before the shanties are teth- ered live decoy ducks. A drake is also tethered a short distance in front, so as to keep the ducks alert. One man in the shanty keeps watch: when he sees a flock of ducks in the distance he immediately sends out two or three live decoys, who fly out in front of the stand, quacking loudly. The wild ducks hear the sound, and swing in close to the beach. The live decoy ducks immediately come back to their place as they have been taught to do, and the gunners line up behind their barrier. At a signal given by one of them, they rise up, and all shoot at once — often killing a whole flock of as many as fifteen or twenty at once.
The same method is followed in gunning for whistlers, coot, geese, and sheldrake. It is difficult for any one who is not under the fas- cination of the game to see anything but gross slaughter in this kind of shooting, and the law
ORLEANS 107
which limits fifteen ducks to a man seems very necessary. The law which prohibits the shoot- ing of any ducks before sunrise or after sun- down has helped save many of the wild fowl along these shores, as their habit is to come close to the shallow places along the shore to find food.
An experienced gunner will sometimes pre- fer a more difficult and more sportsmanlike method of getting his birds. After building up a temporary blind of seaweed, and setting out a few wooden decoys, — possibly keeping a duck and a drake in the pen with him, — he will await the coming of the wild birds and shoot them on the wing, getting less game, but more excitement.
Few of the twentieth-century folk who fly through Orleans by train or in an automobile realize how comparatively short is time when there was not only no railroad, but hardly even a road of any kind in this region. Of course, the first roads here, as everywhere in the colonies, were Indian trails, which were gradually widened. Horses were used, but not
108 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
carriages. The same state of affairs which still exists in primitive parts of the South and West, where a wheel rut is practically unknown, — all carting and carrying being by mule-pack, — was the universal condition. Carriages first made their appearance in the cities. How many people realize that it was not until 1687 that the first horse coaches appeared in Bos- ton; that there were no carriages in Connecti- cut until 1756; that in 1768 there were only twenty-two privately owned wheeled vehicles in Boston; only 145 in 1798. And that there were only a dozen or so private coaches in the combined cities of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia before 1700.^ This was due to the poor roads and lack of bridges. Obviously pleasure driving, or even driving for business, labored under a sobering handicap when a coach, coming to a stream too deep to be forded, was stood up in two parallel canoes and thus conveyed across while the horses swam! Naturally, with this state of affairs as to roads, the waterways were very popular, es- pecially in country districts. They were con-
ORLEANS 109
tinually used: in summer by boat, and in winter by sleds and carrioles which were drawn over the frozen surface by horses and dogs. Later came ox-carts — picturesque vehicles which most people do not associate with New England scenes.
Down on the Cape, even when roads were widened and improved and bridges were built, the easiest way of communication continued to be by water instead of by land. For months at a time the roads were rivers of mud or drifts of snow, and it was no uncommon thing for a wagon to become so embedded in a muddy rut that the driver would leave it where it stuck and wait for spring, when he would return and dig it out. When the corduroy roads were built, they soon became so rough that wagons were literally shaken to pieces in traveling on them. It is quite understandable that a man might prefer to get caught in the mud, from whence he had a reasonable hope of ultimately extracting his wagon, than to see it knocked into uncollectible fragments by the jolting of the corduroy road.
110 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
Of course this state of affairs was soonest mended in the cities and latest in the country districts, and on the Cape, even after roads became very fair, water travel was preferred to that by land. This was how the sailing- packet lines came to be so firmly established. From almost every village on the inside shore of the Cape, one or more of these lines was maintained, and passengers and merchandise were conveyed by them once or twice a week to and from Boston. The usual custom was to notify the South Shore dwellers of the arrival and departure of these vessels by very simple means — namely, of signals hoisted on some eminence, discernible to these villages ! These packets were roomy and sociable, and seem the legitimate background for the tales that come down to us of jolly trips and frequent trials of skill and speed between rival lines, sometimes accompanied by modest betting on the part of the champions of different vessels. Now Provincetown is the only Cape town which communicates regularly by steamer with Boston. The old stage-coach was almost as
ORLEANS 111
romantic a feature as the packet, although it grew in favor more slowly. The transition between private and public conveyance was very gradual. First a horse was borrowed, and then a chaise. Then both horse and chaise. Then, to meet a growing demand, a horse and chaise were kept to be let. Finally a driver was added, and the age of the stage-coach commenced.
At this time it was an all-day journey from Boston to the Cape; a trip wearisome and in- convenient according to modern standards, but not without its charm when viewed in the light of retrospect. Those early days recall the stories of Balzac and De Maupassant, in which the stage-coach furnishes scene and actors for tragedy and comedy, A traveler had to start at early dawn and take his place in the coach in intimate proximity with all sorts and con- ditions of fellow-passengers. The numerous stopping-places along the route gave ample opportunity for the exchange of new opinions and good cheer at the various taverns. They had no hotels or inns then: Cornish's at
112 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
South Plymouth, Swift's at West Sandwich, Fessenden's at Sandwich, Rowland's at West Barnstable, marked the route. The roads were rough, the springs not of the finest, and if all hands had to turn out now and then to help hoist the wagon out of a sandpit or quagmire — well, it was all part of the trip. A journey to Boston was the event of the year, sometimes of a lifetime. When the coaches began to run more and more frequently, and finally brought mail from Boston every day instead of an irregular once or twice a week, people felt that the millennium had come. But as the packet was forced to the wall by the steamboat, so in due time the stage-coach, outsped by the steam-engine, rumbled forever out of sight.
In 1847 the railroad, under the name of the Cape Cod Branch Railroad (which was part of the Old Colony), began to poke its nose down on the Cape — first as far as Sandwich, and then, ten years later, on to Barnstable and Yarmouth. The name was changed to the Cape Cod Railroad in 1854 and the same year the road was extended to Hyannis. Twelve
ORLEANS 113
years later a sale of the Cape Cod Central to the Cape Cod Railroad was made, and the line pushed from Yarmouth to Orleans. Then from Wellfleet to Provincetown, while branches were added from Buzzard's Bay to Wood's Hole and from Harwich to Chatham. It was a slow development, however, and the first trains that arrived at the newly constructed railroad stations in the various villages pulled cars hardly larger than the stage-coaches which they were destined to banish. There are plenty of people alive to-day up and down the Cape who can tell you of the first train that arrived in their village, and the sensation it produced. They were primitive enough — these conveyances. It was not until 1889 that steam was used to heat the cars, and their journey through the scrub oak and blueberry- patches and backyards, and their advent in and departure from the small stations, had the pleasant intimacy bred of smallness and a cer- tain picturesqueness which we no longer as- sociate with steam coaches.
One of the most revolutionary effects of the
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railroad was felt in the postal service. Origi- nally the pockets of chance travelers were the only channels of transporting letters. When the stage-coach came in, mails were brought more frequently, with a great clatter and hul- labaloo and snapping of whips as in old Eng- lish days. But even then many of the villages were only visited occasionally. In 1794 there was no post-office below Yarmouth, and the mail for the lower Cape was sent and received once a week. When John Thatcher contracted to carry it for a dollar a day, and was appointed to do so, the thrifty folk of Yarmouth, though doubtless glad to receive their letters regularly, nevertheless insisted upon styling the inno- vation a tremendous extravagance of the ad- ministration.
But soon after the opening of the railroad mail was sent and received twice a day in quite a matter-of-fact fashion. Later two telegraph lines were constructed on the Cape, and the first telephone was installed. Thus the Cape was caught in a net of steel and iron progress, never to be released, and the days of John
ORLEANS 115
Thatcher seemed as ancient history as were those of Greece. Now the speeding trains wave perpetual banners of smoke from Boston to the innermost points of the Cape, and auto- mobiles glint and flash over the flawless high- ways in such numbers that traffic policemen — many of them bronzed old sea captains — are stationed at the road corners and at bridges. There is only one Cape Cod town without its railroad station to-day, and that is Mashpee,^ and the telegraph and telephone wires lace hilltop to hilltop across all Barn- stable County.^
1 See chap. xvii.
2 There are many " Telegraph Hills " throughout the length of the Cape, dating from the time of the Revolution and the War of 1812, when wigwag signals were given from one hilltop to another. Beginning with the extreme end of the Cape, these hills occur quite frequently (many of them still keeping their old names), the last one being Blue Hill, Milton.
Chapter IX
EASTHAM AND THE AGRICULTURAL FUTURE OF THE CAPE
IT was once the granary of the Cape — this barren, windswept region, with the dying sunHght slanting across its roUing fields. Long, low marshes, level and softly tinted, like deli- cate pastels, contribute now to the sad and lovely scene — quite different in its wistful charm from the other towns about it. Its soli- tary roads, leading off from the state highway to remote houses, are wanly mysterious. Its desolation is not unattractive. But its beauty — for it has an unmistakable beauty of an unearthly quality — is such as to appeal to the eye of the artist rather than to that of the farmer.
lJLj':: \ -rtyf.vv:^..--:^,^:^^ --^W^
EASTHAM 117
" My Love lies in the gates of foam, The last dear wreck of shore: The naked sea-marsh binds her home, The sand her chamber door."
It seems almost impossible to believe that this town, these gently rolling pastures, so bare to-day of anything except the thinnest hay, were once luxuriant with rich and waving crops, and that the Indians had so many maize fields here, and that the early settlers were so successful in their magnificent gardens that the Plymouth Colony talked, at one time, of removing to Eastham. For this was the very- region which was at one time the granary of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth.
What happened, and why? The lesson of Eastham is the lesson of all Cape Cod, and, in a small degree, a warning for all the United States. The fertile soil was forced to bring forth crop after crop: all the good was ex- tracted and none returned, and in course of time it became utterly exhausted. To-day it lies, like a beautiful and weary woman whose life force has ebbed away almost to the last
118 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
breath. Cape Cod is usually considered — by the casual outside world — as a mere sandpit on which nothing grows but a few huckleberry bushes. The Cape Cod farmers, too, after they had raised heavy crops year after year without making the smallest return to the soil, finding that the meadows which used to grow hay twelve feet high now produced a scanty three-foot specimen, began to revile the " sand " and to move away in high dudgeon. The trouble with Cape Cod, from an agri- cultural standpoint, is far less the infertility of the soil than the ignorance or laziness of the farmer. Every region has its soil peculiari- ties, but the wise farmer is the one who ex- ploits these peculiarities to the limit, rather than he who flees in the face of the difficulties they present. Clever as the Cape-Codder was in fishing a fat living from the sea, it is only recently that it has occurred to him that he had an equal opportunity on land, although, to be sure, sheep-raising reached quite a height about 1820. Now there are signs that he is bestirring himself and learning something
EASTHAM 119
about modern farming, and that the younger generation, instead of flocking off to Fall River and New Bedford, as Sicilian folk flock to America, are attending agricultural colleges, taking special correspondence courses, or starting in with some practical line of fruit- growing or poultry-raising.
Here at Eastham, for instance, they have discovered that the soil, when dressed with seaweed and shells, — an inexpensive and accessible fertilizer, — grows asparagus ex- traordinarily well, and recently this town alone sold forty thousand dollars' worth in one sea- son. Farms of from five to fifteen acres are being pressed into service, and although there is a possibility that the same lack of crop rota- tion which was so disastrous in Eastham's early days may again work its invidious mischief, as yet the asparagus crop is abundant and of a high order of excellence. Turnips, too, are raised in large quantities, and the strawberry flourishes like the green bay tree. It is, how- ever, at Falmouth that this latter industry has reached its highest point, two thousand
1^0 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
dollars' worth being shipped from Falmouth alone in the year 1916. Indeed, the strawberry market has been glutted several seasons lately, and the Portuguese, who are indefatigable workers if not scientific ones, have fared ill with their returns.
As a matter of fact, the Cape — the wind- swept, sandy Cape — has some decided ad- vantages which can, if realized, give it a very respectable place in the agricultural world. Such institutions as the Cape Cod Farm Bur- eau ^ are trying to prove to the native popu- lation, and to outsiders seeking a new and permanent home, that the Cape is not all sand by any means; that it varies from a heavy clay to pure sand, with a sandy loam predominat- ing, which is especially suited for the growing of small fruits, asparagus, and vegetables. There need be no difficulty from lack of mois- ture if cultivation is faithfully practiced. The long growing season, with the comparatively mild open winter, offers an exceptional op- portunity to the poultry-raiser as well as to * See chap. ni.
EASTHAM 121
the general farmer and fruit-grower. The steady increase of summer visitors ^ offers a splendid outlet for first-quality produce, while the excellent state roads and frequent and swift train service to Boston ^ reduce the prob- lem of distribution to the minimum. It is true that Cape Cod does not feed herself in any month of the year; that potatoes, apples, eggs, meat, and vegetables are shipped down from Boston constantly; that hundreds of farmers' households still patronize the condensed-milk can in lieu of a cow. But it is also true that Cape Cod is improving; that although there is still lack of tools, lack of knowledge, lack of cooperation, lack of capital, nevertheless, small fruits are being grown profitably at Truro; good hay — a rarity on the Cape — is being raised at East Barnstable; the Portu- guese have, in some districts, banded them- selves together into selling organizations; more than one farmer clears a thousand dollars a year on the side issue of hens and chickens, and asparagus and strawberries have become regu-
1 See chap. vi. ' See chap. vui.
122 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
lar industries of no inconsiderable proportions. Fancy farming is becoming popular, too, as is shown by the Bay End Farm at the head of the Bay, where four tractor engines have been at work clearing the woodland, and where the friendly mistress frequently and freely opens her grounds for fetes and holiday celebration. At Hatchville a new stock farm along generous lines is gathering impetus, and serving as a stimulating example to all the countryside. Thus the signs point to more progressive days on the Cape along lines which have not been considered — until recently — as especially suited to this region. Perhaps there is poetical justice in Eastham — which was originally so fertile and then so despoiled — again coming to the fore through the prominence of her asparagus culture.
Besides serving as a warning and a hopeful example, Eastham has had her own private history, which, when read in the light of these stirring later days, seems rather pathetic: she has come out at the small end of the horn so many times. The famous Camp-Meeting
EASTHAM US
Grounds were originally here, and a matter of pride, but they were soon removed to Falmouth so as to be more accessible. The terminus of the French Atlantic Cable was also originally placed at North Eastham in 1879, amid a very . gratifying provincial stir, but was afterwards picked up and removed to Orleans. And finally much of the land which belonged to Eastham was ignominiously chopped off and handed over to this same sister town — humiliations which Eastham has endured very patiently.
Eastham, which was first called Nauset, was settled in 1646, only seven years after the three pioneer towns of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth, and like these towns she had her ups and downs, doing very creditably with her fishing, until all maritime activities were rudely cut off by the Revolution. After the war whal- ing was again restored and a tide of prosperity set in. Salt-works were established, and in due time the town was able to afford the luxury of a pulpit cushion and a singing-school. The same spirit of fair play, which in 1670 prompted Cape Cod to establish the first public schools
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in this country and to maintain them with the fisheries tax, was evident in Eastham, which, a few years previously, had made a provision that part of every whale cast on the shore should be appropriated for the use of the minis- ter. It was not a bad idea, and perhaps the same policy, if followed to-day, might tend to mitigate some of the unworthy disputes con- cerning our financial treatment of the clergy. It is, however, less from her historical than her topographical aspect that Eastham main- tains her unique place in the interest of the ail- too casual passer-by. There is continual change, perpetual fluctuation along her coast- line, where the forest-bearing bluffs may be often seen, eaten away, with their trees lying along the beach, uptorn roots exposed to the air; and where, on the other hand, a storm will sometimes make a beach by throwing up thousands of tons of sand on a low stretch of coast and burying the marsh-bank completely out of sight. Large stumps are frequently dis- covered a mile out from the land, and ancient peat meadows lie under the water in more than
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one place. There is even one peat meadow in the town which has experienced the changes of being buried by the sand, then being washed out again by the waves, and finally being re- stored to its original state and having fuel taken from it.
It is probably this aspect of Eastham, so different from some of the other more stable communities of Barnstable County, with its pastel tints and long, low marshes, with its inlets and bays in which seaweeds, delicate and many colored, float, making pictures hardly less frail and transient than those pic- tures of another age and time which the his- torian tries to grasp — it is probably this aspect of Eastham, pensive and beautiful, which the stranger will longest remember.
Chapter X WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING
THE popular food of any country offers a significant index to that country's tem- perament. Can we think of Germany without beer, or England without roast beef, or France without salads, or Cape Cod without fish? The term of "Codfish Aristocracy" — although it originated with the Dutch in 1347, the rival parties being called hooks and codfish — is excellently applicable here. It has frequently been afiirmed that a Briton would starve on the fish which sustains a good Cape-Codder. Cer- tain it is that, while in Roman Catholic coun- tries the fish supply is sometimes exhausted
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by the end of Lent, this is a state of affairs never dupHcated in Barnstable County. The fish dinner is a weekly rite throughout the year, and has been ever since the time when Bradford received a Jesuit priest at his table and offered him fish because it happened to be Friday — a courtesy that one might not have been led to expect from that uncompromising old Puritan. But in spite of the reputation of the Cape there are plenty of villages in it where you can- not find a clam chowder or buy a fresh mack- erel. Whatever sea food is caught is sent direct to Boston : the natives are so busy play- ing skipper or chauffeur or gardener to the summer folk that they have no time for humbler occupations. But at Wellfleet you are pretty sure to fare well in regard to ocean products. Whether you wish to delve back into history and see how this town ranked among the other fishing towns, or whether you wish to taste the delicacy of a quahaug pie; or whether you merely want to take a rod and reel and go fishing yourself — your desires can be easily and happily met.
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The fishing industry of the Cape was the first of all its industries. As early as 1659 we find the Commissioners of the Colonies recom- mending to the General Court that they "regu- late the taking of mackerel, since fish was the most staple commodity of the county." Fisher- ies for both cod and mackerel were of the first importance, and even at that early date it was considered advisable to tax strangers who came to the Cape to fish.
Wellfleet had her hundred vessels at the Banks in those days, and led so triumphantly in the whaling era that her name was originally "Whalefleet." Her whaling schooners were built in her own yards from her own timber. This whaling business was entirely different from Bank fishing. At first only the whales that happened to pass near shore were caught. Station houses were erected to watch for them. When they were sighted, vessels, always kept in readiness, dashed out after them. But by and by the whales grew wary. They avoided the shore and the whole Cape region. And then whaling parties, with provisions and harpoons
WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 129
and various implements of destruction suflS- cient to last for months, went after them. These parties pursued their game out to the Falkland Islands; to Guinea and Brazil, and Africa and Hudson Bay. Jesse Holbrook, of Wellfleet, killed in Revolutionary times fifty- two sperm whales in one voyage, which exploit won for him such fame that he was afterward engaged by a London firm for twelve years to teach their employees this curious art. After a checkered career he returned to Wellfleet in 1795 — perhaps one of the most unique vete- rans of any warfare mentioned in the annals of Cape Cod warfare. Those to whom the word "whaling" brings up only a vague picture, may form some idea of its value by this. In 1843 a whale was captured near the end of the Cape by Captain Ebenezer Cook, and estimated to contain two hundred barrels of oil and two thousand pounds of bone. Not having proper facilities for handling this mammoth find, only one hundred and twenty-five barrels of oil were saved and three hundred pounds of bone. Even with this waste the whale was worth
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ten thousand dollars — and this in the days when ten thousand dollars was a fortune. Cot- ton Mather, writing on this subject in 1697, describes a cow and calf recently caught in this vicinity: "The cow was fifty-five feet long; the bone was nine or ten inches wide; a cart upon wheels might have gone into the mouth of it. The calf was twenty feet long, for unto such vast calves the sea-monsters draw forth their breasts. But so does the good God give the people to suck the sea."
There were regular whaleboat fleets, and during King William's War, which raged al- most uninterruptedly from 1699 to 1703, when- ever expeditions were sent out against the enemy, whaleboat fleets always accompanied them. These craft were necessarily small, be- cause the enemy's ports were usually located near the heads of rivers beyond the tidewaters, where ordinary transports could not reach them. They were manned by whalemen, sail- ors, and friendly Indians. Upon the wale of each boat strong pieces of leather were fast- ened, so that whenever they grounded the men
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could step overboard, slip long bars through the leather buoys and take up the boats, and carry them to deeper waters. At night or in stormy weather, the boats were taken on shore, turned over, and used instead of shelter tents. Each boat was fitted with a brass kettle and other conveniences for cooking.
But the turn of the wheel which brought wealth to Pennsylvania took it away from Massachusetts. There is a story that some old sailors who had heard of the discovery of an oil well in Pennsylvania went off, determined to bring back enough whale oil to knock the new-fangled product out of business. They hunted whales right vigorously, and came back at the end of three years with a heavy cargo of treasure. But by that time the mysterious petroleum was gushing up everywhere and the whale oil was practically unmarketable.
They also tell the story of another crew who departed for whale oil and were gone two years. On their return they were greeted with the eager inquiry: "Well, how many whales did you get?" "We didn't see a single whale,"
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was the cheerful response, *'but we had a damned fine sail."
It is impossible to stem the tide of progress. With the opening of the oil wells, the whaling business received its death-blow. The Rev- olutionary War, the invention of iron steam- ships, and the development of the railroad ^ diverted capital. It is interesting to note here that the Great War has brought a sudden impetus back to this ancient industry. In cer- tain bearings of the engines on the modern battleship it has been found that "case oil" — a lubricant which does not disintegrate under great heat or pressure — is absolutely necessary. This case oil is found in the head of the sperm whale and is found here only. To procure it whaling vessels have again been fitted up, mariners procured, and in the sum- mer of 1917 the brig Viola returned to New Bedford with twelve hundred and fifty bar- rels of sperm oil and a hundred and twenty-one pounds of ambergris, valued at about seventy- five thousand dollars. However, even this re-
1 See chap. viii.
WELLFLEET AND CAPE FISHING 133
vival is hardly enough to affect the Cape as a whole. It must be admitted that the maritime interests of Barnstable County have gone to pieces, and from ports like Wellfleet, out of which a hundred vessels once sailed, now only glance the white wings of pleasure catboats or the occasional sparkle of oars in an old dory. And this, from the town which, early in the Revolution, petitioned for an abatement of her war tax, stating that her whale fishery, by which nine tenths of her people lived, was entirely cut off by British gunboats, and that the shellfish industries, on which the remain- ing tenth depended, were equally at a stand- still. In this distress, as later in the Civil War, the sailors took to privateering and made a memorable record.
The days have passed when such a fare of codfish could be got as the one brought in by William McKay in 1882, consisting of 4062 quintals, worth twenty-two thousand dollars. The great blackfish chase of 1884 when fifteen hundred were driven down from Provincetown to Dennis, where they were caught, and brought
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in between twelve and fifteen thousand dol- lars, is also past and will never be repeated.
But in spite of changed conditions, Well- fleet still boasts a goodly fishing industry. Her shellfish are excellent and abundant. Oysters are shipped in large quantities to Boston; clams and quahaugs, scallops and mussels, lobsters and crabs are all caught and cooked in half a hundred delectable ways. The French mussel is found here, although it is not popu- larly appreciated as yet. There are several ponds at Wellfleet which vie with the Bay in yielding up delicacies : pickerel, white and red perch, black bass and landlocked salmon and blue fish. The summer people, of whom there are many, can tell one where to go in search of such sport.
The cold-storage plants for fish, which are seen in many places on the Cape, show that the industry is by no means extinct. These are usually owned by stock companies, and often the stock is owned by the fishermen.
Cape Cod has been called the dividing line between the tropical seas and the North At-
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lantic seas. Here the Gulf Stream strikes and then flows toward the European coasts. Above this line marine vegetation is of Arctic flora, distinct in many features from that of Long Island. In fact, the difference in the flora of Massachusetts Bay and that of Buzzard's Bay is greater than that of Massachusetts Bay and the Bay of Fundy, or of Nantucket and Nor- folk.
Thus, in spite of the fact that Cape Cod has lost much of its prestige as a commercial fish- ing center, it still gives a good deal of pleasure and gets a great deal of profit from its ocean, ponds, and streams; and those who crave the flavor of clam fritters and oysters on the half- shell cannot do better than to seek for them in Wellfleet.
There are interesting things above the earth as well as in the waters under the earth in this town. The four red crosses of a wireless sta- tion, latticed against the sky here, are visible for miles around and are quite as thrilling, in their way, to the sociologist, as the tall, ruined arches of the Roman aqueduct that march
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across the sky, mementos of another great civiHzation.
This station, which is owned by the Marconi Company, was estabhshed in 1903, and sends out press and long-distance messages every night, its range being sixteen hundred miles. Although there are several other wireless sta- tions scattered along the coast of Cape Cod, this was the first high-powered equipment installed in this country, and has transmit- ted signals to England which were received by Mr. Marconi — rather impressive facts to be associated with the humble fishing hamlet.
Alongside this evidence of modernity there are legends in Wellfleet. Those who have lived here long will tell you, with hushed breath, of the minister's deformed child who was cruelly murdered by his father's own hand. On moon- lit nights the pathetic, misshaped little ghost still flits around the rosebush where the child loved to play. And if you are searching for ghosts, be sure to go down to the beach where Sam Bellamy's pirate ship was cast away.
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There the old buccaneer still prowls about, stooping now and then to pick up the coins flung him by the skeleton hands of his drowned shipmates.
Wellfleet had its commercial enterprises, too, as had so many of the Cape towns in those early days. In 1815 the Wellfleet Manufactur- ing Company was incorporated with a capital of six thousand dollars for the purpose of man- ufacturing cotton and woolen yarns. This was the same year that a great gale swept over the country near Buzzard's Bay. With it came the highest tide ever known, exceeding even the memorable one of 1635. Trees were uprooted, salt-works destroyed, and vessels driven from their moorings and landed on shore. Had the tide risen higher it would have inundated the entire Cape.
Thus the history of the little town rounds itself out, as does the history of many of its neighbors. Commerce, success, disaster, change, progress, and fluctuation; and then a final settling into a catering to the summer people. The four tall towers of the wireless,
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marching across the sky, are the last touch of the twentieth century upon the face of the little town first settled as a fishing hamlet a hundred and fifty-four years ago.
Chapter XI
TRURO
THERE is, perhaps, no town where the pecuhar formation of the Cape can be more clearly seen than at Truro. Here, among the rolling dunes, with houses tucked into the hollows at their base, out of reach of the winds, and with the winding roads recalling the old days when every wagon had an extra width of tire and axle so as to get through the heavy sand, one can most easily trace the history of this curious topography.
These hills, many of them so green that only the initiated realize that they are in reality sand dunes, with opening vistas through which one may catch a glimpse of the sea; with paths leading between them to the solitary and dis-
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tant houses of which we may see only a bit of the roof; with their httle gardens lying like bracelets around their bases; with their stunted trees, and low levels of red and brown, wind- licked marshes with their inlets and creeks; and with their churches placed high on an oc- casional crest, like the little rocky chapels on the Cornish coast of England — this is Truro! This half-desolate and wholly fascinating landscape is not infrequently described as typical of the whole Cape. It is not. Down through Falmouth and Sandwich and Bourne there are fertile farms and heavy forests: more of both than there were seventy-five years ago. The increase in forest land on the Cape comes about in this way: When a tract of land that has been tilled is abandoned, — the farmer hav- ing died and his sons having gone to the city, — it becomes covered by grass by the end of a year or two. The year after, miniature pitch pines have sprung up; in another year, bushes. In an astonishingly short time a vigorous low growth clothes the once bare stretch. With the advent of the Portuguese, however, and the
,^ t /
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always increasing cranberry industry, more land is brought under cultivation every year. And thus the Cape is gradually being refor- ested and ref armed.
Many travelers to Cape Cod are astonished, and a little disappointed, to see green grass and sylvan glades where they expected only white sand dunes. There are plenty of dunes if one knows where to look for them, scattered up and down the coast. But in the more fertile regions it is difficult to trace the original form- ation of the land. If you wish to view mile after mile of wild barrens, where the vegeta- tion is chiefly moss, and where the sand after every storm drifts over the heads of the sub- merged bushes and piles up around the decay- ing fence rails; where there is hardly a boulder as big as your hand, or even gravel, and the layer of soil is so thin that you can kick it off with your toe — then go to Truro. Here, more easily than anywhere else, — unless it be in Provincetown, — you will see land in the process of making.
Cape Cod is sixty-five miles long on the
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North Shore, and eighty on the South and East. The average breadth is six miles, and at Truro this narrows down to three. The greatest height above the sea is at Scargo Hill in Den- nis, which is three hundred feet high.
The region of Barnstable County is com- posed entirely of glacial drift, even to a depth of three hundred feet in some places. This was brought down in the ice age. A backbone runs across the county, and from its height one may often, when driving through the wood roads, come out, as on a plateau, and catch a glimpse of the sea. There is a clay vein, too, which starts across the Cape and crops out at Truro in the so-called "Clay Pounds," now crowned with a lighthouse, shining two hundred feet above the ocean. Clam-shells and oyster-shells are sometimes found miles inland, away from any breath of the ocean. They are thought to be the last traces of some Indian village.
In spite of the popular conviction that the entire Cape is merely one sweep of Sahara-like desert, it was thickly forested when Gosnold discovered it, and it is in many places richly
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wooded to-day, although Naushon alone at- tests the noble forests of the past. Those who have seen the autumn forests will never forget them. Those for whom this great delight is still in store cannot do better than to read Thoreau's classic description: '*! never saw an autumnal landscape so beautifully painted as this was. It was like the richest rug imaginable spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the huckleberry, and the reddish brown of the bayberry, min- gled with the bright and living green of small pitch pines, and also the duller green of the bayberry, boxberry, and plum; the yellowish green of the shrub oaks, and the various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the birch and maple and aspen, each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few yellow sand- slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white floor seen through rents in the rug."
If one should sail in an aeroplane above Barnstable County he would see not only
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shores and beaches, gardens, orchards, cran- berry bogs, groves of trees; lawns and leafy thickets; pleasant meadows and hilly slopes where grow the aster and the goldenrod, the violet and mayflowers in due season; but, as he approached Truro, he would see that all these things grew fewer. Here, in spite of strenuous efforts to fasten down the sand and strengthen the harbor shore by planting beach- grass and trees, the sand has choked up the harbor, and even yet sifts against the houses and drifts over the gardens, and in time of storm whirls across the narrow strip of land until even the humblest cottage may boast ground-glass windows.
In Truro, as in Provincetown, the soil for the first gardens was brought over in the hold of vessels. Quite naturally farming has never been the principal occupation in such a region as this. Settled in 1709 by a few English pur- chasers from Eastham, — having been previ- ously occupied by irresponsible fishermen and traders, — it began its career energetically, and under the name of "Dangerfield" it waged
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war against the blackbirds and crows, wolves and foxes; dug clams, fished by the line and net, and watched for whales, in vigorous pio- neer fashion. The name of Truro comes from the market town in Cornwall. Like other towns it had its mackerel fleet, its whalers, and its salt industry. In 1830 to 1855 the wharves were crowded with sloops and schooners. A shipyard was kept busy, and the "turtle-shells of the salt-works," which Thoreau notes, were dotted all along the shore. Here the first Methodist meeting-house on the Cape and the second in New England was built. Doubt- less it was the prototype of those picturesque little structures that are silhouetted against the sky to-day.
When the Revolution put an end to their maritime enterprise, the Truro fishermen, like the rest of the Cape-Codders, melted up their mackerel leads for bullets, and made a record so valiant that it will never be forgotten as long as American history is read.
It was from this wind-swept and sand- scoured town of twenty-three houses that
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twenty-eight men gave up their Hves for lib- erty. The spirit in which they carried out the embargo on tea was amazing. Once a brigan- tine, loaded with tea, waited outside Truro and offered a large reward for transportation serv- ices to shore. But not a single inhabitant from the town could be prevailed upon to touch a single box of the cargo, notwithstanding, as the old records state, "that we had several vessels here unemployed." Their determina- tion was equaled by their ingenuity. Once, when the enemy appeared off the shore, the town was defenseless except for a small militia, and the British seemed about to land. The same sand dunes that make this section so dif- ferent from other sections rolled back from the coast — then as now. The handful of militia took a position behind the inner hill, walked over it, and then, hidden by a hill in front, walked back, around, and over the first eleva- tion again, thus making a procession of theat- rical length. This trick — popular in sheet and pillow-case parties — deceived the enemy, and they sailed away without attempting to land.
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If you were a farmer you might fall a victim to despair searching for a scrap of soil in the lee of some hill into which to thrust a seed. But if you are merely a traveler you will be struck by the beautiful wild sterility of this section of the Cape, recalling similar moors in the roman- tic "Lorna Doone" country. You will pause for a long look as you reach the top of the hill by the Grand View Farm. There you will see the red-roofed cottage half hidden by the slope and the flash of the sea far beyond. The little gardens terraced patiently down the various grades will remind you of the Azores, and you will not be astonished to hear the farmer speak- ing the Portuguese tongue. You will pause again as you come out on the hilltop where you get your first glimpse of Provincetown, and see it lying before you as you have so often seen it on the map, beckoning you out — and out . . .
Fishing and fighting — these were the two original industries of this old Indian Pamet. And the inhabitants did them both with a will, until the sand choked up their harbor and the enemy departed from their coast. Now the
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struggle for existence is more difficult and less spectacular. The little farmhouses that dot the hills testify to the isolation of the lives which are lived there. Bay berry candles and beach- plum jelly, mayflowers and heather, sent to market eke out many a meager household stipend, and the smallness of the garden patches bear pathetic testimony to the results of the season's labor.
A tiny free library finds its niche at the bot- tom of a hill ; the towers of the churches shine against the sky, reminding us of that other church in far Tintagel where, once a year, at Christmas-time, the bells ring out, without the touch of human hand. And reminding us, too, that the first Methodist meeting-house on the Cape and the second in the country was built in Truro, in 1794. Down on the shore there is a colony of summer folk, and the wide auto- mobile road binds Truro to the rest of the world.
^-^^^^;r_-
Chapter XII PROVINCETOWN
PROVINCETOWN is different from all the rest of the Cape : different from all the rest of the world — although all '*land's-end" places have a certain haunting odor and re- semblance. To the Pilgrims, anchoring in the harbor almost three hundred years ago, this haven of shore bloomed forth like a Paradise. They describe it fervently as well wooded with "oakes, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, pines, some ash, walnut," and dwell fondly on the richness of the forests and the soil. But to the pilgrims of to-day — approaching, not in a sea-worn cockle of a boat, but in a well-
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padded motor, or steam-car — this bony, crooked finger extending into the ocean is as bare and sinister as a skeleton's digit.
The long road lies between endless dunes of sand, partially covered — thanks to the per- sistent efforts of the United States Govern- ment — with a mantle of beach grass, to keep them from shifting. But the wind, permeated with the smell of drying fish, fresh fish, de- caying fish, sweeps over the thin verdure as desolately as it would over a desert. There is an eeriness in the interminable approach, ghostly and unreal, even in the hot summer sunshine.
Perhaps it is the fantastic structure of the dunes, carved in intricate mouldings: some with smoothly rounded tops, others combed by unseen fingers, others running into spectral peaks, and still others with long, flat summits — weird sentinels, linked together by the most unstable and most resistless chains. No, if the Pilgrims had come by the way of land instead of by sea, we might never have had a settle- ment at Provincetown — only a lighthouse at
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the menacing tip to warn vessels away from danger.
But they did come, and they anchored grate- fully, glad enough to feel earth beneath their feet again, after sixty-three days' troublous tossing, and they stayed for thirteen days — the very first settlement made in this country by our forefathers ; and we week-end explorers of a softer age, poking our noses into the quaint town caught up on this amazing hook, find ourselves drawn into an atmosphere more for- eign than any other in the United States — • unless we except St. Augustine.
We have crossed the sandy bar which leads from North Truro, with its scattering cottages becoming more frequent nearing the town, and here we are on Front Street — the narrowest, crookedest thoroughfare, compactly lined with ancient cottages, some of them a foot below the level of the sidewalk; with hotels, garages, shops, and stores; crowded with dark-skinned Portuguese and laughing summer folk; with artists and natives and tourists and trades- men; with automobiles and fishcarts and per-
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ambulators; with barefooted children — dark and foreign-looking — and with dogs that lie in the sun, impeding traffic as unconcernedly as do their venerated brothers in the land of the Mussulman.
To your left lie the rotting wharves where once the entire living of the community was brought. Under your feet are the remnants of the famous plankwalk, built after much wrang- ling from the town's share of a surplus revenue distributed by Andrew Jackson and an ami- able Congress in 1837. It was regarded as such a preposterous extravagance by some of the old inhabitants that they indignantly refused to set foot upon it, but plodded righteously in the sandy middle of the road until the day of their deaths. Concrete is replacing it now, how- ever, and the many feet that tread it are quite regardless of the old furor.
Up on Town Hill to your right stands the famous Pilgrim Meniorial Monument, as stern and impressive as the men whose lives it com- memorates. It is to this monument that we must go first of all, to get the "lay of the land,"
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and to recall the few historical facts, without which it is impossible to understand the mean- ing of Provincetown.
The granite shaft — two hundred and fifty- two feet high, thirty feet higher than the one on Bunker-Hill — was dedicated in August, 1910, by the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial As- sociation, which received a grant from the Government on condition that the shaft might be used as an observation tower in case of war. It is an almost exact reproduction of the Torre del Mangia in Sienna, and similar to the campanile of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence — the sole reason for choosing this design be- ing that its austere beauty recommended itself to the engineers and architects. The ascent is easy — an inclined plane copied from that of the Campanile San Marco in Venice, up which Napoleon is supposed to have ridden on horseback.
Sailors, when they mount to the top, the care-keeper tells us, insist upon clambering up to the very pinnacle, where they can be seen from the village peering out with delight over
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the ocean which Hes Uke a chart before them. We, however, will be quite satisfied to remain behind the granite pillars of the parapet, and look out upon the bended sickle of the Cape.
Into this harbor glided the Norsemen in 1004, and again in 1007, hauling up their ves- sels for repairs. Although there is always con- troversy concerning the ways and days of these fleeting rovers, nevertheless a discovery of sixty years ago would seem to substantiate the theory of their landing here. A house was being erected on one of the hills which form the background of the village, and four feet below the surface of the earth — twenty feet below the original crown of the hill — the workmen came upon a remarkable struc- ture of stone. Since no stone larger than a man's fist is to be found in this section of the Cape, and as the foundations of the houses are invariably of brick, the ruin excited the great- est interest. The excavation was carried on more carefully, and the lower portion of a building of considerable size — of the shape of a parallelogram, with two sides still standing
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at right angles — was brought to hght. One corner had evidently been used as a fireplace, and there were ashes and the bones of sea- fowl and small animals. The stones of the wall had been firmly cemented together with a cement in which ground shells had been util- ized as lime — a mode of structure precisely similar to that of the old Stone Mill at New- port, of Norse origin. Whatever this building was, sealed up in the sands of the Province- town dunes, it undoubtedly antedates the Pilgrims, as their stay was brief, and Bradford mentions no such erection — as he most cer- tainly would have done. The Indians left no stone records of any kind. Therefore, those who like to re-people the present with the past have excellent authority for believing that Thorwald the Viking was, indeed, here, and therefore may be regarded as the discoverer of the American Continent.
Without question other adventurers — Port- uguese and Italian — stopped here also, in those early days of romantic adventuring, but the next authentic date is 1602, when Bar-
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tholomew Gosnold and John Brereton, setting sail from Falmouth, England, anchored off this sandy hook, went ashore, tramped around, parleyed with the Indians, and caught codfish and gave the ever-memorable name to the vicinity. After diverse experiences, all of which are written down quite fully in the ancient his- tories if one cares to read them, they pushed off again, found their way to Cuttyhunk, where they spent the winter, returning to England the following June.
The next year Martin Pring came, looking for sassafras, highly valued by pharmacists. After him De Monts and Champlain, in 1605. De Poitrincourt came in the early part of the century, staying for fifteen days, and taking formal possession of the country in the name of the French King. Then came John Smith, whose map of New England, dated 1614, gives the name of Milford Haven to what we know as Cape Cod Bay, and that of Stuart Bay to the present Massachusetts Bay. Although this is regarded by many as the oldest map of New England, the chart made by Champlain, from
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his observations between 1604 and 1607, is more complete in its geographical, ethnologi- cal, zoological, and botanical information. However, that was when this part of the coun- try was known as New France, and so, after all, John Smith's may be regarded as the old- est map of New England, since he gave this name to the region he explored. One cannot pass by the old maps without speaking of the one made, half a century after Champlain's, by another Frenchman, De Barre, only excelled by that of our own Coast Survey. Thus the ante-Pilgrim history of Cape Cod is remark- ably well recorded, and with the landing of that weary but indefatigable band on Novem- ber 11, 1620, the records are entirely complete. It is astonishing how tenacious is the popu- lar belief that the first landing of the Pilgrims in this country was at Plymouth. It was at what is now Provincetown, in this harbor, probably at Long Point. Here it was that that immortal compact — the earliest example of a form of civil government, established by the act of the people to be governed — was drawn
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up and signed in the cabin of the ship. "Per- haps," says John Quincy Adams, "the only instance in human history of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legiti- mate source of government."
Here then, before our very eyes, looking down from this height, is the place in which the American Republic was conceived; and here, while the men waded ashore to explore, and the women promptly instituted the first New England wash-day, Dorothy Bradford, the wife of the future Governor, slipped into the water and was drowned, and Peregrine White — that historic infant whose cradle and various dwelling-places have been so assidu- ously cherished — was born. Births, deaths, governmental compacts, and a prodigious wash- day — what more is needed to attest to the substantiality of the Pilgrim landing?
But although the Pilgrims landed, they did not stay. Many of them had caught cold from their enforced wading from vessel to land, and the bleak shore seemed more instead of less
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forbidding, as they lingered. But their brief visit opens the initial page in American his- tory, and bestows without question upon Provincetown the legitimate title of the first landing of our forefathers.
Fluctuation is the dominant characteristic of Provincetown history: fluctuation as regards both land and those who settled upon it. The sand, — of which some ingenious statistician has reckoned that tWo million tons are displaced yearly, — which drifts under the houses and over the gardens ; which scours the windows to opaqueness and buries driftwood and uncovers the roots of trees; which first lures and then discourages inquiring prospective inhabitants, — is, of course, responsible for the former phenomenon, and possibly for the latter. Race and soil have an intimate connection.
After the union of the Plymouth and Massa- chusetts Bay Colonies in 1692, Provincetown, then a part of Truro, became a fishing hamlet. (It sometimes occurs to the casual student of early days that this habit of the Pilgrims to range forth and dot their fishing stations far
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and wide, like the twentieth-century million- aire with ''hunting boxes out of town," is rather amusing.) In 1741 it was set off as a precinct of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Thus the name of Provincetown was easily arrived at, and with it a rather singular arrangement, which kept the title to lands in the name of the Colony instead of in- dividuals. Those who erected dwelling-houses, fish-houses, and wharves within the limits of the former precinct occupied the position of mere squatters or tenants on sufferance — an anomalous condition which continued until 1893. In this way a populous village grew up, with houses, shops, churches, and schools, and yet not a single householder held any title to the land on which his building stood. When the buildings were sold and conveyed, the conveyance was in the form of a quitclaim and not a warranty. It was less than twenty-five years ago that, by a special provision of the General Court, a division of the lands was made between the township and the Commonwealth, the latter reserving to itself a large section of
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the unoccupied lands of the town, stretching from the outskirts of the settled limits of the village to the ocean, and conveying to the town its title to the settled portion of these lands — the title which for two hundred and sixty years had belonged to the Colonial Province and the State. These Province Lands to-day are largely sand dunes which the Government is persuading beach grass to cover.
This unusual civic arrangement was accom- panied by a continually ebbing and rising and ebbing population. "In 1749," says Douglass in his "Summary," the "town consisted of only two or three settled families, two or three cows, and about six sheep." By 1755 there were ten or fifteen dwellings, but by 1764 the town was so insignificant that the census for- got it altogether. During the War of 1812 there was great depression, and in 1819 we hear that "there was only one horse in Province town' and that was an old white one, with one eye." With peace came prosperity : whale-fishing and shore and Bank fishing; the manufacture of salt and of oil ; fortunes were made in ambergris,
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and fishing stories assumed enormous propor- tions — as of the cHpper Juha Costa, which under a Portuguese skipper set sail at six in the morning for fishing grounds about fifteen miles northeast of Highland Light, took one hundred and fifty thousand pounds of cod, and arrived at her Boston moorings an hour before midnight. But the discovery of petroleum wiped the whaling industry off the map and with it the town suffered another decline.
And now, within a decade, Provincetown has come into a new era. The automobilists, who scatter their laughter and their largess so good-naturedly from one end of the continent to another, have discovered it : it is an alluring week-end trip. One may, as Thoreau said, "stand here and put all America behind him" — not a mean achievement by any count. Besides the tourists have come flocks of sum- mer colonists, artistic and literary folk, who live in cottages and shacks and remodeled stables and patched-up sheds; there are schools of art and other ephemeral and permanent organizations; and all summer long there is a
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daily boat from Boston with a troop of excur- sionists. But the most radical change of all is the gradual establishment of the Portuguese in the first home of our forefathers. Coming, as those original settlers came, across the ocean from the east, these smiling men and women have, without any spectacular ovation, si- lently, persistently, inconspicuously achieved the occupation of Provincetown. In the chap- ter on Barnstable you will find a study of the racial situation on Cape Cod, but if you de- scend from the Monument and walk through the streets, you will see, in a graphic exposi- tion, the amazing preponderance of this quiet, comely race.
Portuguese — Portuguese — Portuguese everywhere. They are the fishermen, the store- keepers: the men work; their children skip rope on the sidewalk; their daughters are waitresses in the hotels and teachers in the schools. For the passion for education, which has always distinguished Cape Cod from the time when in 1673 the revenue derived from the fisheries was set aside for the schools, seems
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to have illuminated these latest of Cape-Cod- ders. There are Portuguese women who can- not speak English; Portuguese men who marry the daughters of Cape Cod stock. There is every shade of color from almost black to a creamy olive, and every grade of refinement in these foreign countenances. Some come from the Azores, and some from Portugal, and there is more or less of a feud between them, and more or less resentment against them all by the natives. But they are a thrifty and law- abiding people, and here, as elsewhere on the Cape, their industry and picturesqueness con- tribute something not without value to the general life.
But the skeleton on which the body of Provincetown is fashioned — the bones of his- tory and ethnology and geography — is not the complete picture of this quaintest of all the Cape towns. The superficial attributes are possibly even more fascinating.
It is here that we find the quintessence of the seafaring atmosphere, for although the inhabitants no longer depend exclusively upon
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the ocean to bring them their means of HveH- hood, yet in a place so completely surrounded by water, peculiar and charming customs be- come an integral part of the daily life. In the houses, for instance, one finds cabinets con- taining great, curious shells, and shells orna- ment the gateposts or mark a line to the front walk. The key left in a shop door will dangle a shell instead of a billet of wood; henyards are occasionally fenced around with pieces of an old seine; lobster pots, herring pots, and conch shells are set upon the lintels; boats are converted into flower beds; and garden beds — whose original earth was brought in ships from a more generous soil — are neatly outlined in scallop shells. The codfish is the favorite weather vane, although the swordfish and the ship are close behind in popularity; and more than one door is kept ajar by a whale's tooth wedged underneath. The atmosphere, both actually and figuratively, is soaked with salt water and the nameless and numberless asso- ciations which are part of it.
One may get a glimpse of Provincetown in
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an hour; a day is better; a week is better still; and a summer is none too much. But no glimpse of the present is complete without some recollection of the vivid scenes of the past. It was in the winter of 1874-75 that Provincetown was hermetically sealed by a glittering ice-field from Wood End to Mano- met — a distance of twenty-two miles. A fleet of fishing vessels was caught in the floe, and stood there, their hulls, rigging, and taper- ing spars encrusted with ice, like fairy vessels of glass. It was one immense, crystalline desert with signals of distress fluttering from the im- mobile craft — a scene of perilous beauty and wicked enchantment. Some of the boats were abandoned by their crews, who had eaten their last crust and burned the bulwarks of their vessel for fuel; some were crushed like paper under the terrific pressure of sea and ice; some were held fast for a month, and only re- leased by the breaking-up of the ice floes. It is hard for us to stand here and survey the peaceful harbor and realize that scene of sav- age and miraculous wonder.
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Shipwrecks without number have occurred here. Bradford mentions the Sparrowhawk as having been stranded here in 1626, and a Httle more than two hundred years later the remains of a hull of an ancient ship were un- covered at Nauset Beach in Orleans, embedded in the mud of a meadow a quarter of a mile from any water that would have floated her. The unusual build of the vessel, unsealed from its tomb of two centuries, has made the in- vestigators feel confident that it was no other than this ancient vessel — perhaps the first to be dashed to destruction on this fatal coast. Another strange occurrence was when the British frigate, the Somerset, chased by the French fleet on the Back Side, as the Atlantic Coast of the Cape is called, struck on Peaked Hill Bars, and was flung far up on the beach by the terrific force of the waves. Stripped by a "plundering gang from Provincetown and Truro," the frigate lay at the mercy of the sands, and they gradually hid her even from memory. But the strong gales and the high tide of 1886 tore the merciful shroud aside and
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brought the blackened timbers again to Hght. "The grim old ship, tormented by relic hunt- ers, peered out over the sea, looking from masthead to masthead for the Union Jack, and, disgusted with what she saw, dived once more under her sandy cover, where the beach grass now grows over her."
There was the tragic case of the Brutus, which struck on the bars at Cape Race, in 1802. All the crew reached shore, but froze to death. There was also the wreck of the Gio- vanni, which, caught in an icy gale, was dis- mantled of her rigging before the very eyes of the spectators on the shore, who were power- less to send aid. It was literally possible to stand on the shore and see the seas sweeping the decks and roaring about the rigging in which the sailors had taken refuge; it was pos- sible to see them, one by one, picked off the rigging, while the ship settled down into the sandy grave the waves were wildly digging. Finally the men on shore, utterly impotent, saw the last sailor drop down from the frozen rigging into the raging ocean, and saw the
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masts strain, crack, and bend, and crash in ruin upon the shattered hull. Here it was that the City of Portland was supposed to have gone down in 1898.
It is all over now — those fierce and terrible days. The Cape Cod Canal has opened a chan- nel of safety for the seagoing ships. The beach grass is holding down with a billion fingers the dangerous sand that used to drift and bury and cut and ruin the houses and roads and paths of Provincetown. On Long Point and Race Point and at Wood End, lighthouses glitter and beckon the way to safety. The story of the life-saving stations and of the his- torical wrecks and of the work of the Humane Society is perhaps best told at Chatham.
Chapter XIII
CHATHAM AND THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE
CHATHAM — you must pronounce it Chat-ham^ like the ham in a sandwich if you wish to be correct: Cape-Codders do not mumble their words, and give firm accent to every syllable; "Chatum" marks the summer cockney — Chatham, then, is one of the very loveliest of all the Cape towns. From its shore run out myriad little fingers of land, making a coast-line which is a maze of "blue inlets and their crystal creeks." It seems like a fairy sea, swathed in mists or jeweled in sunshine; and the land itself, torn into such exquisite tatters, partakes somewhat of the lambent shimmer. This intricate coast not only distinguishes
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Chatham externally, but reveals the records of her past and explains much of her economic career; for these shifting sands have made it quite impossible for the town to have had any centralizing industry.
With a coast which is perpetually in a state of flux; with chasms being forced open and be- ing forced shut; with a constant washing-away of the shore in one place and a building-up in another — what wonder that the fragments of the lighthouses which once stood on the firm headlands now strew the beach, and that the soil on which they were built mingles with the sand of the ocean? Inlets, salt and fresh water ponds — there are thirty of these latter in Chatham — pierce and thread through this whole fascinating region, making a topographi- cal delicacy which suggests a lady in a veil of mist swathed in lacy garments, with one long streamer — the shred of Monomoy — fluttering from her neck. But this fantastically attired creature is, beneath her smile, only the wickedest of sirens, and hundreds and hun- dreds of boats, caught on some shoal or reef of
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her drifting tentacles, have been swirled to death; and thousands of voices in the agony of death have cursed her through the storm for a fiend.
It takes only a glance at the peculiar jagged formation of this part of the Cape to see what a perilous place it must be. Even now, with the Cape Cod Canal cut through, there are wrecks here every year; and before the life- saving stations were established, the disasters were practically without number. The hook of Monomoy and the hook of Provincetown have vied with each other in their evil deeds, and plunging their beaks into the ocean have come up again and again like insatiable hawks with victims dangling and dripping with blood and water.
There were no records kept of the disasters along this coast previous to the establishment of the United States Life-Saving Service in 1872, except in town records and local histories, but some were so memorable that they can never be forgotten. Among these are the wrecks of the Sparrowhawk, the Brutus, and
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the Somerset (mentioned in the chapter on Provincetown) which were among the first vessels in the history of this country to go down. Close upon their foaming wakes we see a long line of phantom vessels, once floating buoyantly upon the water, now sailing on for- ever — only in mirage and memory.
We see the Widdah — that pirate ship whose career of crime would do credit to a Peter Pan party — with her twenty-three guns and her crew of one hundred and thirty men. It was in April, 1718, that she captured seven prizes, and in order to get them to shore put some of her crew on each of them. But the captain of one of them, seeing that the pirates who had been transferred to his ship were drunk, craft- ily anchored in Provincetown Harbor, where the seven pirates were apprehended and after- ward tried and executed in Boston. The Wid- dah herself was inveigled across the shoals, where she struck, and, a storm rising, was wrecked. The news of the pirate fleet prompted the Government to send Captain Southack to the scene to see that the wreck should not be
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plundered, and the story of his miraculous voy- age is given in the chapter on Orleans. One hundred and two men were buried on the beach at that one time, and eight of the pirates were hung. There is still a legend drifting about of a man of frightful and singular aspect who used to visit the Cape every season. He would never speak to any one, but his ejaculations during his sleep — ribald and blasphemous — convinced the people of this region that he had been one of the pirate crew, and that he had come to visit a concealed hoard of gold. When he died a belt filled with gold pieces was found about his waist. The Widdah is only one of that spectacular procession of phantom ships which pass before our memory. We see the Josephus, a British vessel with a cargo of iron rails, striking on the Peaked Hill Bars. Her crew were driven to the rigging from whence their anguished cries could be heard to the mainland. Heroic life-savers hurled themselves into the tempest, and they and the wailing crew and the ship itself, before the eyes of the horror-stricken watchers on the shore, were
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ground to atoms by the monstrous waves. We see the immigrant ship, the FrankHn, deUber- ately run ashore in 1849 near Cahoon's Hol- low, and we still hear the shrieks of the victims of that fearful crime. In the year 1853 we see no less than twenty-three appalling disasters along the shores of Cape Cod. The weather was bitterly cold, and at the time when the ves- sels were lost such violent storms swept the coast that nothing could be done to succor the drowning crews. Those who did reach the shore died upon the desolate uplands and beaches. We see the White Squall, a blockade-runner, who came safely home the long way from China; but when she struck the back of the Cape she went down in total wreckage. The Aurora, with palm oil from the west of Africa; the Clara Bella, coal-laden; the bark Giovanni, with wine from the happy fields of Italy; the iron ship Jason, with its loss of twenty-four lives; the steamer City of Portland, in 1898, lost, no one knows where, but whose last wreckage was washed up on this shore — all too quickly and too tragically do these phan-
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torn ships press upon each other as we recall them, with their divers cargoes and brave re- cords behind them. They are vanished now, and their shattered hulks are part of the drift- wood that flecks the shores. Even their names and the names of their passengers and crews are fading on the pages of those old marine books which fill a small corner in every Cape Cod library.
In spite of the number and horror of these catastrophes it was not until 1871 that Con- gress appropriated the two hundred thousand dollars which made a Life-Saving Service pos- sible. Previously to this, the Massachusetts Humane Society, a private charity, was the sole agent of rescue along this entire coast. This society, which still continues such excel- lent work along salt and fresh water basins, is one of the oldest in the world. It originated its coast service more than thirty-six years before the English; while the French service did not come into being until very much later. Estab- lished in 1786 and incorporated a few years later, the society began its organized relief not
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only along Cape Cod, but along the whole Atlantic Coast as far as it could, by placing huts along the shore in desolate places where shipwrecked persons might be cast. These huts held boats, first-aid kits, flares for light- ing, etc., and were dependent upon volunteer crews. ^ Although the State and the Federal Governments were appreciative of the serv- ices rendered by the society, — as is shown by substantial contributions from time to time,
— yet both State and Federal Governments were very slow in assuming the responsibilities which were obviously theirs, and not a private charity's. As early as 1797 the town of Truro sold the United States Government a tract of land for a lighthouse, where Highland Light
— the first on the Cape — was built. But it was not until seventy-five years later that the first life-saving station was erected. Now there are stations about every five miles from Prov- incetown to Monomoy — at Wood End, Race Point, Peaked Hill Bars, High Head, High-
^ The first building of this kind was erected at Lovell's Island in Boston Harbor in 1807.
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lands, Pamet River, Cahoon's Hollow, Nauset, Orleans, Old Harbor, Chatham, Monomoy, and Monomoy Point.
Picture to yourself a small, plain house, set upon a sand dune, yet out of reach of high water, painted red so that it is visible from quite a distance, and further distinguished by a tall flagstaff. You enter and find, on the first floor, five rooms : a mess-room which also serves as a sitting-room for the crew; a kitchen; a keeper's room; a boat-room; and beach ap- paratus room. There are wide, double-leafed doors opening out upon a sloping platform down which the surf -boat may be quickly run. On the second floor are two rooms: one con- tains cots for the crew and the other for rescued persons. This is a United States Life-Saving Station, and here the keeper lives throughout the year. From August 1 to June 1 of the fol- lowing year he has with him a crew of life- savers whose exploits would honor any Book of Brave Deeds. During July and August, as there are practically no big storms, the men have a vacation. As most of them live near, it
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is easy to summon them in case of need. It is during these summer months, when the crew are away and the sea is calm, that the keeper not infrequently moves his family into the sta- tion, and more than one yachtsman has en- joyed the hospitality of such an improvised home, and delighted summer visitors have joined in the clambakes on the beach.
But when the summer sun grows wintry and the ocean begins to mutter, then the yachts- men and the summer folk depart, and the life- savers assemble for their ten months of stern service. There are drills every day, of course: drills in launching and landing the lifeboats through the surf; flag drills and lantern drills in the International and General Code of Signaling; drills with beach apparatus and breeches buoy; resuscitation drills. Every man knows in detail every act he is to perform in every emergency. If, in one month after the opening of the active season, a crew cannot effect a mimic rescue within five minutes, it is considered that they have been remiss in drill- ing. Of course, in time of actual storm no such
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celerity is possible : here, the surf, the currents, and the stranded craft herself all conspire against the work of rescue. Frequently the horses which are kept at every station refuse to pull the cart which carries the apparatus, and their heads have to be covered before they can be induced to go out into the fury of the elements. It is obvious that all the drilling would go for naught unless the men, beside being well trained, were temperamentally brave and quick-witted in time of danger.
On clear days a watch is kept from every station from the lookout tower. Thus every single vessel that is sighted is recorded, and in case of non-arrival can be quickly traced to the last place where she was sighted. On foggy days and in thick weather, when one could not see from the lookout, a patrol is kept, just like the night patrol. This patrol is faithful to the last degree, and all night long, in snow and blizzard, with the thermometer below zero and the wind blowing fifty miles an hour, over quicksands and "cut throughs" on the beach through which the seas rush through to the
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lowlands — in all times and weathers, the silent guard keeps watch along the coast of the Cape.
It is arranged in this way: The night is di- vided into four watches; two surf men at each station are assigned to each watch ; at the des- ignated time they set out from the station in opposite directions, keeping well down on the beach as near the surf as possible. Midway between each station is a little halfway house. Here the two surfmen from the neighboring stations meet, get warm, exchange checks to prove that both of them have made the ap- pointed trip, and then return. As there are telephones between the halfway station houses and the stations, any delay or absence of a surf- man can immediately be reported, and search- ers sent out to find if he is in trouble — for the walk is often a hazardous one beset with dangers — or if he is in need of help for some vessel in distress. At each end of the route, where there is no "halfway house," the men punch a time clock to record the hour of their arrival.
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Those who live in cities or inland villages rarely comprehend the necessity or the dif- ficulties of this service. The elements are so chained by man's ingenuity on land that many people have almost forgotten the savage wild- ness of a storm at sea. To them stories of the bravery of these surf men — keeping to their patrol in spite of blizzards that half blind and wholly numb them; through storm tides and tempests, along exposed beaches where the wind lashes a million whips of icy terror — seem as far away as stories of the Arabian Nights. But all night and every night, while inlanders are snugly sleeping, the patrol marches up and down the coast, guarding those on shore from sudden shock of flood, and ready with all the assistance that man has ever devised for the help of man at sea. Some of these means of assistance are the result of years of scientific study. The idea of a life- boat was first conceived by a London coach- maker, and the present boat is the result of a century of patient experimentation. Any one who has ever seen the surfmen handling one
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of these boats — so light that they can be quickly run down the beach, and yet so strong that they can withstand the most tumultuous waves — knows something of the extraordi- nary skill that has gone into the making of such a craft and its handling. The method of estab- lishing communication between a stranded vessel and the shore by means of a mortar is over a century old and was worked out by Lieutenant Bell, of the British Royal Artil- lery, in 1791. He demonstrated the practica- bility of the mortar, which could carry a heavy shot four hundred yards from a vessel to the shore. Later the mortar was used to send a line over the vessel from the shore.
The duties of the life-savers do not consist in merely saving human lives in time of storm or in assisting them after they are rescued. This service saves hundreds of stranded ves- sels and their cargoes from complete or par- tial destruction; it protects wrecked property from plunderers and further ravages of the elements; it averts numerous disasters by flashing signals of warning to vessels in danger;
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it assists the Custom-House Service in col- lecting revenues of the Government, and pre- vents smuggling; in time of flood or tidal waves it cares for those on shore as well as those at sea. Furthermore, it keeps a valuable record, not only of passing vessels, but of the condition of the surf and the weather, barometer and thermometer. And finally, it is a valuable part of the national defense. When we declared war against Germany, the Coast Guard auto- matically became (under a law newly passed by Congress) an integral part of the Navy of the United States. It is now a branch of the naval service; its personnel is regularly en- listed and armed with rifles, and each one of its stations provided with a machine gun.
Under the head of the Coast Guard is also the Revenue Cutter Service. These cutters, owned by the Government, are ready at all times to tow boats to places of safety. Thus, when some vessel is sighted from a life-saving station, laboring along under a load of lime or stone, and evidently in distress, word is sent the Acushnet at Wood's Hole or to the Gres-
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ham at Boston, which comes as promptly as possible and tows the boat out of her diffi- culties, and possibly to her port of destina- tion. This saves the vessel the price of a tow- boat — a fee which might be half the value of the craft and quite beyond her power to pay. Boats of this sort get into trouble more fre- quently at Chatham than at any other place, although the whole "pitch of the Cape" — as this back side is called — is extremely dan- gerous.
Tales of wreck, tales of heroism, tales of tragedy and comedy are an integral part of the story of the Life-Saving Service along the Cape. And Chatham, with its fine summer hotels and fine summer houses, with its wind- mill on the hill, trimmed with red like a pic- ture in a nursery book, marks, for all its ap- parent nonchalance, the most perilous spot of a perilous coast. Here, times without number, men have dashed themselves into the ravenous surf to save the lives of other men whom they had never seen, while shrieks of anguish, such as safe inlanders have never heard, have reached
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the listening shore. Here many a spar has been washed up on the beach, bearing a burden of the dead such as only the waves can witness.
Well may the bathers dance along the happy shore during the summer sunshine ! Far out to sea on every hand there is a moaning which neither wind can stifle nor sunshine allay — the moaning of a perpetual dirge for those who have perished along this crystal coast.
Chapter XIV
HARWICH AND THE CAPE COD SCHOOLS
EVER since 1670, when Cape Cod estab- lished the first public schools in this country, maintaining them with funds from the fisheries tax, — no mean drain upon the scanty- resources of hard-working pioneers, — this section of New England has been famed for its excellent educational facilities.
This establishment of public schools was a prodigious feat, requiring a high degree of ini- tiative. For we must remember that the com- mon-school system was not one of the institu- tions transplanted by our forefathers from the mother country, but one which grew out of
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the necessities of their situation. In the Old World from which they came they had been used to family education in the home, and this practice was maintained by the colonists with conscientious fidelity until they worked out the beginnings of our present public-school sys- tem for the more general education of youth. We notice the effects of this long-continued and well-standardized teaching in this region, not only by the general high intelligence of its inhabitants, — for they are innately a keen, sagacious type, — but in their manner of ad- dress, their choice of words, and their ability to express themselves.
An Indian woman from Mashpee will, while working in your kitchen, inquire, '*Is this the appropriate dish in which to serve the pota- toes .f^" And the man who plants your garden or sells you fish will ask questions and answer them, and throw in a little philosophy on the side, with a more cultivated diction than many of the summer folk who employ him.
Travelers, particularly those from the West, are often struck by the pleasing quality of
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voice and astonishingly correct enunciation of a child by the roadside — whether that child be a native, a Portuguese, or an Indian. Of course, there are plenty of provincialisms of speech, and idioms, succinct and terse. Ad- vice as to managing your automobile is fre- quently couched in nautical terms: you are warned, in diverse exigences, not to "sail too close to the wind," or, ''don't get becalmed." Directions on land as well as sea often include suggestions that you "tack to leeward." There is a nasal tang to many voices, probably due to climatic influences. But, as a whole, the Cape- Codder is conspicuous for his well-spoken hab- its and for his stock of accurate and wide in- formation. There are no little dark pockets hidden in the hills, such as one finds in the Berkshires, where isolation and ignorance have brought about conditions quite as appalling — if not as widespread — as those among the mountaineers in Kentucky. Every child in every hamlet here goes to school. There are less than one hundred illiterates of school age in the whole extent of Barnstable County —
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and these few are where the foreign element has recently settled in large numbers. There are thirteen high schools in the fifteen towns which make up this county, and over twenty- four thousand dollars are spent annually in transporting the children to and from various neighborhoods to these same high schools. There are about two hundred and fifty teachers employed, the majority of them college or normal-school graduates. It is easy to bewail the fact that Cape Cod is yearly losing so many of her sons and daughters to the city, but surely a community which can send its chil- dren out to Chicago, San Francisco, and Lon- don, to take prominent parts in great business there, should not feel more bereft than the mother, who, after bringing up a healthy and ambitious family, sees it scatter to new and better fields of endeavor. The Cape Cod boys and girls have a trick of moving away — per- haps they inherited it from those ancestors who sailed to China and the Philippines, coming home, in due time, as gladly as they had gone. To-day the returning Cape-Codders come back
HARWICH 191
as summer people, and in the meanwhile their empty places have been quietly filled by an influx of aliens — dark-eyed Portuguese and eager Finns, Indian children and others too dark to claim that blood. The pedagogical machinery takes up this heterogeneous mass, as it took up the children of the Puritans, and hammers and moulds and grinds into shape — pushing each generation a little in advance of the one before it. In certain districts the ma- chinery labors a little, but as yet the immigra- tion has not become so overwhelming as to clog the wheels of progress.
Harwich, besides having the largest and finest town hall on the Cape, and one of the most extensive village greens, — Brooks Park, — has an admirable educational record. It is here that education receives the largest town appropriation, and here that the first agricul- tural school in Barnstable County and the third in the State was opened. It was here that Sidney Brooks founded the Brooks Seminary in 1844 and served as its head for twenty-two years. The first vocational course offered in
192 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
America was offered here, conducted by Sid- ney Brooks, and was, quite fittingly, a course in navigation.
The Brooks Seminary became the town high school in 1883, and remains so to-day — still carrying the banner of progressiveness high. Before the enactment of the Act of 1911, which provided for the establishment of agricultural departments in high schools under State aid and supervision, Harwich petitioned the Board of Education for such a department. It was granted, and established in 1912, and has done much to revivify agricultural interest on the lower Cape. Furthermore, when it took part in the Vocational Exhibit at the Panama Pacific Exhibition, it won the Grand Prize for Massachusetts.
But the passion for learning is not confined to one town. The Sandwich Academy was in- corporated in 1804, and was a matter of great pride to the whole county until it was under- mined at last by sectarian differences. The Academy in Falmouth was founded in 1835, and the one in Truro in 1840. Nor did the in-
HARWICH 193
fluence of these zealous scholars stop here. Samuel Lewis, a native of Falmouth, was known as the father of the common schools of Ohio, over which he was superintendent for fifty years. One likes to recall the well- grounded and long-established reputation of such schools and such schoolmasters.
Of course, the most famous school on the Cape to-day is the Normal School at Hyannis. Established for twenty years, it has both win- ter and summer courses, and to it have come many foreign students and educators, seeking courses of study in this country.
But to go back to Harwich. At the time when Harwich was incorporated, in 1694, it had been enjoined by law upon every town in the Province, "having the number of fifty householders or upward," to have a "school- master to teach children and youth to read and write." Those having the "number of a hun- dred families or householders " were required to have a grammar school set up and taught by "some discreet person of good conversa- tion, well instructed in the tongues." It was
194 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
not until 1708 that "enough famiHes" were found in Harwich. Even after the famiUes assembled, in the gradual course of settlement, and Mr. Asbon was selected as schoolmaster, no schoolhouse was built, and the town of- fered "nine pence a week for a convenient house to keep school in" — a rent which ap- pears to have been satisfactory, for the school evidently proceeded. Of Mr. Asbon, teaching the progeny of fifty colonial families, — one remembers with a sigh the size of those fami- lies, — in accommodations procured by nine pence a week, the records are mercifully brief. But of his successor, Mr. Philip Selew, we hear a great deal. This worthy gentleman was schoolmaster in Harwich for over fifty years, receiving for his labors forty-eight pounds a year. Surely all the honors that have since gathered around his name w ere only scant rec- ompense for a half -century of heroic toil.
The educational record of Harwich is not its only claim to distinction. Originally, of course, fishing was its chief occupation. Sixty years ago the water front was alive with shipping:
HARWICH 195
vessels came and went; the wharves were throbbing with Ufe; and Harwich capital was largely invested in Harwich vessels, built on the banks of Herring River. Cranberry cul- ture followed, and later this prosperous town, named for the old port in Essex County, Eng- land, supported within its borders a sash and blind factory; a tanning business; a watch busi- ness; and also a sail-making one. Now its chain of fresh-water lakes, rich in bass, pick- erel, and perch, sparkle a perpetual invitation to the fisherman, while the one million dollars that the town has spent on its ninety miles of highway during the past thirteen years, beckon to the motorist. Harwichport, West Harwich, Harwich Center, South and East Harwich, are all dotted with summer homes. Transients double the population for six months in the year, and the long beaches are bright with bathers during the summer weeks.
It is not possible to leave the subject of the educational life of the Cape without mention- ing the free public library. Every traveler must have noticed the handsome and com-
196 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
plete libraries in this region — many of them gift or memorial buildings. But the branch libraries are even more significant than the main ones. It is charming to see some gray cottage tucked in the friendly lee of a hill that has been its shelter for a hundred years and more, bearing above its ancient door the sign "Library." By the side of the road, or half- way across the meadow or in peaceful nearness to the local cemetery, these little "branch li- braries" are the inconspicuous but vital centers for culture throughout the length and breadth of the Cape, testifying poignantly to the men- tal alertness of the Cape-Codder.
Those "trippers" whose travels have taken them over foreign lands will have to think a long time before they can remember any coun- try where the institutions of learning compare with those which dot this small section of the United States. Schools and libraries — free to all who will — are an integral part of the atmosphere and architecture of Cape Cod. We Americans are justified in a proper pride in the system which keeps the fires of learning
HARWICH
197
burning brightly, and which manages every year to swallow a greater and even greater mass of raw material and turn it out in nego- tiable human form.
--ife*^-
Chapter XV FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS
FALMOUTH — a town of dignity and repute; a town of handsome exterior and honorable sons and daughters. Proud and progressive, Falmouth has, for two hundred and thirty years, maintained her prestige in the annals of Cape Cod.
On your entrance to the town you are struck with the air of pleasant prosperity. The Village Green, that touch of ''City Planning" which, for all its naive associations, still remains an incomparably effective landscape touch; the well-built, well-cared-f or houses of comfortable dimensions and admirable proportions; and the church with the ivy-clad chapel by the gleam- ing pond — all sustain this genial atmosphere.
^!! -< '
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 199
Nor are these things superficial features. They are the proper expressions of a long and worthy life. Falmouth has won her prestige fairly. Ever since she attained her autonomy — in 1686 when she and her twin sister of Rochester became the sixty-sixth and sixty- seventh Massachusetts towns — she has mer- ited the admiration that has flowed to her.
All Cape Cod communities have had their experience with coasting, shipbuilding, whal- ing, and salt-making, and Falmouth is no ex- ception to the rule. But in spite of her excel- lent career in these lines — extending over one hundred and sixty years — she has drawn her life more from the land than from the water. Very early in her history she established herself agriculturally, and opened the Fal- mouth Bank, with a capital of one hundred thousand dollars, in 1821. An intelligent mother, she has spent liberally on her schools, churches, and public buildings, and now, like that mother with her work well done, she re- counts with modest but firm pride the worthy records of her sons. It is these sons, returning
200 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
after years in the busier, more distant places of the world, who were originally responsible for the colonies of summer houses which encircle the town on every side. There is much wealth here — although unostentatiously displayed; many traditions, quietly but tenaciously pre- served. It is this social order, squarely built upon the substantial foundations of upright living, that makes a civic structure of definite value and beauty.
The Old Colony Records of 1686 call Fal- mouth " Suckannesset," but the dearer Eng- Ush name of the famous seaport in Cornwall was soon given her by English-speaking tongues. Although her history as a town does not actually begin until 1686, yet twenty-five years earlier than that there were houses built near Salt and Fresh Ponds. The inhabitants of one of these houses — the Hatches — an- chored on the evening of their arrival among the tall flags of the pond. There the first white child born in Falmouth saw the light, and in honor of the rushes which had been his cradle was appropriately named Moses.
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 201
The town drew its population from Barn- stable, Plymouth, and Sandwich, and it brings the past suddenly close to glance at the names of those first settlers and see how many of them are familiar to-day in this vicinity — Gifford, Lawrence, Nye, Dimmick, Swift, Phinney, Robinson, Davis. For all its impor- tations and exportations, these names and a few others still remain a part of the local life, sustaining the continuity of background and association through the years.
For quite a while after they settled here many of these stanch pioneers kept up their connection with the church at the Great Marshes — the prettier name for Barnstable. We to-day, with automobiles and railroads at our door, and finding it diflScult to get to church at all, pause for a moment, wondering, at that old-fashioned eflSciency which made it possible for men to build houses and ships and roads, to defend their country from wolves and weather and a foreign army, and still ''main- tain their connection" with a church a long half-day's drive away. However, this aflfiUa-
202 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
tion was not necessary very long; in a year Falmouth had its own place of worship and its own preacher.
Salutary as the establishment of a local church always is, yet in this case one is inclined to believe that the town owes much of its temperate living and kindly humanity to quite another source, the Quakers, who still maintain their meeting-house on the main road to Fal- mouth Town, and still infuse their peace into the fevered life of a hurrying age. Shamefully treated by Sandwich,^ the inoffensive sect timidly sought an entrance into the shelter of this more liberal community a few years after the first settlers. A mild and peaceful folk, they were accepted as friends and citizens immediately, and even ** cleared" of a minis- terial tax — an unheard-of concession in those orthodox days. Their gray meeting-house, un- adorned by belfry or turret, stands tranquilly by the side of the State road, with the open sheds, where the horses are tied during service, still in use, although to-day more automobiles
^ See chapter iii.
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 203
than horses fill them. Behind and at one side on the slope of the hill is the gravej^ctrd dotted with small stones, — all gray, all uniform, — the lack of worldly rivalry fittingly expressed in the last habitation which these saintly folk have built with hands. Methodism — the "religion of the frontier and the backwoods" as Phelps has called it — is the most popular denomination on the Cape, although one sees an Episcopalian or Baptist, and of later years a Roman Catholic, edifice more and more frequently. But the Friends' Meeting-House, built in 1842 in its frame of cheerful grave- yard, breathes a unique benediction upon this township. It may be due to this influence that, in spite of the sad and cruel lists of mis- deeds toward the Indians which blot the pages of Massachusetts history, not one of them can be traced to Falmouth. She bought her land honestly and paid for it fairly; her personal re- lations with the Indians were uniformly just; the Indian burial-ground on the hilltop over- looking a pond was reverenced and unmo- lested for over two hundred years. Thus, one
204 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
more strand of contentment was woven into the felicitous woof of this happy local chron- icle.
The happiest nations, like the happiest women, says George Eliot, have no history. In a sense this is true of Falmouth. She has escaped fire, pestilence, and calamity; her books are clear of any grievous offense. Even in the Revolution, when she was twice bom- barded by the British, and when, as in the Civil War, she gave most generously of money and of men, she did not suffer violence. To be sure, in 1773 there was an epidemic which at- tacked the oysters, and, in spite of palliative efforts, extinguished their existence in this vi- cinity. And later there was a harrowing con- troversy to decide whether the alewives should have the right of way to Coonenosset Pond. This affair became so bitter that a cannon in charge of the anti-herring party was prema- turely discharged, killing the gunner and the controversy at the same time. Also, again in early days, every householder was required to "kill six old and twelve young blackbirds, or
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 205
four jays and deliver them to the selectmen or pay 3^ for delinquency." Occasionally wolves needed sanguinary attention. But, read in the lenient light of history, these slaughters seem very light indeed, compared to the enforced savageries of many a Puritan town.
Falmouth has never been conspicuous in commercial or maritime undertakings. No mighty ships were ever launched here; the glass works followed the salt-works into easy obliv- ion. It has raised good English hay — more than other townships; it has incorporated a system of diking to convert much of the salt marsh into meadow land; and it has always had time to emphasize the pleasure and the profit of virtuous living.
The New England town at its best is one of the most charming settlements in Chris- tendom; and here we have it at its best. There are numerous small hamlets and colonies in the twelve-mile township of Falmouth. Chapa- quoit is one of the most fashionable resorts on this side of the Atlantic seaboard; Falmouth
206 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
Heights one of the most popular. And these, as well as the country sisters, such as North Falmouth and Hatch ville, are all tinctured with the gracious personality of their mother town.
Professor James Winthrop, of Harvard, coming down by chaise to survey this portion of the Cape in 1791, mentions Falmouth as a pleasant town, "but out of repair." In highly intelligent fashion she has extracted both the sweetness and the stimulant from this ancient criticism. She is still the pleasantest of all the pleasant towns, and no longer could those swept and garnished streets — well shaded and well oiled — be called "out of repair." For un- pretentious as these may appear, one will do well to remember that Falmouth ranks sixth in wealth among all the towns of Massachusetts, her tax valuation in 1914 being $16,554,745, exceeded only by Brookline, Milton, Wellesley, Winchester, and Manchester.
One should not leave Falmouth without tak- ing the four-mile drive to Wood's Hole, dis- tinguished in the nineteenth century as a whal- ing and shipbuilding station. The Pacific
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 207
Guano Company had its headquarters here, and was the magnet which, in 1879, drew the long iron rails of the Old Colony Railroad down to this remote corner. Under another name it carries many a passenger nowadays to catch the boat to Nantucket or to New Bed- ford, or to bring him back from his holiday at Martha's Vineyard.
But even if you have no intention of taking the boat from Wood's Hole, you should not miss going there for a few hours, to see its rose garden and its Marine Biological Station.
You will come to the rose garden first, and although it is private property you are quite welcome to open the rustic gate and walk in, stay as long as you please, and wander where you will. There are two acres of roses here: teas, ramblers, climbers, trailers; tiny little yellow buds; great cabbagy pink ones; there is an arbor and a pergola draped with the Evan- geline; and the pink and crimson ramblers clamber over the buildings like laughing pick- aninnies swarming over a fence. Here stands a pure white rose — calm marmoreal, faultless;
208 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
there flames a scarlet one; and yonder palest pink melts into palest yellow. Here at your feet is a brilliant host of cerise and salmon, red and cream, tended by kneeling men who know the foliage as well as the blossom of each particular one of the thousand bushes. People come from all over the w orld — from Florida and Oregon and Canada and Australia and France — to study these roses and to place their orders for bushes. And you, even if you have no order to give, but only a few minutes to spare in communion with beauty — you are quite welcome also. If you were in Holland, you would not think of passing by one of the famous tulip nurseries. If you "sight-see" in America, you should pause by the gate of Miss Fay's rose garden in Wood's Hole: pause, then lift the latch, and enter.
As for the Marine Biological Laboratory, it is quite as fascinating in its way as the rose garden. If you are of a serious turn of mind you may be interested to know something about its origin, its purpose, and its accom- plishment; if you are merely curious, you will
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 209
like to loiter for a quarter-hour in the small public aquarium where certain specimens are kept. Perhaps even the seriously minded will stop here for a few moments before turning to the less pictorial departments of the institu- tion. For it is always amusing to watch fish through glass, which shows you the surface of the water from the under side instead of from the top. Always amusing to see the skate — as flat as paper against the glass; the dogfish, silver greyhounds of the ocean, and the squid, like shrouded ladies, moving first forward and then back, their translucent veils undulating behind them. The puffers are tremendously important creatures, and in that case beyond the minnows are as thick as Fords on a Sun- day afternoon. The jeweled-eyed sea-robins, muffled in their orange-colored fins and gills, remind one of a frivolous girl lapped in red fox furs, that flutter as she walks. And what an ominousness about the sharks that go
"sailing by — Sail and sail with unshut eye — Round the world for ever and aye."
210 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
Through the next door is the museum, and here to the uninitiated eye the rows of glass jars, with their strange preserved specimens of sponge, jellyfish, coral, and seaweeds, seem like vessels in some unholy kitchen — where dia- bolical fruits and ghastly condiments are await- ing the feast of a Frankenstein.
This Marine Biological Station, like the one at Beaufort, North Carolina, and at Fairport, on the Mississippi River, in Iowa, is under the direct control of the Bureau of Fisheries, Wash- ington. Although many important investiga- tions were carried out here during the early years of the Bureau, it was not until 1883 that the present permanent establishment was created. Now there is a hatchery and labora- tory building, a residence for the superintend- ent and the director of the laboratory and the scientific staff during the summer, a pump- house and coal-shed, a workshop and store- house, and extensive wharves enclosing a stone basin. One or more steam vessels are detailed to the station, and there is ample equipment of launches and small boats. The scientific work
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 211
is largely achieved during the summer, and for the remainder of the year the station is devoted to fish culture. This fish culture is carried on in the large room which is at the left as you enter the building. Any one may enter, but probably only those who have had special training will understand the hatching appa- ratus unless it is explained to them. During the summer you are not so likely to see the machinery in working order. You may, how- ever, study the hatching-tables, each one of which is provided with twelve compartments. Each compartment has two partitions near the ends: one fixed, the other movable. Between the two is a box with a scrim bottom in which the eggs are placed. Sea-water from the sup- ply pipes is led through the rubber tubing to the small space cut off by the fixed partition, and, passing through a hole in the latter and a corresponding hole in the egg box, spreads over the eggs and passes out through the scrim bottom. The movable partition, which does not quite reach to the bottom of the compart- ment, cuts off a space at the other end, in
212 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
which is located a standpipe extending not quite to the top of the compartment. This is covered by a cyhndrical cap of large diameter, the two together forming a siphon. The in- flowing water, after passing among the eggs, fills the compartment to the top of the stand- pipe, when it is rapidly siphoned off until the bottom of the cap is exposed and the siphon flow is broken. Thus, about every seven min- utes the compartments are filled and nearly half emptied, the surface of the water rising and falling like the tide, and suggesting the name, "tidal box," by which this apparatus is known. Cod is the principal fish hatched here, as this fish spawns along the coast of New England and on the offshore banks from Nov- ember to April. The eggs, of which nearly ten million may be produced by a seventy-five- pound fish, are about one eighteenth of an inch in diameter. The eggs for hatching are procured either by the ** Norwegian method" or by "stripping." About 426,000 of them are placed in each hatching-box, in a layer one and one half inches deep, and the tidal current of
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 213
water is maintained constantly until they hatch — an average period of fifteen days. After they hatch, the fry are carried by boats to various parts of Vineyard Sound and Buz- zard's Bay, and carefully emptied into the water, where they undergo their future devel- opment under natural conditions.
In the year 1913-14, 82,000,000 cod, 373,- 000,000 flounders, and 2,500,000 mackerel were hatched in this station and planted in the ad- jacent waters. Sea-bass, tautog, scup, and lobster have also been hatched. When we con- sider the high cost of living, and the fact that the annual value of the fishery products of Alaska is about twenty million dollars (or over two and a half times the original cost of the territory to the United States), we see the direct economic as well as scientific value of such a station as this.
In addition to the hatchery, there is also a large laboratory, a small chemical laboratory, and a number of individual research rooms; all sorts of nets, seines, and collecting apparatus, and a very fine library, where about fifteen
214 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
or twenty investigators are busy all summer long.
Besides the Marine Biological Station at Wood's Hole, a great deal of gayety and out- door informal good time is brought to the town by the Marine Biological Association, where about a hundred and fifty men and girls, young doctors and all sorts of research workers, con- gregate for study during the summer months. While not organically connected with the sta- tion, the two institutions cooperate in many ways, and as a result, the marine life of the Wood's Hole region is more fully and accurately known than that of any other region of simi- lar extent on the western shore of the Atlantic. In fact, there are few regions anywhere in the world where such knowledge is more complete. Of marine animals alone approximately seven- teen hundred species are listed from Vineyard Sound and Buzzard's Bay, and the marine plants are correspondingly numerous. There is something that reminds one of a Greek fable in this community of studious and yet social men and women, spending the summer on the
FALMOUTH THE PROSPEROUS 215
shore of a classic coast, working diligently to solve the question of general habits and dis- tribution of fish; the regulation and conserva- tion of the fisheries; the investigation of fish- ery by-products; the extraction of oils and gelatins from the waste products; and the effect of various industrial water pollutions on economic marine animals.
What more fitting place for such a study than here, where for hundreds of years the community made its living from the labor of those earlier devotees of ocean life — those bronzed sea captains and sturdy fishermen and all the goodly crew of Cape Cod mariners, who, like those other ancients, "went down to the sea in ships"?
Chapter XVI
BY A CAPE COD POND
IT lies, like a shallow glass bowl of clear water, a rim of snowy sand encircling it with the prettiest of borders. On three sides rise the gentle hills, folding themselves away in veils of haze. On the fourth side curves the country road, half hidden by the thick shrub- bery; only the shrubbery is cut open in two places near the road to make an entrance for the thirsty horse. In the autumn the copper and bronze foliage is reflected in its burnished surface; in the spring the seed pods drop off and drift across the unruffled translucence. The sun glints across it; the stars smile into it; and on quiet nights the moon unrolls a long
BY A CAPE COD POND 217
wide path of silver from end to end. Pond- lilies float in the sheltered cove, and here and there the sharp fin of a leaping fish cuts the thin surface. Sometimes a solitary bather pushes his way through the swamp honey- suckle, and wades out into the delicious cool- ness; more often fishermen, in an old-fashioned rowboat, rip, with its keel, a noiseless and quickly obliterated seam in the sleek silk ex- panse. During the day an occasional passer- by, jogging along in his country buggy, stops and drives his horse and wagon down to the edge, then urging the beast on into the water itself, gives him time to drink, and to gaze reflectively at the hills. Then, making a half -circle, with water up to the hubs, — he drives out again a few rods farther on. Deer come, too, and lesser woodland folk, shy and eager.
Linger here a moment by this unnamed pond in the midst of the woods, and let the warm sand — as fine and white as that upon the ocean shore, although the ocean is miles from here — run through your fingers. You
218 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
are in communion with one of the most char- acteristic and lovely of Cape Cod secrets.
When Thoreau took his walk down one side of the Cape and up the other, he saw little of the inland country. He does not even mention the frequency and extraordinary beauty of these unexpected sheets of water. And yet there is no region in Massachusetts more brightly jeweled in this way than is Barnstable County. There are one hundred and seventy- four ponds — of over ten acres in area — in this small section : two of them are of one hun- dred acres, and three are of seven hundred acres. There are twenty-seven in the township of Barnstable alone, and no town has less than five. Nor does this enumeration include the hundreds of pondlets — tinier but by no means less bewitching — very like this one where we are now sitting. Such dimples of limpid water fleck the Cape everywhere, often surrounded by rolling meadow or pasture land, divided by a fence rail that runs twenty feet or so into the water, to keep separate the cows from different farms. Often a farmhouse with
BY A CAPE COD POND 219
its barns and sheds stands on a hilltop over- looking the water, making a picture idyllic in the extreme. You have not seen Cape Cod un- less you have taken time to walk to some such intimate spot and sit for a long half -hour and listen to the sounds of the forest life around you, and see the shadows of clouds and trees dissolve and form again in the flawless mirror. Botanists have studied this peculiarity of Cape Cod with minute and loving attention; and the fruit of their research is full of flavor.
The smaller ponds usually lie in an amphi- theater, and have neither outlet nor inlet. The bottom and shore are commonly of white sand, and the water crystal clear. They are spring- fed, and there is an overflow through the upper loose soil by percolation. Undoubtedly many of the fresh-water ponds which are near sea- level were originally inlets from the sea, cut off by the formation of sandbars at their mouths. Some are still near enough to get the tang of ocean spray splashed into them on a high wind. The annual rainfall has made them fresh. When we realize that the annual rain
2^0 CAPE COD NEAV AND OLD
supply amounts to forty inches a year for such sheets of water, and that an inch of rain upon an acre of water surface amounts to one hun- dred tons, it is easy to see how the annual sup- ply of four thousand tons would freshen any land-locked lake. But although they are fresh, they still retain enough common and other mineral salts to give them a peculiarly bril- liant sparkle and a pleasant taste — quite un- like the flatness of rain or distilled water. This quantity of salt is very minute — about one thousandth as much as in sea-water. If it becomes more — as, for instance, one tenth of one per cent — the water is brackish. It is interesting to trace the diminution of chlorine as one leaves the coast and journeys inland.
Thus, Shank Painter Pond, in Provincetown, has almost three times as much chlorine as has Long Pond or Ashumet in Falmouth. The ac- companying table shows the consistency of this theory.
The elevation of the ponds is also worthy of mention. The highest is Peter's in Sandwich. It has an elevation of ninety feet. Then come
BY A CAPE COD POND
221
|
Name of pond |
Location |
Area |
Amount of chlorine |
|
Shank Painter Clapp's Pond Great Pond |
Provincetown Provincetown Eastham Brewster Barnstable ]\fashpee Mashpee Falmouth Falmouth |
83 72 112 700 770 240 225 205 |
2:42 2:39 1:98 |
|
Long Pond |
1:44 |
||
|
Nine-Mile Pond Mashpee Lake John's Pond |
1:05 :85 :81 |
||
|
Ashumet |
:77 |
||
|
Long Pond |
:87 |
||
Mashpee, Spectacle, Triangle and Lawrence Ponds in Sandwich, with elevations of sixty to eighty feet. Cotuit, Ashubael, and Round Ponds in Barnstable and Mill Pond in Brew- ster have about thirty feet. Mill and FoUin's Ponds, tributaries of Bass River in Yarmouth, Long and Swan Ponds in Yarmouth, Swan Pond in Dennis, Long Pond in Brewster, and Hinckley's Pond in Harwich have elevations of from ten to twenty feet. Few of the larger ponds of the easterly towns of the Cape have an elevation of more than fifteen feet above the
sea.
Another curious point which always seems
222 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
quite incredible is this: similar as these ponds may be to the casual observer, both in size and conformation, every single one is distinctive in its algse and its microscopic flora. Even in ponds separated by a ridge of barely half a mile, — as in Ashumet and John's Ponds, — the naturalist will find totally different assort- ments of animal and vegetable life. Such is the individuality that Nature so jealously main- tains, even in her geographical and topo- graphical offspring.
The largest, deepest, and most beautiful of all freshwater bodies on the Cape are those of Mashpee and Wakeby — two incomparable lakes, only partially separated from each other by Canaumet Neck, a piece of land owned by President Lowell, of Harvard, and undoubt- edly the most superb piece of woodland in the whole county. Here one finds beech trees with a spread of fifty feet, their smooth barks gleam- ing against the white of the sand and the blue of the water. Here one finds a solemn cathe- dral grove through which the sunlight filters as through majestic stained-glass windows.
BY A CAPE COD POND 223
Here are stretches of beach as white as snow- drift, pretty bluffs and glossy thickets. Here it was that Grover Cleveland and Joseph Jef- ferson used to love to come and fish, and many a humbler angler since then has enjoyed as keen a delight upon these tranquil waters. There are three little round islands in Mashpee Lake, wooded to the rim, and rising in a soft conical peak in the center, like decorative features in an imaginary landscape, quite as lovely as Ellen's Isle that Sir Walter Scott has made immortal. They are the goals for ad- venturous swimmers, picnic spots for fisher- men, and a final touch of enchantment for spectators from the shore.
For many years these perfect lakes — mak- ing a region as entrancing as that of the Eng- lish Lake District — were almost unknown to any except the canny fishermen, who made no haste to share them with the world. But they have been discovered now, and the woodland about the border — bearing trees quite dif- ferent in their sheltered loftiness from the wind-twisted ones near the ocean — has been
224 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
quietly bought up. One by one mansions are springing up near the shore, concealed behind a leafy screen, and the green bow of a canoe pulled up under the shade of a beech tree and the thread of smoke from some hidden camp betray that the summer visitor is here.
Go where you will on Cape Cod, you will never be far from a wood-enshrouded or a pas- ture-framed pond or lake. Often you will find a shady beach in the heart of a forest patch; and often a tangle of sweet swamp growth fringing the moor that shelves down to an old mill pond.
You may bathe or picnic here with impu- nity. You may fish if you choose, and you will find the people who live in the neighboring house and who own the rowboat generous with the loaning of it. Pickerel is preeminently the fish of the fresh water of the Cape, but you will find quick-mouthed bass, perch, and, in the streams, trout. But do not build a fire as you may have built it in other woods. The Cape has been ravaged too many times by flames, and the miles and miles of gaunt spec-
BY A CAPE COD POND 225
tral trees, blackened and tortured out of all shape, are mute warnings against the careless match or the flying spark and are explana- tions of the rigor of the forest regulations.
It all lies before you for your pleasure — the fairy pools and shimmering lakes clasped in the tender embrace of greenery. They yield to the easy demands of the cranberry dike and submit with meekness to the ploughing of the fisherman's keel. But they are only shallow things at best. Even if they were near enough to be accessible to the cities of eastern Massa- chusetts, the great pumps of the Boston Water Works and of Chestnut Hill could empty them in a few days. Not one of them has a contrib- uting watershed or is fed by a stream of suf- ficient size to furnish the needs of a metro- pohtan population. But they will always be part of the welcome that Cape Cod extends to her children and to her children's friends — forever a delight to those who know them well and to those who chance upon them for the first time.
Chapter XVII
A FORGOTTEN CORNER OF CAPE COD^
A RAGGED pile of sticks by the side of the meandering road — long sticks and short sticks; green sticks and rotten sticks; every villager who passes flings a branch or a stone upon the *' Indian's Tavern." The dark-eyed children, shy and foreign-looking, cannot tell you why, even when they are rac- ing by at top speed, they are invariably and irresistibly impelled to pick up a twig, and, as they run, to toss it on the uncouth heap. And neither can their mothers tell you, or their
1 This sketch of Mashpee was written by my mother, Rosa- mond Pentecost Rothery, and appeared in the Bourne In- dependent in 1903.
A FORGOTTEN CORNER 227
fathers, or their grandparents. And yet here, in this forgotten corner of Cape Cod, is thus automatically preserved the last fragment of an ancient Indian rite. This pile of rubbish at the crossroads is the lineal descendant of the Sacrificial Rock, about which the American Indians have cherished an immemorial tradi- tion — too vague to have been translated, but deeply enough rooted to have been for centu- ries unbrokenly maintained.
This curious custom, this mystical "In- dian's Tavern," is only one of the strange sights that await you if you will penetrate into the quaint town of Mashpee. It is a queer, quiet little place, inland, — as much as any- thing can be inland on Cape Cod, — which, as early as 1650, was set aside as an Indian reservation. Now, though no longer a reserva- tion, and with its ten thousand acres slipping gradually into the possession of the white man, it still retains a surprising flavor of distinction.
Although automobilists constantly whizz by on the excellent State road, few know enough to turn aside a little, and detect, straggling
228 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
through the wood, the primitive hamlet, with I its small gray houses, — placed with a fine dis- regard to the building line or the future, — its crystal lake, — loveliest on Cape Cod, — and its dark-skinned, handsome folk, with the in- scrutable poise which characterizes the In- dian, and the lustrous eyes which betray an African tincture. There are plenty of good Cape-Codders who have never been to Mash- pee, although it is only half a dozen miles from Sandwich, not much farther from Falmouth and Bourne, a gentle ride from Cotuit and Osterville, and near to Plymouth in both age and story. People from Buzzard's Bay pos- sibly do not dare to thread the bewildering roads which crisscross the scorched woods encircling the charmed section. But the fisher- men know it well, for here in the spring the jeweled trout flits through the twisting river and the flashing bass and polished pickerel leap to — and from — the hook of the lucky man who hires a fishing privilege. Grover Cleve- land knew Mashpee Lake joining Wakeby, around a peerless promontory, and so did
A FORGOTTEN CORNER 229
Joseph Jefferson, and a score of other eminent men, of whom pleasant memories still linger among the friendly natives. And the gunners from far and near know it, too, and their shacks are hidden around the white shore of the water that mirrors the passing moods of sky and cloud and beckons to the screaming wild duck in the clear fall weather.
Even if you have heard nothing of the un- usual history of the place, you cannot help but be struck by the soft-voiced people, none of them rich and few of them poor, and the air of Sabbath calm that pervades all times and seasons. If you alight from your machine or carriage and go afoot, — as visitors to Mash- pee ought to go, — you will be tempted to linger in the little store, where one can ex- change eggs for cheese, potatoes for meal, and turnips for thread. And where, if one has not eggs or potatoes or turnips, one may get credit. You will glance at the cheerful graveyard bask- ing in the sun at the juncture of the cross- roads, and see, among the half-obliterated mounds, — all lying ranged from north to
230 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
south, — a grave which measures ten feet long from headstone to footstone: a mute reminder that the ancient one was a mighty man in his generation. There are no eight-footers above ground nowadays. If you have time you will let yourself be lured down some of the bypaths, overgrown with trailing arbutus in the spring, and heavy with wild roses and laurel in the early summer; paths that lead to cabins where solitary Indians live, and others that lead to the low wooded hills, whence cometh their help — and their firewood. Perhaps after you have strolled about the village for a while, or come back again, — once or twice or many times, — you may grow curious as to its ori- gin and unique history, as instinct with pathos and inspiration as that of many a more pre- tentious spot. And then, perhaps, you will try and find out for yourself some of the facts I have here set down.
It was in 1650 that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, uncomfortably conscious of its obligations to the native inhabitants of Mash- pee, who were being steadily crowded out of
A FORGOTTEN CORNER 231
their happy hunting grounds, set aside then geveral thousand acres of land for their use, on condition that "no Indian should sell or white man buy of an Indian, any land with- out a license first obtained from the General Court." At this time the Indians were also made wards of the State. While the material advantages of this arrangement were so great that Mashpee became a popular asylum for red men from all over New England, — for the hills were wooded and full of game, the many ponds, lakes, and rivers yielded an abundance of fish, and the natural formation of the land made it, as the old record explains, "a most favorable place for gaining a liveli- hood without labor," — yet there was a fly in the ointment.
The sense of guardianship galled a people unconquerably independent. Defiance of it, acquiescence to it, complaints, revolts, fol- lowed each other in perpetual sequence. The Mashpee tribe gained the management of its own affairs in 1693; held it for three years; lost it; were incorporated into a district in 1763,
232 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
and the act was repealed in 1788. When, in 1870, the plantation was finally incorporated into a town, there was not a single pure-blooded Indian left to enjoy the privilege. Of course, all these upheavals were accompanied by bit- ter controversy. The records reveal quite un- mistakably how this little settlement of In- dians, with their imperviousness to the white man's point of view, was a thorn in the side of the Pilgrim Fathers. Just how the Indians regarded the pale-faced intruders who wrested the whole tract of countryside away from them and doled out some thousand acres, need only be surmised. Mashpee represented an Indian problem in miniature, and Indian problems are too well and too sadly known to need further exposition. However, the little settlement did, at last, attain its existence as a town, and in due time sent its representative to the Legislature. But the many marks, some of them naively touching, of the plantation era, still remain. You may notice, for instance, how frequently persons in Mashpee still own precisely sixty acres of land — exactly the number that was
A FORGOTTEN CORNER 233
originally apportioned off to each male adult. Many more now, alas, now that they are at liberty to sell and buy, are dispossessed of their ancestral heritage.
But if the civil history of Mashpee has been somewhat marred by discontent, the ecclesias- tical history is both cheerful and uncommon. From 1630, when good Mr. Jonathan Bourne turned his attention toward evangelizing the Indians, there has been an unbroken line of preachers, whose salary is provided for in true story-book fashion. It happened in this way. In 1790 Dr. Samuel Williams, an English gen- tleman of piety and learning, died, leaving his estates in England to Harvard College, on "condition that sixty pounds per annum be allowed to two persons, well qualified as to prudence and piety, to be nominated by trus- tees of the estate, to preach as itinerants, in the English plantations, for the good of what pagans and blacks may be neglected there." The will goes on at some length to state that "if the College at Cambridge be hindered in its encouragement of this blessed work of con-
234 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
verting the poor Indians, then the estates, to- gether with all the accruing profits and ad- vantages, shall go to the City of Boston."
The "College in Cambridge" seems not to have been "hindered in its encouragement" or despoiled of its trust. And to this day it continues to send to Mashpee, four times a year, that part of the money due it, which sum is directly applied to the minister's salary. There appears never to have been any ques- tion but that the fund left for the conversion of the neglected pagans of New England be- longs to this parish! Thus it was that in 1790 Mashpee had the only organized Indian church in the Commonwealth, and has, for over a hundred years, boasted an endowed church. However, it was the custom of their white guardians to appoint the missionary for the church without consulting the wishes of the members. Sometimes he was to their liking and the edification of their souls, and then all went well. Sometimes he was not; and the church made history fast and furious. It was the determination of the Mashpee tribe to
A FORGOTTEN CORNER 235
be masters of their own spiritual affairs that finally resulted in their freedom from all State control.
Although it is impossible to catch the at- mosphere of a bygone age from dry data, nevertheless, the mere names of some of the preachers who fervently exhorted "the neg- lected pagans" of this settlement, reconstruct for us a glimpse of a picturesque procession. First there was Mr. Bourne, who, assisted by the famous John Eliot, organized the church. Then came Simon Popmonet, an Indian, who died after a ministry of forty years, leaving, as the old record puts it, " several children, who all lived to a great age, and some of them are very respectable for Indians." Then came the Reverend Joseph Bourne, grandson of the first. And then Solomon Briant, an Indian, preaching always in the Indian tongue. Do not these names, with the brief note we have of them, impart, even to this day, an aroma of the past?
Unusual as Mashpee has been in its civil and ecclesiastical development, it boasts still
236 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
another difference. The racial mixture here has produced striking results. First of all, of course, there were the Indians, living in wig- wams made of sedge, hunting, fishing, and weaving their own clothes. They have left a special stamp upon the lineaments and car- riage of their descendants: a brave erectness; a dignity and a reserve. Although the last member of the community who could speak the Indian tongue died twenty-five years ago, and the last pure-blooded one in 1793, yet one can easily recognize in the deeply furrowed faces, the aquiline noses, and the straight black hair, remnants of that poignant strain. In 1771 there were fourteen negroes in the town of Mashpee and forty or fifty Indians. Twenty-one years later there was not a sin- gle pure-blooded Indian left. It was this infusion that brought the musical mellow voices, — it is a revelation to hear a Mash- pee congregation sing, — the laughter and the dancing feet. However, the alloying of the Indian type is not wholly due to negro affiliations. Some of the Hessians who were
A FORGOTTEN CORNER 237
captured in the Revolution were sent to Mashpee to oversee the salt-works. These intermarried, leaving as their most permanent contribution a few names such as Hirsch, De Grasse, etc. Of later years the Portuguese have drifted in, turning the sandy fields into quite miraculous strawberry farms, and bringing, too, certain quaint and vivid touches of color and custom from their home at Cape Verde. But in spite of its heterogeneous ancestry, the Mashpee folk still prefer to call themselves Indians. The names of Attiquin, Amos, Coombs, Pocknet, and half a dozen others which frequently recur on the old records, are still jealously preserved and handed down with pride. And tradition, like that of ** Indian's Tavern," is kept green by faithful observance. But even if one should tell the complete his- tory of Mashpee, only one half would then be told. For the other half is intangible, made up of balmy air, brooding sky, and blessed sense of peace. And why should there not be peace, when every man is as one with nothing to make him afraid? The summer is long and the win-
238 CAPE COD NEW AND OLD
ter is kind. The minister's salary is oflE their minds, and the soil is perfect for the scratch- ing hen. The hills hide many rich cranberry bogs, where men, women, and children may earn full wages in the fine fall weather, if they are so inclined.
No one hurries: indeed, how could one? There is no bustling square; no crowded mar- ket-place; no rival church with clanging bells to split the wide tranquillity; no flying to catch the train, for there is no train, soiling the blue with a smoky pennant. It was only a season or two ago that we saw a barefooted girl, with blowing hair and smiling face, drive an ancient horse, attached to a still more ancient wagon, into a wide stream, and then proceed to dip a bucket, fastened to a pole, into the water, and draw it up and turn it into a barrel on the wagon. This she did gayly and gracefully, and no doubt frequently, for they had no well, and always procured their water this way — summer and winter. Yet there were men in the family, and plenty of water to be had for the digging.
A FORGOTTEN CORNER 239
If any one chooses to go to Mashpee and see if these things are true, he is charged to throw away ambition, and be still, and learn what Sunday calm means all the days of the week.
But let him go soon, for horrid rumors are abroad. Already electric lights have sparkled forth to shame the fireflies, and the white man has been seen there with clanking chains and strange, uncanny instruments, that affright the brown babies and the careless birds. Wooded stakes have sprung up along the guilt- less forest roads, and lo ! who knows when their mantle of peace may be torn to shreds, and their rest joined to our restlessness by black iron rails, and the twisted cable of progress and electricity.'^
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