Title: Cape Cod
Author: Thoreau, Henry David
Language: English
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[Illustration]

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Cape Cod

by Henry David Thoreau

Author of “A Week on the Concord,” “Walden,”
“Excursions,” “The Maine Woods,” etc.

ILLUSTRATED BY
CLIFTON JOHNSON

[Illustration]

NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1908
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

Contents

 INTRODUCTION
 I. The Shipwreck
 II. Stage-coach Views
 III. The Plains Of Nauset
 IV. The Beach
 V. The Wellfleet Oysterman
 VI. The Beach Again
 VII. Across the Cape
 VIII. The Highland Light
 IX. The Sea and the Desert
 X. Provincetown

ILLUSTRATIONS

 The Clam-Digger (Photogravure)
 Cohasset—The little cove at Whitehead promontory
 An old windmill
 A street in Sandwich
 The old Higgins tavern at Orleans
 A Nauset lane
 Nauset Bay
 A scarecrow
 Millennium Grove camp-meeting grounds
 A Cape Cod citizen
 Wreckage under the sand-bluff
 Herring River at Wellfleet
 A characteristic gable with many windows
 A Wellfleet oysterman
 Wellfleet
 Hunting for a leak
 Truro—Starting on a voyage
 Unloading the day’s catch
 A Truro footpath
 Truro meeting-house on the hill
 A herd of cows
 Pond Village
 Dragging a dory up on the beach
 An old wrecker at home
 The Highland Light
 Towing along shore
 A cranberry meadow
 The sand dunes drifting in upon the trees
 The white breakers on the Atlantic side
 In Provincetown harbor
 Provincetown—A bit of the village from the wharf
 The day of rest
 A Provincetown fishing-vessel



INTRODUCTION


Of the group of notables who in the middle of the last century made the
little Massachusetts town of Concord their home, and who thus conferred
on it a literary fame both unique and enduring, Thoreau is the only one
who was Concord born. His neighbor, Emerson, had sought the place in
mature life for rural retirement, and after it became his chosen
retreat, Hawthorne, Alcott, and the others followed; but Thoreau, the
most peculiar genius of them all, was native to the soil.

In 1837, at the age of twenty, he graduated from Harvard, and for three
years taught school in his home town. Then he applied himself to the
business in which his father was engaged,—the manufacture of lead
pencils. He believed he could make a better pencil than any at that
time in use; but when he succeeded and his friends congratulated him
that he had now opened his way to fortune he responded that he would
never make another pencil. “Why should I?” said he. “I would not do
again what I have done once.”

So he turned his attention to miscellaneous studies and to nature. When
he wanted money he earned it by some piece of manual labor agreeable to
him, as building a boat or a fence, planting, or surveying. He never
married, very rarely went to church, did not vote, refused to pay a tax
to the State, ate no flesh, drank no wine, used no tobacco; and for a
long time he was simply an oddity in the estimation of his
fellow-townsmen. But when they at length came to understand him better
they recognized his genuineness and sincerity and his originality, and
they revered and admired him. He was entirely independent of the
conventional, and his courage to live as he saw fit and to defend and
uphold what he believed to be right never failed him. Indeed, so
devoted was he to principle and his own ideals that he seems never to
have allowed himself one indifferent or careless moment.

He was a man of the strongest local attachments, and seldom wandered
beyond his native township. A trip abroad did not tempt him in the
least. It would mean in his estimation just so much time lost for
enjoying his own village, and he says: “At best, Paris could only be a
school in which to learn to live here—a stepping-stone to Concord.”

He had a very pronounced antipathy to the average prosperous city man,
and in speaking of persons of this class remarks: “They do a little
business commonly each day in order to pay their board, and then they
congregate in sitting-rooms, and feebly fabulate and paddle in the
social slush, and go unashamed to their beds and take on a new layer of
sloth.”

The men he loved were those of a more primitive sort, unartificial,
with the daring to cut loose from the trammels of fashion and inherited
custom. Especially he liked the companionship of men who were in close
contact with nature. A half-wild Irishman, or some rude farmer, or
fisherman, or hunter, gave him real delight; and for this reason, Cape
Cod appealed to him strongly. It was then a very isolated portion of
the State, and its dwellers were just the sort of independent,
self-reliant folk to attract him. In his account of his rambles there
the human element has large place, and he lingers fondly over the
characteristics of his chance acquaintances and notes every salient
remark. They, in turn, no doubt found him interesting, too, though the
purposes of the wanderer were a good deal of a mystery to them, and
they were inclined to think he was a pedler.

His book was the result of several journeys, but the only trip of which
he tells us in detail was in October. That month, therefore, was the
one I chose for my own visit to the Cape when I went to secure the
series of pictures that illustrate this edition; for I wished to see
the region as nearly as possible in the same guise that Thoreau
describes it. From Sandwich, where his record of Cape experiences
begins, and where the inner shore first takes a decided turn eastward,
I followed much the same route he had travelled in 1849, clear to
Provincetown, at the very tip of the hook.

Thoreau has a good deal to say of the sandy roads and toilsome walking.
In that respect there has been marked improvement, for latterly a large
proportion of the main highway has been macadamed. Yet one still
encounters plenty of the old yielding sand roads that make travel a
weariness either on foot or in teams. Another feature to which the
nature lover again and again refers is the windmills. The last of these
ceased grinding a score of years ago, though several continue to stand
in fairly perfect condition. There have been changes on the Cape, but
the landscape in the main presents the same appearance it did in
Thoreau’s time. As to the people, if you see them in an unconventional
way, tramping as Thoreau did, their individuality retains much of the
interest that he discovered.

Our author’s report of his trip has a piquancy that is quite alluring.
This might be said of all his books, for no matter what he wrote about,
his comments were certain to be unusual; and it is as much or more for
the revelations of his own tastes, thoughts, and idiosyncrasies that we
read him as for the subject matter with which he deals. He had
published only two books when he died in 1862 at the age of forty-four,
and his “Cape Cod” did not appear until 1865. Nor did the public at
first show any marked interest in his books. During his life,
therefore, the circle of his admirers was very small, but his fame has
steadily increased since, and the stimulus of his lively descriptions
and observations seems certain of enduring appreciation.

Clifton Johnson.

Hadley, Mass.



I
THE SHIPWRECK


Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, which, we
are told, covers more than two-thirds of the globe, but of which a man
who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace, more than of
another world, I made a visit to Cape Cod in October, 1849, another the
succeeding June, and another to Truro in July, 1855; the first and last
time with a single companion, the second time alone. I have spent, in
all, about three weeks on the Cape; walked from Eastham to
Province-town twice on the Atlantic side, and once on the Bay side
also, excepting four or five miles, and crossed the Cape half a dozen
times on my way; but having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but
little salted. My readers must expect only so much saltness as the land
breeze acquires from blowing over an arm of the sea, or is tasted on
the windows and the bark of trees twenty miles inland, after September
gales. I have been accustomed to make excursions to the ponds within
ten miles of Concord, but latterly I have extended my excursions to the
seashore.

I did not see why I might not make a book on Cape Cod, as well as my
neighbor on “Human Culture.” It is but another name for the same thing,
and hardly a sandier phase of it. As for my title, I suppose that the
word Cape is from the French _cap_; which is from the Latin _caput_, a
head; which is, perhaps, from the verb _capere_, to take,—that being
the part by which we take hold of a thing:—Take Time by the forelock.
It is also the safest part to take a serpent by. And as for Cod, that
was derived directly from that “great store of codfish” which Captain
Bartholomew Gosnold caught there in 1602; which fish appears to have
been so called from the Saxon word _codde_, “a case in which seeds are
lodged,” either from the form of the fish, or the quantity of spawn it
contains; whence also, perhaps, _codling_ (_pomum coctile?_) and
coddle,—to cook green like peas. (V. Dic.)

Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts: the shoulder is
at Buzzard’s Bay; the elbow, or crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre; the
wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown,—behind which the
State stands on her guard, with her back to the Green Mountains, and
her feet planted on the floor of the ocean, like an athlete protecting
her Bay,—boxing with northeast storms, and, ever and anon, heaving up
her Atlantic adversary from the lap of earth,—ready to thrust forward
her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at Cape
Ann.

On studying the map, I saw that there must be an uninterrupted beach on
the east or outside of the forearm of the Cape, more than thirty miles
from the general line of the coast, which would afford a good sea view,
but that, on account of an opening in the beach, forming the entrance
to Nauset Harbor, in Orleans, I must strike it in Eastham, if I
approached it by land, and probably I could walk thence straight to
Race Point, about twenty-eight miles, and not meet with any
obstruction.

We left Concord, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, October 9th, 1849. On
reaching Boston, we found that the Provincetown steamer, which should
have got in the day before, had not yet arrived, on account of a
violent storm; and, as we noticed in the streets a handbill headed,
“Death! one hundred and forty-five lives lost at Cohasset,” we decided
to go by way of Cohasset. We found many Irish in the cars, going to
identify bodies and to sympathize with the survivors, and also to
attend the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon;—and when
we arrived at Cohasset, it appeared that nearly all the passengers were
bound for the beach, which was about a mile distant, and many other
persons were flocking in from the neighboring country. There were
several hundreds of them streaming off over Cohasset common in that
direction, some on foot and some in wagons,—and among them were some
sportsmen in their hunting-jackets, with their guns, and game-bags, and
dogs. As we passed the graveyard we saw a large hole, like a cellar,
freshly dug there, and, just before reaching the shore, by a pleasantly
winding and rocky road, we met several hay-riggings and farm-wagons
coming away toward the meeting-house, each loaded with three large,
rough deal boxes. We did not need to ask what was in them. The owners
of the wagons were made the undertakers. Many horses in carriages were
fastened to the fences near the shore, and, for a mile or more, up and
down, the beach was covered with people looking out for bodies, and
examining the fragments of the wreck. There was a small island called
Brook Island, with a hut on it, lying just off the shore. This is said
to be the rockiest shore in Massachusetts, from Nantasket to
Scituate,—hard sienitic rocks, which the waves have laid bare, but have
not been able to crumble. It has been the scene of many a shipwreck.

The brig _St. John_, from Galway, Ireland, laden with emigrants, was
wrecked on Sunday morning; it was now Tuesday morning, and the sea was
still breaking violently on the rocks. There were eighteen or twenty of
the same large boxes that I have mentioned, lying on a green hillside,
a few rods from the water, and surrounded by a crowd. The bodies which
had been recovered, twenty-seven or eight in all, had been collected
there. Some were rapidly nailing down the lids, others were carting the
boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which were yet loose, and
peeping under the cloths, for each body, with such rags as still
adhered to it, was covered loosely with a white sheet. I witnessed no
signs of grief, but there was a sober dispatch of business which was
affecting. One man was seeking to identify a particular body, and one
undertaker or carpenter was calling to another to know in what box a
certain child was put. I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the
cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a
drowned girl,—who probably had intended to go out to service in some
American family,—to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half
concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of
a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and
muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless,—merely red and white,—with
wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, dead-lights; or like the
cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand. Sometimes there
were two or more children, or a parent and child, in the same box, and
on the lid would perhaps be written with red chalk, “Bridget
such-a-one, and sister’s child.” The surrounding sward was covered with
bits of sails and clothing. I have since heard, from one who lives by
this beach, that a woman who had come over before, but had left her
infant behind for her sister to bring, came and looked into these boxes
and saw in one,—probably the same whose superscription I have
quoted,—her child in her sister’s arms, as if the sister had meant to
be found thus; and within three days after, the mother died from the
effect of that sight.

We turned from this and walked along the rocky shore. In the first cove
were strewn what seemed the fragments of a vessel, in small pieces
mixed with sand and sea-weed, and great quantities of feathers; but it
looked so old and rusty, that I at first took it to be some old wreck
which had lain there many years. I even thought of Captain Kidd, and
that the feathers were those which sea-fowl had cast there; and perhaps
there might be some tradition about it in the neighborhood. I asked a
sailor if that was the _St. John_. He said it was. I asked him where
she struck. He pointed to a rock in front of us, a mile from the shore,
called the Grampus Rock, and added:

“You can see a part of her now sticking up; it looks like a small
boat.”

I saw it. It was thought to be held by the chain-cables and the
anchors. I asked if the bodies which I saw were all that were drowned.

“Not a quarter of them,” said he.

“Where are the rest?”

“Most of them right underneath that piece you see.”

It appeared to us that there was enough rubbish to make the wreck of a
large vessel in this cove alone, and that it would take many days to
cart it off. It was several feet deep, and here and there was a bonnet
or a jacket on it. In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck,
there were men with carts busily collecting the sea-weed which the
storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide,
though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from
it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it.
Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable
manure. This shipwreck had not produced a visible vibration in the
fabric of society.

About a mile south we could see, rising above the rocks, the masts of
the British brig which the _St. John_ had endeavored to follow, which
had slipped her cables and, by good luck, run into the mouth of
Cohasset Harbor. A little further along the shore we saw a man’s
clothes on a rock; further, a woman’s scarf, a gown, a straw bonnet,
the brig’s caboose, and one of her masts high and dry, broken into
several pieces. In another rocky cove, several rods from the water, and
behind rocks twenty feet high, lay a part of one side of the vessel,
still hanging together. It was, perhaps, forty feet long, by fourteen
wide. I was even more surprised at the power of the waves, exhibited on
this shattered fragment, than I had been at the sight of the smaller
fragments before. The largest timbers and iron braces were broken
superfluously, and I saw that no material could withstand the power of
the waves; that iron must go to pieces in such a case, and an iron
vessel would be cracked up like an egg-shell on the rocks. Some of
these timbers, however, were so rotten that I could almost thrust my
umbrella through them. They told us that some were saved on this piece,
and also showed where the sea had heaved it into this cove, which was
now dry. When I saw where it had come in, and in what condition, I
wondered that any had been saved on it. A little further on a crowd of
men was collected around the mate of the _St. John_, who was telling
his story. He was a slim-looking youth, who spoke of the captain as the
master, and seemed a little excited. He was saying that when they
jumped into the boat, she filled, and, the vessel lurching, the weight
of the water in the boat caused the painter to break, and so they were
separated. Whereat one man came away, saying:—

“Well, I don’t see but he tells a straight story enough. You see, the
weight of the water in the boat broke the painter. A boat full of water
is very heavy,”—and so on, in a loud and impertinently earnest tone, as
if he had a bet depending on it, but had no humane interest in the
matter.

Another, a large man, stood near by upon a rock, gazing into the sea,
and chewing large quids of tobacco, as if that habit were forever
confirmed with him.

“Come,” says another to his companion, “let’s be off. We’ve seen the
whole of it. It’s no use to stay to the funeral.”

Further, we saw one standing upon a rock, who, we were told, was one
that was saved. He was a sober-looking man, dressed in a jacket and
gray pantaloons, with his hands in the pockets. I asked him a few
questions, which he answered; but he seemed unwilling to talk about it,
and soon walked away. By his side stood one of the life-boatmen, in an
oil-cloth jacket, who told us how they went to the relief of the
British brig, thinking that the boat of the _St. John_, which they
passed on the way, held all her crew,—for the waves prevented their
seeing those who were on the vessel, though they might have saved some
had they known there were any there. A little further was the flag of
the _St. John_ spread on a rock to dry, and held down by stones at the
corners. This frail, but essential and significant portion of the
vessel, which had so long been the sport of the winds, was sure to
reach the shore. There were one or two houses visible from these rocks,
in which were some of the survivors recovering from the shock which
their bodies and minds had sustained. One was not expected to live.

We kept on down the shore as far as a promontory called Whitehead, that
we might see more of the Cohasset Rocks. In a little cove, within half
a mile, there were an old man and his son collecting, with their team,
the sea-weed which that fatal storm had cast up, as serenely employed
as if there had never been a wreck in the world, though they were
within sight of the Grampus Rock, on which the _St. John_ had struck.
The old man had heard that there was a wreck, and knew most of the
particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it
happened. It was the wrecked weed that concerned him most, rock-weed,
kelp, and sea-weed, as he named them, which he carted to his barn-yard;
and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up,
but which were of no use to him. We afterwards came to the life-boat in
its harbor, waiting for another emergency,—and in the afternoon we saw
the funeral procession at a distance, at the head of which walked the
captain with the other survivors.

On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have
expected. If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely
place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the
winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was
the order of the day. If this was the law of Nature, why waste any time
in awe or pity? If the last day were come, we should not think so much
about the separation of friends or the blighted prospects of
individuals. I saw that corpses might be multiplied, as on the field of
battle, till they no longer affected us in any degree, as exceptions to
the common lot of humanity. Take all the graveyards together, they are
always the majority. It is the individual and private that demands our
sympathy. A man can attend but one funeral in the course of his life,
can behold but one corpse. Yet I saw that the inhabitants of the shore
would be not a little affected by this event. They would watch there
many days and nights for the sea to give up its dead, and their
imaginations and sympathies would supply the place of mourners far
away, who as yet knew not of the wreck. Many days after this, something
white was seen floating on the water by one who was sauntering on the
beach. It was approached in a boat, and found to be the body of a
woman, which had risen in an upright position, whose white cap was
blown back with the wind. I saw that the beauty of the shore itself was
wrecked for many a lonely walker there, until he could perceive, at
last, how its beauty was enhanced by wrecks like this, and it acquired
thus a rarer and sublimer beauty still.


[Illustration: Cohasset, The little cove at Whitehead promontory]

Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but the
worms or fishes. Their owners were coming to the New World, as Columbus
and the Pilgrims did,—they were within a mile of its shores; but,
before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever
Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there
is far more universal and convincing evidence—though it has not yet
been discovered by science—than Columbus had of this; not merely
mariners’ tales and some paltry drift-wood and sea-weed, but a
continual drift and instinct to all our shores. I saw their empty hulks
that came to land; but they themselves, meanwhile, were cast upon some
shore yet further west, toward which we are all tending, and which we
shall reach at last, it may be through storm and darkness, as they did.
No doubt, we have reason to thank God that they have not been
“shipwrecked into life again.” The mariner who makes the safest port in
Heaven, perchance, seems to his friends on earth to be shipwrecked, for
they deem Boston Harbor the better place; though perhaps invisible to
them, a skillful pilot comes to meet him, and the fairest and balmiest
gales blow off that coast, his good ship makes the land in halcyon
days, and he kisses the shore in rapture there, while his old hulk
tosses in the surf here. It is hard to part with one’s body, but, no
doubt, it is easy enough to do without it when once it is gone. All
their plans and hopes burst like a bubble! Infants by the score dashed
on the rocks by the enraged Atlantic Ocean! No, no! If the _St. John_
did not make her port here, she has been telegraphed there. The
strongest wind cannot stagger a Spirit; it is a Spirit’s breath. A just
man’s purpose cannot be split on any Grampus or material rock, but
itself will split rocks till it succeeds.

The verses addressed to Columbus, dying, may, with slight alterations,
be applied to the passengers of the _St. John:_—

“Soon with them will all be over,
Soon the voyage will be begun
That shall bear them to discover,
Far away, a land unknown.

“Land that each, alone, must visit,
But no tidings bring to men;
For no sailor, once departed,
Ever hath returned again.

“No carved wood, no broken branches,
Ever drift from that far wild;
He who on that ocean launches
Meets no corse of angel child.

“Undismayed, my noble sailors,
Spread, then spread your canvas out;
Spirits! on a sea of ether
Soon shall ye serenely float!

“Where the deep no plummet soundeth,
Fear no hidden breakers there,
And the fanning wing of angels
Shall your bark right onward bear.

“Quit, now, full of heart and comfort,
These rude shores, they are of earth;
Where the rosy clouds are parting,
There the blessed isles loom forth.”


One summer day, since this, I came this way, on foot, along the shore
from Boston. It was so warm that some horses had climbed to the very
top of the ramparts of the old fort at Hull, where there was hardly
room to turn round, for the sake of the breeze. The _Datura
stramonium_, or thorn-apple, was in full bloom along the beach; and, at
sight of this cosmopolite,—this Captain Cook among plants,—carried in
ballast all over the world, I felt as if I were on the highway of
nations. Say, rather, this Viking, king of the Bays, for it is not an
innocent plant; it suggests not merely commerce, but its attend-ant
vices, as if its fibres were the stuff of which pirates spin their
yarns. I heard the voices of men shouting aboard a vessel, half a mile
from the shore, which sounded as if they were in a barn in the country,
they being between the sails. It was a purely rural sound. As I looked
over the water, I saw the isles rapidly wasting away, the sea nibbling
voraciously at the continent, the springing arch of a hill suddenly
interrupted, as at Point Alderton,—what botanists might call
premorse,—showing, by its curve against the sky, how much space it must
have occupied, where now was water only, On the other hand, these
wrecks of isles were being fancifully arranged into new shores, as at
Hog Island, inside of Hull, where everything seemed to be gently
lapsing, into futurity. This isle had got the very form of a
ripple,—and I thought that the inhabitants should bear a ripple for
device on their shields, a wave passing over them, with the _datura_,
which is said to produce mental alienation of long duration without
affecting the bodily health,[1] springing from its edge. The most
interesting thing which I heard of, in this township of Hull, was an
unfailing spring, whose locality was pointed out to me, on the side of
a distant hill, as I was panting along the shore, though I did not
visit it. Perhaps, if I should go through Rome, it would be some spring
on the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest. It is true, I was
somewhat interested in the well at the old French fort, which was said
to be ninety feet deep, with a cannon at the bottom of it. On Nantasket
beach I counted a dozen chaises from the public-house. From time to
time the riders turned their horses toward the sea, standing in the
water for the coolness,—and I saw the value of beaches to cities for
the sea breeze and the bath.

At Jerusalem village the inhabitants were collecting in haste, before a
thunder-shower now approaching, the Irish moss which they had spread to
dry. The shower passed on one side, and gave me a few drops only, which
did not cool the air. I merely felt a puff upon my cheek, though,
within sight, a vessel was capsized in the bay, and several others
dragged their anchors, and were near going ashore. The sea-bathing at
Cohasset Rocks was perfect. The water was purer and more transparent
than any I had ever seen. There was not a particle of mud or slime
about it. The bottom being sandy, I could see the sea-perch swimming
about. The smooth and fantastically worn rocks, and the perfectly clean
and tress-like rock-weeds falling over you, and attached so firmly to
the rocks that you could pull yourself up by them, greatly enhanced the
luxury of the bath. The stripe of barnacles just above the weeds
reminded me of some vegetable growth,—the buds, and petals, and
seed-vessels of flowers. They lay along the seams of the rock like
buttons on a waistcoat. It was one of the hottest days in the year, yet
I found the water so icy cold that I could swim but a stroke or two,
and thought that, in case of shipwreck, there would be more danger of
being chilled to death than simply drowned. One immersion was enough to
make you forget the dog-days utterly. Though you were sweltering
before, it will take you half an hour now to remember that it was ever
warm. There were the tawny rocks, like lions couchant, defying the
ocean, whose waves incessantly dashed against and scoured them with
vast quantities of gravel. The water held in their little hollows, on
the receding of the tide, was so crystalline that I could not believe
it salt, but wished to drink it; and higher up were basins of fresh
water left by the rain,—all which, being also of different depths and
temperature, were convenient for different kinds of baths. Also, the
larger hollows in the smoothed rocks formed the most convenient of
seats and dressing-rooms. In these respects it was the most perfect
seashore that I had seen.

I saw in Cohasset, separated from the sea only by a narrow beach, a
handsome but shallow lake of some four hundred acres, which, I was
told, the sea had tossed over the beach in a great storm in the spring,
and, after the alewives had passed into it, it had stopped up its
outlet, and now the alewives were dying: by thousands, and the
inhabitants were apprehending a pestilence as the water evaporated. It
had live rocky islets in it.

This Rock shore is called Pleasant Cove, on some maps; on the map of
Cohasset, that name appears to be confined to the particular cove where
I saw the wreck of the St. J aim. The ocean did not look, now, as if
any were ever shipwrecked in it; it was not grand and sub-lime, but
beautiful as a lake. Not a vestige of a wreck was visible, nor could I
believe that the bones of many a shipwrecked man were buried in that
pure sand. But to go on with our first excursion.

 [1] The Jamestown weed (or thorn-apple). “This, being an early plant,
 was gathered very young for a boiled salad, by some of the soldiers
 sent thither [_i.e._ to Virginia] to quell the rebellion of Bacon; and
 some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very
 pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several
 days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart
 straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up
 in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows at them; a fourth
 would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces,
 with a countenance more antic than any in a Dutch droll. In this
 frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their
 folly, destroy themselves,—though it was observed that all their
 actions were full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not
 very cleanly. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after
 eleven days returned to themselves again, not remembering anything
 that had passed.”—Beverly’s _History of Virginia_, p. 120.
 



II
STAGE COACH VIEWS


After spending the night in Bridgewater, and picking up a few
arrow-heads there in the morning, we took the cars for Sandwich, where
we arrived before noon. This was the terminus of the “Cape Cod
Railroad,” though it is but the beginning of the Cape. As it rained
hard, with driving mists, and there was no sign of its holding up, we
here took that almost obsolete conveyance, the stage, for “as far as it
went that day,” as we told the driver. We had for-gotten how far a
stage could go in a day, but we were told that the Cape roads were very
“heavy,” though they added that, being of sand, the rain would improve
them. This coach was an exceedingly narrow one, but as there was a
slight spherical excess over two on a seat, the driver waited till nine
passengers had got in, without taking the measure of any of them, and
then shut the door after two or three ineffectual slams, as if the
fault were all in the hinges or the latch,—while we timed our
inspirations and expirations so as to assist him.

We were now fairly on the Cape, which extends from Sandwich eastward
thirty-five miles, and thence north and northwest thirty more, in all
sixty-five, and has an average breadth of about five miles. In the
interior it rises to the height of two hundred, and sometimes perhaps
three hundred feet above the level of the sea. According to Hitchcock,
the geologist of the State, it is composed almost entirely of sand,
even to the depth of three hundred feet in some places, though there is
probably a concealed core of rock a little beneath the surface, and it
is of diluvian origin, excepting a small portion at the extremity and
elsewhere along the shores, which is alluvial. For the first half of
the Cape large blocks of stone are found, here and there, mixed with
the sand, but for the last thirty miles boulders, or even gravel, are
rarely met with. Hitchcock conjectures that the ocean has, in course of
time, eaten out Boston, Harbor and other bays in the mainland, and that
the minute fragments have been deposited by the currents at a distance
from the shore, and formed this sand-bank. Above the sand, if the
surface is subjected to agricultural tests, there is found to be a thin
layer of soil gradually diminishing from Barnstable to Truro, where it
ceases; but there are many holes and rents in this weather-beaten
garment not likely to be stitched in time, which reveal the naked flesh
of the Cape, and its extremity is completely bare.

I at once got out my book, the eighth volume of the Collections of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, printed in 1802, which contains some
short notices of the Cape towns, and began to read up to where I was,
for in the cars I could not read as fast as I travelled. To those who
came from the side of Plymouth, it said: “After riding through a body
of woods, twelve miles in extent, interspersed with but few houses, the
settlement of Sandwich appears, with a more agreeable effect, to the
eye of the traveller.” Another writer speaks of this as a _beautiful_
village. But I think that our villages will bear to be contrasted only
with one another, not with Nature. I have no great respect for the
writer’s taste, who talks easily about beautiful villages, embellished,
perchance, with a “fulling-mill,” “a handsome academy,” or
meeting-house, and “a number of shops for the different mechanic arts”;
where the green and white houses of the gentry, drawn up in rows, front
on a street of which it would be difficult to tell whether it is most
like a desert or a long stable-yard. Such spots can be beautiful only
to the weary traveller, or the returning native,—or, perchance, the
repentant misanthrope; not to him who, with unprejudiced senses, has
just come out of the woods, and approaches one of them, by a bare road,
through a succession of straggling homesteads where he cannot tell
which is the alms-house. However, as for Sandwich, I cannot speak
particularly. Ours was but half a Sandwich at most, and that must have
fallen on the buttered side some time. I only saw that it was a closely
built town for a small one, with glass-works to improve its sand, and
narrow streets in which we turned round and round till we could not
tell which way we were going, and the rain came in, first on this side,
and then on that, and I saw that they in the houses were more
comfortable than we in the coach. My book also said of this town, “The
inhabitants, in general, are substantial livers.”—that is. I suppose,
they do not live like philosophers: but, as the stage did not stop long
enough for us to dine, we had no opportunity to test the truth of this
statement. It may have referred, however, to the quantity “of oil they
would yield.” It further said, “The inhabitants of Sandwich generally
manifest a fond and steady adherence to the manners, employments, and
modes of living which characterized their fathers”; which made me think
that they were, after all, very much like all the rest of the
world;—and it added that this was “a resemblance, which, at this day,
will constitute no impeachment of either their virtue or taste”: which
remark proves to me that the writer was one with the rest of them. No
people ever lived by cursing their fathers, however great a curse their
fathers might have been to them. But it must be confessed that ours was
old authority, and probably they have changed all that now.


[Illustration: An old windmill]

Our route was along the Bay side, through Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis,
and Brewster, to Orleans, with a range of low hills on our right,
running down the Cape. The weather was not favorable for wayside views,
but we made the most of such glimpses of land and water as we could get
through the rain. The country was, for the most part, bare, or with
only a little scrubby wood left on the hills. We noticed in
Yarmouth—and, if I do not mistake, in Dennis—large tracts where
pitch-pines were planted four or five years before. They were in rows,
as they appeared when we were abreast of them, and, excepting that
there were extensive vacant spaces, seemed to be doing remarkably well.
This, we were told, was the only use to which such tracts could be
profitably put. Every higher eminence had a pole set up on it, with an
old storm-coat or sail tied to it, for a signal, that those on the
south side of the Cape, for instance, might know when the Boston
packets had arrived on the north. It appeared as if this use must
absorb the greater part of the old clothes of the Cape, leaving but few
rags for the pedlers. The wind-mills on the hills,—large
weather-stained octagonal structures,—and the salt-works scattered all
along the shore, with their long rows of vats resting on piles driven
into the marsh, their low, turtle-like roofs, and their slighter
wind-mills, were novel and interesting objects to an inlander. The sand
by the road-side was partially covered with bunches of a moss-like
plant, _Hudsonia tomentosa_, which a woman in the stage told us was
called “poverty-grass,” because it grew where nothing else would.

I was struck by the pleasant equality which reigned among the stage
company, and their broad and invulnerable good-humor. They were what is
called free and easy, and met one another to advantage, as men who had
at length learned how to live. They appeared to know each other when
they were strangers, they were so simple and downright. They were well
met, in an unusual sense, that is, they met as well as they could meet,
and did not seem to be troubled with any impediment. They were not
afraid nor ashamed of one another, but were contented to make just such
a company as the ingredients allowed. It was evident that the same
foolish respect was not here claimed for mere wealth and station that
is in many parts of New England; yet some of them were the “first
people,” as they are called, of the various towns through which we
passed. Retired sea-captains, in easy circumstances, who talked of
farming as sea-captains are wont; an erect, respectable, and
trustworthy-looking man, in his wrapper, some of the salt of the earth,
who had formerly been the salt of the sea; or a more courtly gentleman,
who, per-chance, had been a representative to the General Court in his
day; or a broad, red-faced Cape Cod man, who had seen too many storms
to be easily irritated; or a fisherman’s wife, who had been waiting a
week for a coaster to leave Boston, and had at length come by the cars.

A strict regard for truth obliges us to say that the few women whom we
saw that day looked exceedingly pinched up. They had prominent chins
and noses, having lost all their teeth, and a sharp _W_ would represent
their profile. They were not so well preserved as their husbands; or
perchance they were well preserved as dried specimens. (Their husbands,
however, were pickled.) But we respect them not the less for all that;
our own dental system is far from perfect.

Still we kept on in the rain, or, if we stopped, it was commonly at a
post-office, and we thought that writing letters, and sorting them
against our arrival, must be the principal employment of the
inhabitants of the Cape this rainy day. The post-office appeared a
singularly domestic institution here. Ever and anon the stage stopped
before some low shop or dwelling, and a wheelwright or shoemaker
appeared in his shirt sleeves and leather apron, with spectacles newly
donned, holding up Uncle Sam’s bag, as if it were a slice of home-made
cake, for the travellers, while he retailed some piece of gossip to the
driver, really as indifferent to the presence of the former as if they
were so much baggage. In one instance we understood that a woman was
the postmistress, and they said that she made the best one on the road;
but we suspected that the letters must be subjected to a very close
scrutiny there. While we were stopping for this purpose at Dennis, we
ventured to put our heads out of the windows, to see where we were
going, and saw rising before us, through the mist, singular barren
hills, all stricken with poverty-grass, looming up as if they were in
the horizon, though they were close to us, and we seemed to have got to
the end of the land on that side, notwithstanding that the horses were
still headed that way. Indeed, that part of Dennis which we saw was an
exceedingly barren and desolate country, of a character which I can
find no name for; such a surface, perhaps, as the bottom of the sea
made dry land day before yesterday. It was covered with poverty-grass,
and there was hardly a tree in sight, but here and there a little
weather-stained, one-storied house, with a red roof,—for often the roof
was painted, though the rest of the house was not,—standing bleak and
cheerless, yet with a broad foundation to the land, where the comfort
must have been all inside. Yet we read in the Gazetteer—for we carried
that too with us—that, in 1837, one hundred and fifty masters of
vessels, belonging to this town, sailed from the various ports of the
Union. There must be many more houses in the south part of the town,
else we cannot imagine where they all lodge when they are at home, if
ever they are there; but the truth is, their houses are floating ones,
and their home is on the ocean. There were almost no trees at all in
this part of Dennis, nor could I learn that they talked of setting out
any. It is true, there was a meeting-house, set round with Lombardy
poplars, in a hollow square, the rows fully as straight as the studs of
a building, and the corners as square; but, if I do not mistake, every
one of them was dead. I could not help thinking that they needed a
revival here. Our book said that, in 1795, there was erected in Dennis
“an elegant meeting-house, with a steeple.” Perhaps this was the one;
though whether it had a steeple, or had died down so far from sympathy
with the poplars, I do not remember. Another meeting-house in this town
was described as a “neat building”; but of the meeting-house in
Chatham, a neigh-boring town, for there was then but one, nothing is
said, except that it “is in good repair,”—both which remarks, I trust,
may be understood as applying to the churches spiritual as well as
material. However, “elegant meeting-houses,” from that Trinity one on
Broadway, to this at Nobscusset, in my estimation, belong to the same
category with “beautiful villages.” I was never in season to see one.
Handsome is that handsome does. What they did for shade here, in warm
weather, we did not know, though we read that “fogs are more frequent
in Chatham than in any other part of the country; and they serve in
summer, instead of trees, to shelter the houses against the heat of the
sun. To those who delight in extensive vision,”—is it to be inferred
that the inhabitants of Chatham do not?—“they are unpleasant, but they
are not found to be unhealthful.” Probably, also, the unobstructed
sea-breeze answers the purpose of a fan. The historian of Chatham says
further, that “in many families there is no difference between the
breakfast and supper; cheese, cakes, and pies being as common at the
one as at the other.” But that leaves us still uncertain whether they
were really common at either.

[Illustration: A street in Sandwich]

The road, which was quite hilly, here ran near the Bay-shore, having
the Bay on one side, and “the rough hill of Scargo,” said to be the
highest land on the Cape, on the other. Of the wide prospect of the Bay
afforded by the summit of this hill, our guide says: “The view has not
much of the beautiful in it, but it communicates a strong emotion of
the sublime.” That is the kind of communication which we love to have
made to us. We passed through the village of Suet, in Dennis, on Suet
and Quivet Necks, of which it is said, “when compared with
Nobscusset,”—we had a misty recollection of having passed through, or
near to, the latter,—“it may be denominated a pleasant village; but, in
comparison with the village of Sandwich, there is little or no beauty
in it.” However, we liked Dennis well, better than any town we had seen
on the Cape, it was so novel, and, in that stormy day, so sublimely
dreary.

Captain John Sears, of Suet, was the first per-son in this country who
obtained pure marine salt by solar evaporation alone; though it had
long been made in a similar way on the coast of France, and elsewhere.
This was in the year 1776, at which time, on account of the war, salt
was scarce and dear. The Historical Collections contain an interesting
account of his experiments, which we read when we first saw the roofs
of the salt-works. Barnstable county is the most favorable locality for
these works on our northern coast,—there is so little fresh water here
emptying into ocean. Quite recently there were about two millions of
dollars invested in this business here. But now the Cape is unable to
compete with the importers of salt and the manufacturers of it at the
West, and, accordingly, her salt-works are fast going to decay. From
making salt, they turn to fishing more than ever. The Gazetteer will
uniformly tell you, under the head of each town, how many go a-fishing,
and the value of the fish and oil taken, how much salt is made and
used, how many are engaged in the coasting trade, how many in
manufacturing palm-leaf hats, leather, boots, shoes, and tinware, and
then it has done, and leaves you to imagine the more truly domestic
manufactures which are nearly the same all the world over.

Late in the afternoon, we rode through Brewster, so named after Elder
Brewster, for fear he would be forgotten else. Who has not heard of
Elder Brewster? Who knows who he was? This appeared to be the
modern-built town of the Cape, the favorite residence of retired
sea-captains. It is said that “there are more masters and mates of
vessels which sail on foreign voyages belonging to this place than to
any other town in the country.” There were many of the modern American
houses here, such as they turn out at Cambridgeport, standing on the
sand; you could almost swear that they had been floated down Charles
River, and drifted across the Bay. I call them American, because they
are paid for by Americans, and “put up” by American carpenters; but
they are little removed from lumber; only Eastern stuff disguised with
white paint, the least interesting kind of drift-wood to me. Perhaps we
have reason to be proud of our naval architecture, and need not go to
the Greeks, or the Goths, or the Italians, for the models of our
vessels. Sea-captains do not employ a Cambridgeport carpenter to build
their floating houses, and for their houses on shore, if they must copy
any, it would be more agreeable to the imagination to see one of their
vessels turned bottom upward, in the Numidian fashion. We read that,
“at certain seasons, the reflection of the sun upon the windows of the
houses in Well-fleet and Truro (across the inner side of the elbow of
the Cape) is discernible with the naked eye, at a distance of eighteen
miles and upward, on the county road.” This we were pleased to imagine,
as we had not seen the sun for twenty-four hours.

[Illustration: The old Higgins tavern at Orleans]

The same author (the Rev. John Simpkins) said of the inhabitants, a
good while ago: “No persons appear to have a greater relish for the
social circle and domestic pleasures. They are not in the habit of
frequenting taverns, unless on public occasions. I know not of a proper
idler or tavern-haunter in the place.” This is more than can be said of
my townsmen.

At length we stopped for the night at Higgins’s tavern, in Orleans,
feeling very much as if we were on a sand-bar in the ocean, and not
knowing whether we should see land or water ahead when the mist cleared
away. We here overtook two Italian boys, who had waded thus far down
the Cape through the sand, with their organs on their backs, and were
going on to Provincetown. What a hard lot, we thought, if the
Provincetown people should shut their doors against them! Whose yard
would they go to next? Yet we concluded that they had chosen wisely to
come here, where other music than that of the surf must be rare. Thus
the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every
sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker
visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.



III
THE PLAINS OF NAUSET


The next morning, Thursday, October 11th, it rained, as hard as ever;
but we were determined to proceed on foot, nevertheless. We first made
some inquiries with regard to the practicability of walking up the
shore on the Atlantic side to Provincetown, whether we should meet with
any creeks or marshes to trouble us. Higgins said that there was no
obstruction, and that it was not much farther than by the road, but he
thought that we should find it very “heavy” walking in the sand; it was
bad enough in the road, a horse would sink in up to the fetlocks there.
But there was one man at the tavern who had walked it, and he said that
we could go very well, though it was sometimes inconvenient and even
dangerous walking under the bank, when there was a great tide, with an
easterly wind, which caused the sand to cave. For the first four or
five miles we followed the road, which here turns to the north on the
elbow, —the narrowest part of the Cape,—that we might clear an inlet
from the ocean, a part of Nauset Harbor, in Orleans, on our right. We
found the travelling good enough for walkers on the sides of the roads,
though it was “heavy” for horses in the middle. We walked with our
umbrellas behind us, since it blowed hard as well as rained, with
driving mists, as the day before, and the wind helped us over the sand
at a rapid rate. Everything indicated that we had reached a strange
shore. The road was a mere lane, winding over bare swells of bleak and
barren-looking land. The houses were few and far between, besides being
small and rusty, though they appeared to be kept in good repair, and
their dooryards, which were the unfenced Cape, were tidy; or, rather,
they looked as if the ground around them was blown clean by the wind.
Perhaps the scarcity of wood here, and the consequent absence of the
wood-pile and other wooden traps, had something to do with this
appearance. They seemed, like mariners ashore, to have sat right down
to enjoy the firmness of the land, without studying their postures or
habiliments. To them it was merely _terra firma_ and _cognita_, not yet
_fertilis_ and _jucunda_. Every landscape which is dreary enough has a
certain beauty to my eyes, and in this instance its permanent qualities
were enhanced by the weather. Everything told of the sea, even when we
did not see its waste or hear its roar. For birds there were gulls, and
for carts in the fields, boats turned bottom upward against the houses,
and sometimes the rib of a whale was woven into the fence by the
road-side. The trees were, if possible, rarer than the houses,
excepting apple-trees, of which there were a few small orchards in the
hollows. These were either narrow and high, with flat tops, having lost
their side branches, like huge plum-bushes growing in exposed
situations, or else dwarfed and branching immediately at the ground,
like quince-bushes. They suggested that, under like circumstances, all
trees would at last acquire like habits of growth. I afterward saw on
the Cape many full-grown apple-trees not higher than a man’s head; one
whole orchard, indeed, where all the fruit could have been gathered by
a man standing on the ground; but you could hardly creep beneath the
trees. Some, which the owners told me were twenty years old, were only
three and a half feet high, spreading at six inches from the ground
five feet each way, and being withal surrounded with boxes of tar to
catch the cankerworms, they looked like plants in flower-pots, and as
if they might be taken into the house in the winter. In another place,
I saw some not much larger than currant-bushes; yet the owner told me
that they had borne a barrel and a half of apples that fall. If they
had been placed close together, I could have cleared them all at a
jump. I measured some near the Highland Light in Truro, which had been
taken from the shrubby woods thereabouts when young, and grafted. One,
which had been set ten years, was on an average eighteen inches high,
and spread nine feet with a flat top. It had borne one bushel of apples
two years before. Another, probably twenty years old from the seed, was
five feet high, and spread eighteen feet, branching, as usual, at the
ground, so that you could not creep under it. This bore a barrel of
apples two years before. The owner of these trees invariably used the
personal pronoun in speaking of them; as, “I got _him_ out of the
woods, but _he_ doesn’t bear.” The largest that I saw in that
neighborhood was nine feet high to the topmost leaf, and spread
thirty-three feet, branching at the ground five ways.

[Illustration: A Nauset lane]

In one yard I observed a single, very healthy-looking tree, while all
the rest were dead or dying. The occupant said that his father had
manured all but that one with blackfish.

This habit of growth should, no doubt, be encouraged; and they should
not be trimmed up, as some travelling practitioners have advised. In
1802 there was not a single fruit-tree in Chatham, the next town to
Orleans, on the south; and the old account of Orleans says:
“Fruit-trees cannot be made to grow within a mile of the ocean. Even
those which are placed at a greater distance are injured by the east
winds; and, after violent storms in the spring, a saltish taste is
perceptible on their bark.” We noticed that they were often covered
with a yellow lichen-like rust, the _Parmelia parietina_.

The most foreign and picturesque structures on the Cape, to an
inlander, not excepting the salt-works, are the
wind-mills,—gray-looking octagonal towers, with long timbers slanting
to the ground in the rear, and there resting on a cart-wheel, by which
their fans are turned round to face the wind. These appeared also to
serve in some measure for props against its force. A great circular rut
was worn around the building by the wheel. The neighbors who assemble
to turn the mill to the wind are likely to know which way it blows,
without a weathercock. They looked loose and slightly locomotive, like
huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg, and re-minded one of
pictures of the Netherlands. Being on elevated ground, and high in
themselves, they serve as landmarks,—for there are no tall trees, or
other objects commonly, which can be seen at a distance in the horizon;
though the outline of the land itself is so firm and distinct that an
insignificant cone, or even precipice of sand, is visible at a great
distance from over the sea. Sailors making the land commonly steer
either by the wind-mills or the meeting-houses. In the country, we are
obliged to steer by the meeting-houses alone. Yet the meeting-house is
a kind of wind-mill, which runs one day in seven, turned either by the
winds of doctrine or public opinion, or more rarely by the winds of
Heaven, where another sort of grist is ground, of which, if it be not
all bran or musty, if it be not _plaster_, we trust to make bread of
life.

There were, here and there, heaps of shells in the fields, where clams
had been opened for bait; for Orleans is famous for its shell-fish,
especially clams, or, as our author says, “to speak more properly,
worms.” The shores are more fertile than the dry land. The inhabitants
measure their crops, not only by bushels of corn, but by barrels of
clams. A thousand barrels of clam-bait are counted as equal in value to
six or eight thousand bushels of Indian corn, and once they were
procured without more labor or expense, and the supply was thought to
be inexhaustible. “For,” runs the history, “after a portion of the
shore has been dug over, and almost all the clams taken up, at the end
of two years, it is said, they are as plenty there as ever. It is even
affirmed by many persons, that it is as necessary to stir the clam
ground frequently as it is to hoe a field of potatoes; because, if this
labor is omitted, the clams will be crowded too closely together, and
will be prevented from increasing in size.” But we were told that the
small clam, _Mya arenaria_, was not so plenty here as formerly.
Probably the clam ground has been stirred too frequently, after all.
Nevertheless, one man, who complained that they fed pigs with them and
so made them scarce, told me that he dug and opened one hundred and
twenty-six dollars’ worth in one winter, in Truro.

[Illustration: Nauset Bay]

We crossed a brook, not more than fourteen rods long, between Orleans
and Eastham, called Jeremiah’s Gutter. The Atlantic is said sometimes
to meet the Bay here, and isolate the northern part of the Cape. The
streams of the Cape are necessarily formed on a minute scale, since
there is no room for them to run, without tumbling immediately into the
sea; and beside, we found it difficult to run ourselves in that sand,
when there was no want of room. Hence, the least channel where water
runs, or may run, is important, and is dignified with a name. We read
that there is no running water in Chatham, which is the next town. The
barren aspect of the land would hardly be believed if described. It was
such soil, or rather land, as, to judge from appearances, no farmer in
the interior would think of cultivating, or even fencing. Generally,
the ploughed fields of the Cape look white and yellow, like a mixture
of salt and Indian meal. This is called soil. All an inlander’s notions
of soil and fertility will be confounded by a visit to these parts, and
he will not be able, for some time afterward, to distinguish soil from
sand. The historian of Chatham says of a part of that town, which has
been gained from the sea: “There is a doubtful appearance of a soil
beginning to be formed. It is styled _doubtful_, because it would not
be observed by every eye, and perhaps not acknowledged by many.” We
thought that this would not be a bad description of the greater part of
the Cape. There is a “beach” on the west side of Eastham, which we
crossed the next summer, half a mile wide, and stretching across the
township, containing seventeen hundred acres, on which there is not now
a particle of vegetable mould, though it formerly produced wheat. All
sands are here called “beaches,” whether they are waves of water or of
air that dash against them, since they commonly have their origin on
the shore. “The sand in some places,” says the historian of Eastham,
“lodging against the beach-grass, has been raised into hills fifty feet
high, where twenty-five years ago no hills existed. In others it has
filled up small valleys, and swamps. Where a strong-rooted bush stood,
the appearance is singular: a mass of earth and sand adheres to it,
resembling a small tower. In several places, rocks, which were formerly
covered with soil, are disclosed, and being lashed by the sand, driven
against them by the wind, look as if they were recently dug from a
quarry.”

We were surprised to hear of the great crops of corn which are still
raised in Eastham, notwithstanding the real and apparent barrenness.
Our landlord in Orleans had told us that he raised three or four
hundred bushels of corn annually, and also of the great number of pigs
which he fattened. In Champlain’s “Voyages,” there is a plate
representing the Indian cornfields hereabouts, with their wigwams in
the midst, as they appeared in 1605, and it was here that the Pilgrims,
to quote their own words, “bought eight or ten hogsheads of corn and
beans” of the Nauset Indians, in 1622, to keep themselves from
starving.[1]

“In 1667 the town [of Eastham] voted that every housekeeper should kill
twelve blackbirds or three crows, which did great damage to the corn;
and this vote was repeated for many years.” In 1695 an additional order
was passed, namely, that “every unmarried man in the township shall
kill six blackbirds, or three crows, while he remains single; as a
penalty for not doing it, shall not be married until he obey this
order.” The blackbirds, however, still molest the corn. I saw them at
it the next summer, and there were many scarecrows, if not
scare-blackbirds, in the fields, which I often mistook for men.

[Illustration: A scarecrow]

From which I concluded that either many men were not married, or many
blackbirds were. Yet they put but three or four kernels in a hill, and
let fewer plants remain than we do. In the account of Eastham, in the
“Historical Collections,” printed in 1802, it is said, that “more corn
is produced than the inhabitants consume, and about a thousand bushels
are annually sent to market. The soil being free from stones, a plough
passes through it speedily; and after the corn has come up, a small
Cape horse, somewhat larger than a goat, will, with the assistance of
two boys, easily hoe three or four acres in a day; several farmers are
accustomed to produce five hundred bushels of grain annually, and not
long since one raised eight hundred bushels on sixty acres.” Similar
accounts are given to-day; indeed, the recent accounts are in some
instances suspectable repetitions of the old, and I have no doubt that
their statements are as often founded on the exception as the rule, and
that by far the greater number of acres are as barren as they appear to
be. It is sufficiently remarkable that any crops can be raised here,
and it may be owing, as others have suggested, to the amount of
moisture in the atmosphere, the warmth of the sand, and the rareness of
frosts. A miller, who was sharpening his stones, told me that, forty
years ago, he had been to a husking here, where five hundred bushels
were husked in one evening, and the corn was piled six feet high or
more, in the midst, but now, fifteen or eighteen bushels to an acre
were an average yield. I never saw fields of such puny and unpromising
looking corn as in this town. Probably the inhabitants are contented
with small crops from a great surface easily cultivated. It is not
always the most fertile land that is the most profitable, and this sand
may repay cultivation, as well as the fertile bottoms of the West. It
is said, moreover, that the vegetables raised in the sand, without
manure, are remarkably sweet, the pumpkins especially, though when
their seed is planted in the interior they soon degenerate. I can
testify that the vegetables here, when they succeed at all, look
remarkably green and healthy, though perhaps it is partly by contrast
with the sand. Yet the inhabitants of the Cape towns, generally, do not
raise their own meal or pork. Their gardens are commonly little
patches, that have been redeemed from the edges of the marshes and
swamps.

All the morning we had heard the sea roar on the eastern shore, which
was several miles distant; for it still felt the effects of the storm
in which the _St. John_ was wrecked,—though a school-boy, whom we
overtook, hardly knew what we meant, his ears were so used to it. He
would have more plainly heard the same sound in a shell. It was a very
inspiriting sound to walk by, filling the whole air, that of the sea
dashing against the land, heard several miles inland. Instead of having
a dog to growl before your door, to have an Atlantic Ocean to growl for
a whole Cape! On the whole, we were glad of the storm, which would show
us the ocean in its angriest mood. Charles Darwin was assured that the
roar of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, after a heavy gale, could be
heard at night a distance of “21 sea miles across a hilly and wooded
country.” We conversed with the boy we have mentioned, who might have
been eight years old, making him walk the while under the lee of our
umbrella; for we thought it as important to know what was life on the
Cape to a boy as to a man. We learned from him where the best grapes
were to be found in that neighborhood. He was carrying his dinner in a
pail; and, without any impertinent questions being put by us, it did at
length appear of what it consisted. The homeliest facts are always the
most acceptable to an inquiring mind. At length, before we got to
Eastham meeting-house, we left the road and struck across the country
for the eastern shore at Nauset Lights,—three lights close together,
two or three miles distant from us. They were so many that they might
be distinguished from others; but this seemed a shiftless and costly
way of accomplishing that object. We found ourselves at once on an
apparently boundless plain, without a tree or a fence, or, with one or
two exceptions, a house in sight. Instead of fences, the earth was
sometimes thrown up into a slight ridge. My companion compared it to
the rolling prairies of Illinois. In the storm of wind and rain which
raged when we traversed it, it no doubt appeared more vast and desolate
than it really is. As there were no hills, but only here and there a
dry hollow in the midst of the waste, and the distant horizon was
concealed by mist, we did not know whether it was high or low. A
solitary traveller whom we saw perambulating in the distance loomed
like a giant. He appeared to walk slouchingly, as if held up from above
by straps under his shoulders, as much as supported by the plain below.
Men and boys would have appeared alike at a little distance, there
being no object by which to measure them. Indeed, to an inlander, the
Cape landscape is a constant mirage. This kind of country extended a
mile or two each way. These were the “Plains of Nauset,” once covered
with wood, where in winter the winds howl and the snow blows right
merrily in the face of the traveller. I was glad to have got out of the
towns, where I am wont to feel unspeakably mean and disgraced,—to have
left behind me for a season the bar-rooms of Massachusetts, where the
full-grown are not weaned from savage and filthy habits,—still sucking
a cigar. My spirits rose in proportion to the outward dreariness. The
towns need to be ventilated. The gods would be pleased to see some pure
flames from their altars. They are not to be appeased with cigar-smoke.

As we thus skirted the back-side of the towns, for we did not enter any
village, till we got to Provincetown, we read their histories under our
umbrellas, rarely meeting anybody. The old accounts are the richest in
topography, which was what we wanted most; and, indeed, in most things
else, for I find that the readable parts of the modern accounts of
these towns consist, in a great measure, of quotations, acknowledged
and unacknowledged, from the older ones, without any additional
information of equal interest;—town histories, which at length run into
a history of the Church of that place, that being the only story they
have to tell, and conclude by quoting the Latin epitaphs of the old
pastors, having been written in the good old days of Latin and of
Greek. They will go back to the ordination of every minister and tell
you faithfully who made the introductory prayer, and who delivered the
sermon; who made the ordaining prayer, and who gave the charge; who
extended the right hand of fellowship, and who pronounced the
benediction; also how many ecclesiastical councils convened from time
to time to inquire into the orthodoxy of some minister, and the names
of all who composed them. As it will take us an hour to get over this
plain, and there is no variety in the prospect, peculiar as it is, I
will read a little in the history of Eastham the while.

When the committee from Plymouth had purchased the territory of Eastham
of the Indians, “it was demanded, who laid claim to Billingsgate?”
which was understood to be all that part of the Cape north of what they
had purchased. “The answer was, there was not any who owned it. ‘Then,’
said the committee, ‘that land is ours.’ The Indians answered, that it
was.” This was a remarkable assertion and admission. The Pilgrims
appear to have regarded themselves as Not Any’s representatives.
Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of “speaking for”
a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may
be, which their descendants have practised, and are still practising so
extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all
America before the Yankees. But history says that, when the Pilgrims
had held the lands of Billingsgate many years, at length “appeared an
Indian, who styled himself Lieutenant Anthony,” who laid claim to them,
and of him they bought them. Who knows but a Lieutenant Anthony may be
knocking at the door of the White House some day? At any rate, I know
that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to
pay at last.

Thomas Prince, who was several times the governor of the Plymouth
colony, was the leader of the settlement of Eastham. There was recently
standing, on what was once his farm, in this town, a pear-tree which is
said to have been brought from England, and planted there by him, about
two hundred years ago. It was blown down a few months before we were
there. A late account says that it was recently in a vigorous state;
the fruit small, but excellent; and it yielded on an average fifteen
bushels. Some appropriate lines have been addressed to it, by a Mr.
Heman Doane, from which I will quote, partly because they are the only
specimen of Cape Cod verse which I remember to have seen, and partly
because they are not bad.

“Two hundred years have, on the wings of Time,
    Passed with their joys and woes, since thou, Old Tree!
Put forth thy first leaves in this foreign clime.
    Transplanted from the soil beyond the sea.”


*    *    *    *    *


[These stars represent the more clerical lines, and also those which
have deceased.]

“That exiled band long since have passed away,
    And still, Old Tree I thou standest in the place
Where Prince’s hand did plant thee in his day,—
    An undesigned memorial of his race
And time; of those out honored fathers,
    when They came from Plymouth o’er and settled here;
Doane, Higgins, Snow, and other worthy men.
    Whose names their sons remember to revere.


*    *    *    *    *


“Old Time has thinned thy boughs. Old Pilgrim Tree!
    And bowed thee with the weight of many years;
Yet ’mid the frosts of age, thy bloom we see,
    And yearly still thy mellow fruit appears.”


There are some other lines which I might quote, if they were not tied
to unworthy companions by the rhyme. When one ox will lie down, the
yoke bears hard on him that stands up.

One of the first settlers of Eastham was Deacon John Doane, who died in
1707, aged one hundred and ten. Tradition says that he was rocked in a
cradle several of his last years. That, certainly, was not an Achillean
life. His mother must have let him slip when she dipped him into the
liquor which was to make him invulnerable, and he went in, heels and
all. Some of the stone-bounds to his farm which he set up are standing
to-day, with his initials cut in them.

The ecclesiastical history of this town interested us somewhat. It
appears that “they very early built a small meeting-house, twenty feet
square, with a thatched roof through which they might fire their
muskets,”—of course, at the Devil. “In 1662, the town agreed that a
part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the support of
the ministry.” No doubt there seemed to be some propriety in thus
leaving the support of the ministers to Providence, whose servants they
are, and who alone rules the storms; for, when few whales were cast up,
they might suspect that their worship was not acceptable. The ministers
must have sat upon the cliffs in every storm, and watched the shore
with anxiety. And, for my part, if I were a minister I would rather
trust to the bowels of the billows, on the back-side of Cape Cod, to
cast up a whale for me, than to the generosity of many a country parish
that I know. You cannot say of a country minister’s salary, commonly,
that it is “very like a whale.” Nevertheless, the minister who depended
on whales cast up must have had a trying time of it. I would rather
have gone to the Falkland Isles with a harpoon, and done with it. Think
of a w hale having the breath of life beaten out of him by a storm, and
dragging in over the bars and guzzles, for the support of the ministry!
What a consolation it must have been to him! I have heard of a
minister, who had been a fisherman, being settled in Bridgewater for as
long a time as he could tell a cod from a haddock. Generous as it
seems, this condition would empty most country pulpits forthwith, for
it is long since the fishers of men were fishermen. Also, a duty was
put on mackerel here to support a free-school; in other words, the
mackerel-school was taxed in order that the children’s school might be
free. “In 1665 the Court passed a law to inflict corporal punishment on
all persons, who resided in the towns of this government, who denied
the Scriptures.” Think of a man being whipped on a spring morning till
he was constrained to confess that the Scriptures were true! “It was
also voted by the town that all persons who should stand out of the
meeting-house during the time of divine service should be set in the
stocks.” It behooved such a town to see that sitting in the
meeting-house was nothing akin to sitting in the stocks, lest the
penalty of obedience to the law might be greater than that of
disobedience. This was the Eastham famous of late years for its
camp-meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from
all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps
unusual, if not unhealthful, development of the religious sentiment
here was the fact that a large portion of the population are women
whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned,
and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind. The old
account says that “hysteric fits are very common in Orleans, Eastham,
and the towns below, particularly on Sunday, in the times of divine
service. When one woman is affected, five or six others generally
sympathize with her; and the congregation is thrown into the utmost
confusion. Several old men suppose, unphilosophically and uncharitably,
perhaps, that the will is partly concerned, and that ridicule and
threats would have a tendency to prevent the evil.” How this is now we
did not learn. We saw one singularly masculine woman, however, in a
house on this very plain, who did not look as if she was ever troubled
with hysterics, or sympathized with those that were; or, perchance,
life itself was to her a hysteric fit,—a Nauset woman, of a hardness
and coarseness such as no man ever possesses or suggests. It was enough
to see the vertebrae and sinews of her neck, and her set jaws of iron,
which would have bitten a board-nail in two in their ordinary
action,—braced against the world, talking like a man-of-war’s-man in
petticoats, or as if shouting to you through a breaker; who looked as
if it made her head ache to live; hard enough for any enormity. I
looked upon her as one who had committed infanticide; who never had a
brother, unless it were some wee thins: that died in infancy,—for what
need of him?—and whose father must have died before she was born. This
woman told us that the camp-meetings were not held the previous summer
for fear of introducing the cholera, and that they would have been held
earlier this summer, but the rye was so backward that straw would not
have been re adv for them; for they He in straw. There are sometimes
one hundred and fifty ministers (!) and five thousand hearers
assembled. The ground, which is called Millennium Grove, is owned by a
company in Boston, and is the most suitable, or rather unsuitable, for
this purpose of any that I saw on the Cape. It is fenced, and the
frames of the tents are at all times to be seen interspersed among the
oaks. They have an oven and a pump, and keep all their kitchen utensils
and tent coverings and furniture in a permanent building on the spot.
They select a time for their meetings when the moon is full. A man is
appointed to clear out the pump a week beforehand, while the ministers
are clearing their throats; but, probably, the latter do not always
deliver as pure a stream as the former. I saw the heaps of clam-shells
left under the tables, where they had feasted in previous summers, and
supposed, of course, that that was the work of the unconverted, or the
backsliders and scoffers. It looked as if a camp-meeting must be a
singular combination of a prayer-meeting and a picnic.

[Illustration: Millennium Grove camp-meeting grounds]

The first minister settled here was the Rev. Samuel Treat, in 1672, a
gentleman who is said to be “entitled to a distinguished rank among the
evangelists of New England.” He converted many Indians, as well as
white men, in his day, and translated the Confession of Faith into the
Nauset language. These were the Indians concerning whom their first
teacher, Richard Bourne, wrote to Gookin, in 1674, that he had been to
see one who was sick, “and there came from him very savory and heavenly
expressions,” but, with regard to the mass of them, he says, “the truth
is, that many of them are very loose in their course, to my
heartbreaking sorrow.” Mr. Treat is described as a Calvinist of the
strictest kind, not one of those who, by giving up or explaining away,
become like a porcupine disarmed of its quills, but a consistent
Calvinist, who can dart his quills to a distance and courageously
defend himself. There exists a volume of his sermons in manuscript,
“which,” says a commentator, “appear to have been designed for
publication.” I quote the following sentences at second hand, from a
Discourse on Luke xvi. 23, addressed to sinners:—

“Thou must erelong go to the bottomless pit. Hell hath enlarged
herself, and is ready to receive thee. There is room enough for thy
entertainment....

“Consider, thou art going to a place prepared by God on purpose to
exalt his justice in,—a place made for no other employment but
torments. Hell is God’s house of correction; and, remember, God doth
all things like himself. When God would show his justice, and what is
the weight of his wrath, he makes a hell where it shall, indeed, appear
to purpose.... Woe to thy soul when thou shalt be set up as a butt for
the arrows of the Almighty....

“Consider, God himself shall be the principal agent in thy misery,—his
breath is the bellows which blows up the flame of hell forever;—and if
he punish thee, if he meet thee in his fury, he will not meet thee as a
man; he will give thee an omnipotent blow.”

“Some think sinning ends with this life; but it is a mistake. The
creature is held under an everlasting law; the damned increase in sin
in hell. Possibly, the mention of this may please thee. But, remember,
there shall be no pleasant sins there; no eating, drinking, singing,
dancing, wanton dalliance, and drinking stolen waters, but damned sins,
bitter, hellish sins; sins exasperated by torments, cursing God, spite,
rage, and blasphemy.—The guilt of all thy sins shall be laid upon thy
soul, and be made so many heaps of fuel....

“Sinner, I beseech thee, realize the truth of these things. Do not go
about to dream that this is derogatory to God’s mercy, and nothing but
a vain fable to scare children out of their wits withal. God can be
merciful, though he make thee miserable. He shall have monuments enough
of that precious attribute, shining like stars in the place of glory,
and singing eternal hallelujahs to the praise of Him that redeemed
them, though, to exalt the power of his justice, he damn sinners heaps
upon heaps.”

“But,” continues the same writer, “with the advantage of proclaiming
the doctrine of terror, which is naturally productive of a sublime and
impressive style of eloquence (‘Triumphat ventoso gloriæ curru orator,
qui pectus angit, irritat, et implet terroribus.’ Vid. Burnet, De Stat.
Mort., p. 309), he could not attain the character of a popular
preacher. His voice was so loud that it could be heard at a great
distance from the meeting-house, even amidst the shrieks of hysterical
women, and the winds that howled over the plains of Nauset; but there
was no more music in it than in the discordant sounds with which it was
mingled.”

“The effect of such preaching,” it is said, “was that his hearers were
several times, in the course of his ministry, awakened and alarmed; and
on one occasion a comparatively innocent young man was frightened
nearly out of his wits, and Mr. Treat had to exert himself to make hell
seem somewhat cooler to him”; yet we are assured that “Treat’s manners
were cheerful, his conversation pleasant, and sometimes facetious, but
always decent. He was fond of a stroke of humor, and a practical joke,
and manifested his relish for them by long and loud fits of laughter.”

This was the man of whom a well-known anecdote is told, which doubtless
many of my readers have heard, but which, nevertheless, I will venture
to quote:—

“After his marriage with the daughter of Mr. Willard (pastor of the
South Church in Boston), he was sometimes invited by that gentleman to
preach in his pulpit. Mr. Willard possessed a graceful delivery, a
masculine and harmonious voice; and, though he did not gain much
reputation by his ‘Body of Divinity,’ which is frequently sneered at,
particularly by those who have read it, yet in his sermons are strength
of thought and energy of language. The natural consequence was that he
was generally admired. Mr. Treat having preached one of his best
discourses to the congregation of his father-in-law, in his usual
unhappy manner, excited universal disgust; and several nice judges
waited on Mr. Willard, and begged that Mr. Treat, who was a worthy,
pious man, it was true, but a wretched preacher, might never be invited
into his pulpit again. To this request Mr. Willard made no reply; but
he desired his son-in-law to lend him the discourse; which being left
with him, he delivered it without alteration to his people a few weeks
after. They ran to Mr. Willard and requested a copy for the press. ‘See
the difference,’ they cried, ‘between yourself and your son-in-law; you
have preached a sermon on the same text as Mr. Treat’s, but whilst his
was contemptible, yours is excellent.’ As is observed in a note, ‘Mr.
Willard, after producing the sermon in the handwriting of Mr. Treat,
might have addressed these sage critics in the words of Phaedrus,

“‘En hic declarat, quales sitis judices.’”[2]


Mr. Treat died of a stroke of the palsy, just after the memorable storm
known as the Great Snow, which left the ground around his house
entirely bare, but heaped up the snow in the road to an uncommon
height. Through this an arched way was dug, by which the Indians bore
his bod to the grave.

The reader will imagine us, all the while, steadily traversing that
extensive plain in a direction a little north of east toward Nauset
Beach, and reading under our umbrellas as we sailed, while it blowed
hard with mingled mist and rain, as if we were approaching a fit
anniversary of Mr. Treat’s funeral. We fancied that it was such a moor
as that on which somebody perished in the snow, as is related in the
“Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life.”

The next minister settled here was the “Rev. Samuel Osborn, who was
born in Ireland, and educated at the University of Dublin.” He is said
to have been “A man of wisdom and virtue,” and taught his people the
use of peat, and the art of drying and preparing it, which as they had
scarcely any other fuel, was a great blessing to them. He also
introduced improvements in agriculture. But, notwithstanding his many
services, as he embraced the religion of Arminius, some of his flock
became dissatisfied. At length, an ecclesiastical council, consisting
of ten ministers, with their churches, sat upon him, and they,
naturally enough, spoiled his usefulness. The council convened at the
desire of two divine philosophers,—Joseph Doane and Nathaniel Freeman.

In their report they say, “It appears to the council that the Rev. Mr.
Osborn hath, in his preaching to this people, said, that what Christ
did and suffered doth nothing abate or diminish our obligation to obey
the law of God, and that Christ’s suffering and obedience were for
himself; both parts of which, we think, contain dangerous error.”

“Also: ‘It hath been said, and doth appear to this council, that the
Rev. Mr. Osborn, both in public and in private, asserted that there are
no promises in the Bible but what are conditional, which we think,
also, to be an error, and do say that there are promises which are
absolute and without any condition,—such as the promise of a new heart,
and that he will write his law in our hearts.’”

“Also, they say, ‘it hath been alleged, and doth appear to us, that Mr.
Osborn hath declared, that _obedience_ is a considerable _cause_ of a
person’s justification, which, we think, contains very dangerous
error.’”

And many the like distinctions they made, such as some of my readers,
probably, are more familiar with than I am. So, far in the East, among
the Yezidis, or Worshippers of the Devil, so-called, the Chaldaeans,
and others, according to the testimony of travellers, you may still
hear these remarkable disputations on doctrinal points going on. Osborn
was, accordingly, dismissed, and he removed to Boston, where he kept
school for many years. But he was fully justified, methinks, by his
works in the peat-meadow; one proof of which is, that he lived to be
between ninety and one hundred years old.

The next minister was the Rev. Benjamin Webb, of whom, though a
neighboring clergy-man pronounced him “the best man and the best
minister whom he ever knew,” yet the historian says that,

“As he spent his days in the uniform discharge of his duty (it reminds
one of a country muster) and there were no shades to give relief to his
character, not much can be said of him. (Pity the Devil did not plant a
few shade-trees along his avenues.) His heart was as pure as the
new-fallen snow, which completely covers every dark spot in a field;
his mind was as serene as the sky in a mild evening in June, when the
moon shines without a cloud. Name any virtue, and that virtue he
practised; name any vice, and that vice he shunned. But if peculiar
qualities marked his character, they were his humility, his gentleness,
and his love of God. The people had long been taught by a son of
thunder (Mr. Treat): in him they were instructed by a son of
consolation, who sweetly allured them to virtue by soft persuasion, and
by exhibiting the mercy of the Supreme Being; for his thoughts were so
much in heaven that they seldom descended to the dismal regions below;
and though of the same religious sentiments as Mr. Treat, yet his
attention was turned to those glad tidings of great joy which a Saviour
came to publish.”

We were interested to hear that such a man had trodden the plains of
Nauset.

Turning over further in our book, our eyes fell on the name of the Rev.
Jonathan Bascom, of Orleans; “Senex emunctæ naris, doctus, et auctor
elegantium verborum, facetus, et dulcis festique sermonis.” And, again,
on that of the Rev. Nathan Stone, of Dennis: “Vir humilis, mitis,
blandus, advenarum hospes; (there was need of him there;) suis commodis
in terrâ non studens, reconditis thesauris in cœlo.” An easy virtue
that, there, for methinks no inhabitant of Dennis could be very
studious about his earthly commodity, but must regard the bulk of his
treasures as in heaven. But probably the most just and pertinent
character of all is that which appears to be given to the Rev. Ephraim
Briggs, of Chatham, in the language of the later Romans, “_Seip,
sepoese, sepoemese, wechekum_,”—which not being interpreted, we know
not what it means, though we have no doubt it occurs somewhere in the
Scriptures, probably in the Apostle Eliot’s Epistle to the Nipmucks.

Let no one think that I do not love the old ministers. They were,
probably, the best men of their generation, and they deserve that their
biographies should fill the pages of the town histories. If I could but
hear the “glad tidings” of which they tell, and which, perchance, they
heard, I might write in a worthier strain than this.

There was no better way to make the reader realize how wide and
peculiar that plain was, and how long it took to traverse it, than by
inserting these extracts in the midst of my narrative.

 [1] They touched after this at a place called Mattachiest, where they
 got more corn; but their shallop being cast away in a storm, the
 Governor was obliged to return to Plymouth on foot, fifty miles
 through the woods. According to Mourt’s Relation, “he came safely
 home, though weary and _surbated_,” that is, foot-sore. (Ital.
 _sobattere_, Lat. _sub_ or _solea battere_, to bruise the soles of the
 feet; v. Dic. Not “from _acerbatus_, embittered or aggrieved,” as one
 commentator on this passage supposes.) This word is of very rare
 occurrence, being applied only to governors and persons of like
 description, who are in that predicament; though such generally have
 considerable mileage allowed them, and might save their soles if they
 cared.


 [2] Lib. v. Fab. 5.



IV
THE BEACH


At length we reached the seemingly retreating boundary of the plain,
and entered what had appeared at a distance an upland marsh, but proved
to be dry sand covered with Beach-grass, the Bearberry, Bayberry,
Shrub-oaks, and Beach-plum, slightly ascending as we approached the
shore; then, crossing over a belt of sand on which nothing grew, though
the roar of the sea sounded scarcely louder than before, and we were
prepared to go half a mile farther, we suddenly stood on the edge of a
bluff overlooking the Atlantic. Far below us was the beach, from half a
dozen to a dozen rods in width, with a long line of breakers rushing to
the strand. The sea was exceedingly dark and stormy, the sky completely
overcast, the clouds still dropping rain, and the wind seemed to blow
not so much as the exciting cause, as from sympathy with the already
agitated ocean. The waves broke on the bars at some distance from the
shore, and curving green or yellow as if over so many unseen dams, ten
or twelve feet high, like a thousand waterfalls, rolled in foam to the
sand. There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe.

Having got down the bank, and as close to the water as we could, where
the sand was the hardest, leaving the Nauset Lights behind us, we began
to walk leisurely up the beach, in a northwest direction, towards
Provincetown, which was about twenty-five miles distant, still sailing
under our umbrellas with a strong aft wind, admiring in silence, as we
walked, the great force of the ocean stream,—

ποταμοῖο μέγα σθένος Ὠκεανοῖο.


The white breakers were rushing to the shore; the foam ran up the sand,
and then ran back as far as we could see (and we imagined how much
farther along the Atlantic coast, before and behind us), as regularly,
to compare great things with small, as the master of a choir beats time
with his white wand; and ever and anon a higher wave caused us hastily
to deviate from our path, and we looked back on our tracks filled with
water and foam. The breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild
horses of Neptune, rushing to the shore, with their white manes
streaming far behind; and when at length the sun shone for a moment,
their manes were rainbow-tinted. Also, the long kelp-weed was tossed up
from time to time, like the tails of sea-cows sporting in the brine.

[Illustration: A Cape Cod citizen]

There was not a sail in sight, and we saw none that day,—for they had
all sought harbors in the late storm, and had not been able to get out
again; and the only human beings whom we saw on the beach for several
days were one or two wreckers looking for drift-wood, and fragments of
wrecked vessels. After an easterly storm in the spring, this beach is
sometimes strewn with eastern wood from one end to the other, which, as
it belongs to him who saves it, and the Cape is nearly destitute of
wood, is a Godsend to the inhabitants. We soon met one of these
wreckers,—a regular Cape Cod man, with whom we parleyed, with a
bleached and weather-beaten face, within whose wrinkles I distinguished
no particular feature. It was like an old sail endowed with life,—a
hanging cliff of weather-beaten flesh,—like one of the clay boulders
which occurred in that sand-bank. He had on a hat which had seen salt
water, and a coat of many pieces and colors, though it was mainly the
color of the beach, as if it had been sanded. His variegated back—for
his coat had many patches, even between the shoulders—was a rich study
to us, when we had passed him and looked round. It might have been
dishonorable for him to have so many scars behind, it is true, if he
had not had many more and more serious ones in front. He looked as if
he sometimes saw a doughnut, but never descended to comfort; too grave
to laugh, too tough to cry; as indifferent as a clam,—like a sea-clam
with hat on and legs, that was out walking the strand. He may have been
one of the Pilgrims,—Peregrine White, at least,—who has kept on the
back-side of the Cape, and let the centuries go by. He was looking for
wrecks, old logs, water-logged and covered with barnacles, or bits of
boards and joists, even chips, which he drew out of the reach of the
tide, and stacked up to dry. When the log was too large to carry far,
he cut it up where the last wave had left it, or rolling it a few feet
appropriated it by sticking two sticks into the ground crosswise above
it. Some rotten trunk, which in Maine cumbers the ground, and is,
perchance, thrown into the water on purpose, is here thus carefully
picked up, split and dried, and husbanded. Before winter the wrecker
painfully carries these things up the bank on his shoulders by a long
diagonal slanting path made with a hoe in the sand, if there is no
hollow at hand. You may see his hooked pike-staff always lying on the
bank ready for use. He is the true monarch of the beach, whose “right
there is none to dispute,” and he is as much identified with it as a
beach-bird.

Crantz, in his account of Greenland, quotes Dalagen’s relation of the
ways and usages of the Greenlanders, and says, “Whoever finds
driftwood, or the spoils of a shipwreck on the strand, enjoys it as his
own, though, he does not live there. But he must haul it ashore and lay
a stone upon it, as a token that some one has taken possession of it,
and this stone is the deed of security, for no other Greenlander will
offer to meddle with it afterwards.” Such is the instinctive law of
nations. We have also this account of drift-wood in Crantz: “As he (the
Founder of Nature) has denied this frigid rocky region the growth of
trees, he has bid the streams of the Ocean to convey to its shores a
great deal of wood, which accordingly comes floating thither, part
without ice, but the most part along with it, and lodges itself between
the islands. Were it not for this, we Europeans should have no wood to
burn there, and the poor Greenlanders (who, it is true, do not use
wood, but train, for burning) would, however, have no wood to roof
their houses, to erect their tents, as also to build their boats, and
to shaft their arrows (yet there grew some small but crooked alders,
&c.), by which they must procure their maintenance, clothing and train
for warmth, light, and cooking. Among this wood are great trees torn up
by the roots, which by driving up and down for many years and rubbing
on the ice, are quite bare of branches and bark, and corroded with
great wood-worms. A small part of this drift-wood are willows, alder
and birch trees, which come out of the bays in the south of (_i.e._
Greenland); also large trunks of aspen-trees, which must come from a
greater distance; but the greatest part is pine and fir. We find also a
good deal of a sort of wood finely veined, with few branches; this I
fancy is larch-wood, which likes to decorate the sides of lofty, stony
mountains. There is also a solid, reddish wood, of a more agreeable
fragrance than the common fir, with visible cross-veins; which I take
to be the same species as the beautiful silver-firs, or _zirbel_, that
have the smell of cedar, and grow on the high Grison hills, and the
Switzers wainscot their rooms with them.” The wrecker directed us to a
slight depression, called Snow’s Hollow, by which we ascended the
bank,—for elsewhere, if not difficult, it was inconvenient to climb it
on ac-count of the sliding sand, which filled our shoes.

This sand-bank—the backbone of the Cape—rose directly from the beach to
the height of a hundred feet or more above the ocean. It was with
singular emotions that we first stood upon it and discovered what a
place we had chosen to walk on. On our right, beneath us, was the beach
of smooth and gently sloping sand, a dozen rods in width; next, the
endless series of white breakers; further still, the light green water
over the bar, which runs the whole length of the forearm of the Cape,
and beyond this stretched the unwearied and illimitable ocean. On our
left, extending back from the very edge of the bank, was a perfect
desert of shining sand, from thirty to eighty rods in width, skirted in
the distance by small sand-hills fifteen or twenty feet high; between
which, however, in some places, the sand penetrated as much farther.
Next commenced the region of vegetation—a succession of small hills and
valleys covered with shrubbery, now glowing with the brightest
imaginable autumnal tints; and beyond this were seen, here and there,
the waters of the bay. Here, in Wellfleet, this pure sand plateau,
known to sailors as the Table Lands of Eastham, on account of its
appearance, as seen from the ocean, and because it once made a part of
that town,—full fifty rods in width, and in many places much more, and
sometimes full one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean,—stretched
away northward from the southern boundary of the town, without a
particle of vegetation,—as level almost as a table,—for two and a half
or three miles, or as far as the eye could reach; slightly rising
towards the ocean, then stooping to the beach, by as steep a slope as
sand could lie on, and as regular as a military engineer could desire.
It was like the escarped rampart of a stupendous fortress, whose glacis
was the beach, and whose champaign the ocean.—From its surface we
overlooked the greater part of the Cape. In short, we were traversing a
desert, with the view of an autumnal landscape of extraordinary
brilliancy, a sort of Promised Land, on the one hand, and the ocean on
the other. Yet, though the prospect was so extensive, and the country
for the most part destitute of trees, a house was rarely visible,—we
never saw one from the beach,—and the solitude was that of the ocean
and the desert combined. A thousand men could not have seriously
interrupted it, but would have been lost in the vastness of the scenery
as their footsteps in the sand.

The whole coast is so free from rocks, that we saw but one or two for
more than twenty miles. The sand was soft like the beach, and trying to
the eyes when the sun shone. A few piles of drift-wood, which some
wreckers had painfully brought up the bank and stacked up there to dry,
being the only objects in the desert, looked indefinitely large and
distant, even like wigwams, though, when we stood near them, they
proved to be insignificant little “jags” of wood.

For sixteen miles, commencing at the Nauset Lights, the bank held its
height, though farther north it was not so level as here, but
interrupted by slight hollows, and the patches of Beach-grass and
Bayberry frequently crept into the sand to its edge. There are some
pages entitled “A description of the Eastern Coast of the County of
Barnstable,” printed in 1802, pointing out the spots on which the
Trustees of the Humane Society have erected huts called Charity or
Humane Houses, “and other places where shipwrecked seamen may look for
shelter.” Two thousand copies of this were dispersed, that every vessel
which frequented this coast might be provided with one. I have read
this Shipwrecked Seaman’s Manual with a melancholy kind of
interest,—for the sound of the surf, or, you might say, the moaning of
the sea, is heard all through it, as if its author were the sole
survivor of a shipwreck himself. Of this part of the coast he says:
“This highland approaches the ocean with steep and lofty banks, which
it is extremely difficult to climb, especially in a storm. In violent
tempests, during very high tides, the sea breaks against the foot of
them, rendering it then unsafe to walk on the strand which lies between
them and the ocean. Should the seaman succeed in his attempt to ascend
them, he must forbear to penetrate into the country, as houses are
generally so remote that they would escape his research during the
night; he must pass on to the valleys by which the banks are
intersected. These valleys, which the inhabitants call Hollows, run at
right angles with the shore, and in the middle or lowest part of them a
road leads from the dwelling-houses to the sea.” By the _word_ road
must not always be understood a visible cart-track.

There were these two roads for us,—an upper and a lower one,—the bank
and the beach; both stretching twenty-eight miles northwest, from
Nauset Harbor to Race Point, without a single opening into the beach,
and with hardly a serious interruption of the desert. If you were to
ford the narrow and shallow inlet at Nauset Harbor, where there is not
more than eight feet of water on the bar at full sea, you might walk
ten or twelve miles farther, which would make a beach forty miles
long,—and the bank and beach, on the east side of Nantucket, are but a
continuation of these. I was comparatively satisfied. There I had got
the Cape under me, as much as if I were riding it bare-backed. It was
not as on the map, or seen from the stagecoach; but there I found it
all out of doors, huge and real, Cape Cod! as it cannot be represented
on a map, color it as you will; the thing itself, than which there is
nothing more like it, no truer picture or account; which you cannot go
farther and see. I cannot remember what I thought before that it was.
They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them,
not those which have a Humane house alone. But I wished to see that
seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic
House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes
ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the
only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say
of it.

We walked on quite at our leisure, now on the beach, now on the
bank,—sitting from time to time on some damp log, maple or yellow
birch, which had long followed the seas, but had now at last settled on
land; or under the lee of a sandhill, on the bank, that we might gaze
steadily on the ocean. The bank was so steep that, where there was no
danger of its caving, we sat on its edge, as on a bench. It was
difficult for us landsmen to look out over the ocean without imagining
land in the horizon; yet the clouds appeared to hang low over it, and
rest on the water as they never do on the land, perhaps on account of
the great distance to which we saw. The sand was not without advantage,
for, though it was “heavy” walking in it, it was soft to the feet; and,
notwithstanding that it had been raining nearly two days, when it held
up for half an hour, the sides of the sand-hills, which were porous and
sliding, afforded a dry seat. All the aspects of this desert are
beautiful, whether you behold it in fair weather or foul, or when the
sun is just breaking out after a storm, and shining on its moist
surface in the distance, it is so white, and pure, and level, and each
slight inequality and track is so distinctly revealed; and when your
eyes slide off this, they fall on the ocean. In summer the mackerel
gulls—which here have their nests among the neighboring
sand-hills—pursue the traveller anxiously, now and then diving close to
his head with a squeak, and he may see them, like swallows, chase some
crow which has been feeding on the beach, almost across the Cape.

Though for some time I have not spoken of the roaring of the breakers,
and the ceaseless flux and reflux of the waves, yet they did not for a
moment cease to dash and roar, with such a tumult that if you had been
there, you could scarcely have heard my voice the while; and they are
dashing and roaring this very moment, though it may be with less din
and violence, for there the sea never rests. We were wholly absorbed by
this spectacle and tumult, and like Chryses, though in a different mood
from him, we walked silent along the shore of the resounding sea,

Βῆ δ’ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης.[1]


I put in a little Greek now and then, partly because it sounds so much
like the ocean,—though I doubt if Homer’s _Mediterranean_ Sea ever
sounded so loud as this.

The attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at Eastham is
said to be divided between the preaching of the Methodists and the
preaching of the billows on the back-side of the Cape, for they all
stream over here in the course of their stay. I trust that in this case
the loudest voice carries it. With what effect may we suppose the ocean
to say, “My hearers!” to the multitude on the bank! On that side some
John N. Maffit; on this, the Reverend Poluphloisboios Thalassa.

There was but little weed cast up here, and that kelp chiefly, there
being scarcely a rock for rockweed to adhere to. Who has not had a
vision from some vessel’s deck, when he had still his land-legs on, of
this great brown apron, drifting half upright, and quite submerged
through the green water, clasping a stone or a deep-sea mussel in its
unearthly fingers? I have seen it carrying a stone half as large as my
head. We sometimes watched a mass of this cable-like weed, as it was
tossed up on the crest of a breaker, waiting with interest to see it
come in, as if there were some treasure buoyed up by it; but we were
always surprised and disappointed at the insignificance of the mass
which had attracted us. As we looked out over the water, the smallest
objects floating on it appeared indefinitely large, we were so
impressed by the vastness of the ocean, and each one bore so large a
proportion to the whole ocean, which we saw. We were so often
disappointed in the size of such things as came ashore, the ridiculous
bits of wood or weed, with which the ocean labored, that we began to
doubt whether the Atlantic itself would bear a still closer inspection,
and wold not turn out to be a but small pond, if it should come ashore
to us. This kelp, oar-weed, tangle, devils-apron, sole-leather, or
ribbon-weed,—as various species are called,—appeared to us a singularly
marine and fabulous product, a lit invention for Neptune to adorn his
car with, or a freak of Proteus. All that is told of the sea has a
fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land, and all its products have
a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from
sea-weed to a sailor’s yarn, or a fish-story. In this element the
animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled. One
species of kelp, according to Bory St. Vincent, has a stem fifteen
hundred feet long, and hence is the longest vegetable known, and a
brig’s crew spent two days to no purpose collecting the trunks of
another kind cast ashore on the Falkland Islands, mistaking it for
drift-wood. (See Harvey on _Algæ_) This species looked almost edible;
at least, I thought that if I were starving I would try it. One sailor
told me that the cows ate it. It cut like cheese: for I took the
earliest opportunity to sit down and deliberately whittle up a fathom
or two of it, that I might become more intimately acquainted with it,
see how it cut, and if it were hollow all the way through. The blade
looked like a broad belt, whose edges had been quilled, or as if
stretched by hammering, and it was also twisted spirally. The extremity
was generally worn and ragged from the lashing of the waves. A piece of
the stem which I carried home shrunk to one quarter of its size a week
afterward, and was completely covered with crystals of salt like frost.
The reader will excuse my greenness,—though it is not sea-greenness,
like his, perchance,—for I live by a river-shore, where this weed does
not wash up. When we consider in what meadows it grew. and how it was
raked, and in what kind of hay weather got in or out, we may well be
curious about it. One who is weatherwise has given the following
account of the matter.

“When descends on the Atlantic
        The gigantic
    Storm-wind of the equinox,
Landward in his wrath he scourges
        The toiling surges,
Laden with sea-weed from the rocks.

“From Bermuda’s reefs, from edges
        Of sunken ledges,
    On some far-off bright Azore;
From Bahama and the dashing,
    Silver-flashing
Surges of San Salvador;

“From the trembling surf that buries
        The Orkneyan Skerries.
    Answering the hoarse Hebrides;
And from wrecks and ships and drifting
    Spars, uplifting
On the desolate rainy seas;

“Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless main.”

But he was not thinking of this shore, when he added:—

“Till, in sheltered coves and reaches
    Of sandy beaches,
All have found repose again.”


_These_ weeds were the symbols of those grotesque and fabulous thoughts
which have not yet got into the sheltered coves of literature.

“Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
        On the shifting
    Currents of the restless heart,”
_And not yet_ “in books recorded
    They, like hoarded
Household words, no more depart.”


The beach was also strewn with beautiful sea-jellies, which the
wreckers called Sun-squall, one of the lowest forms of animal life,
some white, some wine-colored, and a foot in diameter. I at first
thought that they were a tender part of some marine monster, which the
storm or some other foe had mangled. What right has the sea to bear in
its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies and mosses, when it has
such a boisterous shore that the stoutest fabrics are wrecked against
it? Strange that it should undertake to dandle such delicate children
in its arm. I did not at first recognize these for the same which I had
formerly seen in myriads in Boston Harbor, rising, with a waving
motion, to the surface, as if to meet the sun, and discoloring the
waters far and wide, so that I seemed to be sailing through a mere
sunfish soup. They say that when you endeavor to take one up, it will
spill out the other side of your hand like quicksilver. Before the land
rose out of the ocean, and became _dry_ land, chaos reigned; and
between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and
rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures
can inhabit. Mackerel-gulls were all the while flying over our heads
and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one;
quite at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organizations
as sea-jellies and mosses; and we saw that they were adapted to their
circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. Theirs must be
an essentially wilder, that is, less human, nature than that of larks
and robins. Their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal, and
harmonized well with the scenery and the roar of the surf, as if one
had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the
shore; a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray. But if
I were required to name a sound the remembrance of which most perfectly
revives the impression which the beach has made, it would be the dreary
peep of the piping plover (_Charadrius melodus_) which haunts there.
Their voices, too, are heard as a fugacious part in the dirge which is
ever played along the shore for those mariners who have been lost in
the deep since first it was created. But through all this dreariness we
seemed to have a pure and unqualified strain of eternal melody, for
always the same strain which is a dirge to one household is a morning
song of rejoicing to another.

A remarkable method of catching gulls, derived from the Indians, was
practised in Wellfleet in 1794. “The Gull House,” it is said, “is built
with crotchets, fixed in the ground on the beach,” poles being
stretched across for the top, and the sides made close with stakes and
seaweed. “The poles on the top are covered with lean whale. The man
being placed within, is not discovered by the fowls, and while they are
contending for and eating the flesh, he draws them in, one by one,
between the poles, until he has collected forty or fifty.” Hence,
perchance, a man is said to be _gulled_, when he is _taken in_. We read
that one “sort of gulls is called by the Dutch _mallemucke, i.e._ the
foolish fly, because they fall upon a whale as eagerly as a fly, and,
indeed, all gulls are foolishly bold and easy to be shot. The
Norwegians call this bird _havhest_, sea-horse (and the English
translator says, it is probably what we call boobies). If they have
eaten too much, they throw it up, and eat it again till they are tired.
It is this habit in the gulls of parting with their property
[disgorging the contents of their stomachs to the skuas], which has
given rise to the terms gull, guller, and gulling, among men.” We also
read that they used to kill small birds which roosted on the beach at
night, by making a fire with hog’s lard in a frying-pan. The Indians
probably used pine torches; the birds flocked to the light, and were
knocked down with a stick. We noticed holes dug near the edge of the
bank, where gunners conceal themselves to shoot the large gulls which
coast up and down a-fishing, for these are considered good to eat.

We found some large clams of the species _Mactra solidissima_, which
the storm had torn up from the bottom, and cast ashore. I selected one
of the largest, about six inches in length, and carried it along,
thinking to try an experiment on it. We soon after met a wrecker, with
a grapple and a rope, who said that he was looking for tow cloth, which
had made part of the cargo of the ship _Franklin_, which was wrecked
here in the spring, at which time nine or ten lives were lost. The
reader may remember this wreck, from the circumstance that a letter was
found in the captain’s valise, which washed ashore, directing him to
wreck the vessel before he got to America, and from the trial which
took place in consequence. The wrecker said that tow cloth was still
cast up in such storms as this. He also told us that the clam which I
had was the sea-clam, or hen, and was good to eat. We took our nooning
under a sand-hill, covered with beach-grass, in a dreary little hollow,
on the top of the bank, while it alternately rained and shined. There,
having reduced some damp drift-wood, which I had picked up on the
shore, to shavings with my knife, I kindled a fire with a match and
some paper and cooked my clam on the embers for my dinner; for
breakfast was commonly the only meal which I took in a house on this
excursion. When the clam was done, one valve held the meat and the
other the liquor. Though it was very tough, I found it sweet and
savory, and ate _the whole_ with a relish. Indeed, with the addition of
a cracker or two, it would have been a bountiful dinner. I noticed that
the shells were such as I had seen in the sugar-kit at home. Tied to a
stick, they formerly made the Indian’s hoe hereabouts.

At length, by mid-afternoon, after we had had two or three rainbows
over the sea, the showers ceased, and the heavens gradually cleared up,
though the wind still blowed as hard and the breakers ran as high as
before. Keeping on, we soon after came to a Charity-house, which we
looked into to see how the shipwrecked mariner might fare. Far away in
some desolate hollow by the sea-side, just within the bank, stands a
lonely building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight nail put
through the staple, which a freezing man can bend, with some straw,
perchance, on the floor on which he may lie, or which he may burn in
the fireplace to keep him alive. Perhaps this hut has never been
required to shelter a ship-wrecked man, and the benevolent person who
promised to inspect it annually, to see that the straw and matches are
here, and that the boards will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and
thinks that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very night a
perishing crew may pry open its door with their numbed fingers and
leave half their number dead here by morning. When I thought what must
be the condition of the families which alone would ever occupy or had
occupied them, what must have been the tragedy of the winter evenings
spent by human beings around their hearths, these houses, though they
were meant for human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. They
appeared but a stage to the grave. The gulls flew around and screamed
over them; the roar of the ocean in storms, and the lapse of its waves
in calms, alone resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year
in, year out, except, perchance, on one memorable night. Houses of
entertainment for shipwrecked men! What kind of sailors’ homes were
they?

[Illustration: Wreckage under the sand-bluff]

“Each hut,” says the author of the “Description of the Eastern Coast of
the County of Barnstable,” “stands on piles, is eight feet long, eight
feet wide, and seven feet high; a sliding door is on the south, a
sliding shutter on the west, and a pole, rising fifteen feet above the
top of the building, on the east. Within it is supplied either with
straw or hay, and is further accommodated with a bench.” They have
varied little from this model now. There are similar huts at the Isle
of Sable and Anticosti, on the north, and how far south along the coast
I know not. It is pathetic to read the minute and faithful directions
which he gives to seamen who may be wrecked on this coast, to guide
them to the nearest Charity-house, or other shelter, for, as is said of
Eastham, though there are a few houses within a mile of the shore, yet
“in a snow-storm, which rages here with excessive fury, it would be
almost impossible to discover them either by night or by day.” You hear
their imaginary guide thus marshalling, cheering, directing the
dripping, shivering, freezing troop along; “at the entrance of this
valley the sand has gathered, so that at present a little climbing is
necessary. Passing over several fences and taking heed not to enter the
wood on the right hand, at the distance of three-quarters of a mile a
house is to be found. This house stands on the south side of the road,
and not far from it on the south is Pamet River, which runs from east
to west through body of salt marsh.” To him cast ashore in Eastham, he
says, “The meeting-house is without a steeple, but it may be
distinguished from the dwelling-houses near it by its situation, which
is between two small groves of locusts, one on the south and one on the
north,—that on the south being three times as long as the other. About
a mile and a quarter from the hut, west by north, appear the top and
arms of a windmill.” And so on for many pages.

We did not learn whether these houses had been the means of saving any
lives, though this writer says, of one erected at the head of Stout’s
Creek in Truro, that “it was built in an improper manner, having a
chimney in it; and was placed on a spot where no beach-grass grew. The
strong winds blew the sand from its foundation and the weight of the
chimney brought it to the ground; so that in January of the present
year [1802] it was entirely demolished. This event took place about six
weeks before the _Brutus_ was cast away. If it had remained, it is
probable that the whole of the unfortunate crew of that ship would have
been saved, as they gained the shore a few rods only from the spot
where the hut had stood.”

This “Charity-house,” as the wrecker called it, this “Humane-house,” as
some call it, that is, the one to which we first came, had neither
window nor sliding shutter, nor clapboards, nor paint. As we have said,
there was a rusty nail put through the staple. However, as we wished to
get an idea of a Humane house, and we hoped that we should never have a
better opportunity, we put our eyes, by turns, to a knot-hole in the
door, and after long looking, without seeing, into the dark,—not
knowing how many shipwrecked men’s bones we might see at last, looking
with the eye of faith, knowing that, though to him that knocketh it may
not always be opened, yet to him that looketh long enough through a
knot-hole the inside shall be visible,—for we had had some practice at
looking inward,—by steadily keeping our other ball covered from the
light meanwhile, putting the outward world behind us, ocean and land,
and the beach,—till the pupil became enlarged and collected the rays of
light that were wandering in that dark (for the pupil shall be enlarged
by looking; there never was so dark a night but a faithful and patient
eye, however small, might at last prevail over it),—after all this, I
say, things began to take shape to our vision,—if we may use this
expression where there was nothing but emptiness,—and we obtained the
long-wished-for insight. Though we thought at first that it was a
hopeless case, after several minutes’ steady exercise of the divine
faculty, our prospects began decidedly to brighten, and we were ready
to exclaim with the blind bard of “Paradise Lost and Regained,”—

“Hail, holy Light! offspring of Heaven first born,
Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam.
May I express thee unblamed?”


A little longer, and a chimney rushed red on our sight. In short, when
our vision had grown familiar with the darkness, we discovered that
there were some stones and some loose wads of wool on the floor, and an
empty fireplace at the further end; but it _was not_ supplied with
matches, or straw, or hay, that we could see, nor “accommodated with a
bench.” Indeed, it was the wreck of all cosmical beauty there within.

Turning our backs on the outward world, we thus looked through the
knot-hole into the Humane house, into the very bowels of mercy; and for
bread we found a stone. It was literally a great cry (of sea-mews
outside), and a little wool. However, we were glad to sit outside,
under the lee of the Humane house, to escape the piercing wind; and
there we thought how cold is charity! how inhumane humanity! This,
then, is what charity hides! Virtues antique and far away with ever a
rusty nail over the latch; and very difficult to keep in repair,
withal, it is so uncertain whether any will ever gain the beach near
you. So we shivered round about, not being able to get into it, ever
and anon looking through the knot-hole into that night without a star,
until we concluded that it was not a _humane_ house at all, but a
sea-side box, now shut up. belonging to some of the family of Night or
Chaos, where they spent their summers by the sea, for the sake of the
sea breeze, and that it was not proper for us to be prying into their
concerns.

My companion had declared before this that I had not a particle of
sentiment, in rather absolute terms, to my astonishment; but I suspect
he meant that my legs did not ache just then, though I am not wholly a
stranger to that sentiment. But I did not intend this for a sentimental
journey.

[Illustration: Herring River at Wellfleet]

 [1] We have no word in English to express the sound of many waves,
 dashing at once, whether gently or violently, πολυφλοίσβοιος to the
 ear, and, in the ocean’s gentle moods, an ἀνάριθμον γέλασμα to the
 eye.



V
THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN


Having walked about eight miles since we struck the beach, and passed
the boundary between Wellfleet and Truro, a stone post in the sand,—for
even this sand comes under the jurisdiction of one town or another,—we
turned inland over barren hills and valleys, whither the sea, for some
reason, did not follow us, and, tracing up a Hollow, discovered two or
three sober-looking houses within half a mile, uncommonly near the
eastern coast. Their garrets were apparently so full of chambers, that
their roofs could hardly lie down straight, and we did not doubt that
there was room for us there. Houses near the sea are generally low and
broad. These were a story and a half high; but if you merely counted
the windows in their gable-ends, you would think that there were many
stories more, or, at any rate, that the half-story was the only one
thought worthy of being illustrated. The great number of windows in the
ends of the houses, and their irregularity in size and position, here
and elsewhere on the Cape, struck us agreeably,—as if each of the
various occupants who had their _cunabula_ behind had punched a hole
where his necessities required it, and, according to his size and
stature, without regard to outside effect. There were windows for the
grown folks, and windows for the children,—three or four apiece; as a
certain man had a large hole cut in his barn-door for the cat, and
another smaller one for the kitten. Sometimes they were so low under
the eaves that I thought they must have perforated the plate beam for
another apartment, and I noticed some which were triangular, to fit
that part more exactly. The ends of the houses had thus as many muzzles
as a revolver, and, if the inhabitants have the same habit of staring
out the windows that some of our neighbors have, a traveller must stand
a small chance with them.

Generally, the old-fashioned and unpainted houses on the Cape looked
more comfortable, as well as picturesque, than the modern and more
pretending ones, which were less in harmony with the scenery, and less
firmly planted.

[Illustration: A characteristic gable with many windows]

These houses were on the shores of a chain of ponds, seven in number,
the source of a small stream called Herring River, which empties into
the Bay. There are many Herring Rivers on the Cape; they will, perhaps,
be more numerous than herrings soon. We knocked at the door of the
first house, but its inhabitants were all gone away. In the meanwhile,
we saw the occupants of the next one looking out the window at us, and
before we reached it an old woman came out and fastened the door of her
bulkhead, and went in again. Nevertheless, we did not hesitate to knock
at her door, when a grizzly-looking man appeared, whom we took to be
sixty or seventy years old. He asked us, at first, suspiciously, where
we were from, and what our business was; to which we returned plain
answers.

“How far is Concord from Boston?” he inquired.

“Twenty miles by railroad.”

“Twenty miles by railroad,” he repeated.

“Didn’t you ever hear of Concord of Revolutionary fame?”

“Didn’t I ever hear of Concord? Why, I heard the guns fire at the
battle of Bunker Hill. [They hear the sound of heavy cannon across the
Bay.] I am almost ninety; I am eighty-eight year old. I was fourteen
year old at the time of Concord Fight,—and where were you then?”

We were obliged to confess that we were not in the fight.

“Well, walk in, we’ll leave it to the women,” said he.

So we walked in, surprised, and sat down, an old woman taking our hats
and bundles, and the old man continued, drawing up to the large,
old-fashioned fireplace,—

“I am a poor good-for-nothing crittur, as Isaiah says; I am all broken
down this year. I am under petticoat government here.”

The family consisted of the old man, his wife, and his daughter, who
appeared nearly as old as her mother, a fool, her son (a
brutish-looking, middle-aged man, with a prominent lower face, who was
standing by the hearth when we entered, but immediately went out), and
a little boy of ten.

While my companion talked with the women, I talked with the old man.
They said that he was old and foolish, but he was evidently too knowing
for them.

“These women,” said he to me, “are both of them poor good-for-nothing
critturs. This one is my wife. I married her sixty-four years ago. She
is eighty-four years old, and as deaf as an adder, and the other is not
much better.”

He thought well of the Bible, or at least he _spoke_ well, and did not
_think_ ill, of it, for that would not have been prudent for a man of
his age. He said that he had read it attentively for many years, and he
had much of it at his tongue’s end. He seemed deeply impressed with a
sense of his own nothingness, and would repeatedly exclaim,—

“I am a nothing. What I gather from my Bible is just this: that man is
a poor good-for-nothing crittur, and everything is just as God sees fit
and disposes.”

“May I ask your name?” I said.

“Yes,” he answered, “I am not ashamed to tell my name. My name is——. My
great-grandfather came over from England and settled here.”

He was an old Wellfleet oysterman, who had acquired a competency in
that business, and had sons still engaged in it.

Nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachusetts, I am told, are
supplied and kept by natives of Wellfleet, and a part of this town is
still called Billingsgate from the oysters having been formerly planted
there; but the native oysters are said to have died in 1770. Various
causes are assigned for this, such as a ground frost, the carcasses of
blackfish kept to rot in the harbor, and the like, but the most common
account of the matter is,—and I find that a similar superstition with
regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost everywhere,—that
when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the
right to gather them, yellow specks appeared in them, and Providence
caused them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand bushels were
annually brought from the South and planted in the harbor of Wellfleet
till they attained “the proper relish of Billingsgate”; but now they
are imported commonly full-grown, and laid down near their markets, at
Boston and elsewhere, where the water, being a mixture of salt and
fresh, suits them better. The business was said to be still good and
improving.

The old man said that the oysters were liable to freeze in the winter,
if planted too high; but if it were not “so cold as to strain their
eyes” they were not injured. The inhabitants of New Brunswick have
noticed that “ice will not form over an oyster-bed, unless the cold is
very intense indeed, and when the bays are frozen over the oyster-beds
are easily discovered by the water above them remaining unfrozen, or as
the French residents say, _degèle_.” Our host said that they kept them
in cellars all winter.

“Without anything to eat or drink?” I asked.

“Without anything to eat or drink,” he answered.

“Can the oysters move?”

“Just as much as my shoe.”

[Illustration: A Welfleet oysterman]

But when I caught him saying that they “bedded themselves down in the
sand, flat side up, round side down,” I told him that my shoe could not
do that, without the aid of my foot in it; at which he said that they
merely settled down as they grew; if put down in a square they would be
found so; but the clam could move quite fast. I have since been told by
oystermen of Long Island, where the oyster is still indigenous and
abundant, that they are found in large masses attached to the parent in
their midst, and are so taken up with their tongs; in which case, they
say, the age of the young proves that there could have been no motion
for five or six years at least. And Buckland in his Curiosities of
Natural History (page 50) says: “An oyster who has once taken up his
position and fixed himself when quite young can never make a change.
Oysters, nevertheless, that have not fixed themselves, but remain loose
at the bottom of the sea, have the power of locomotion; they open their
shells to their fullest extent, and then suddenly contracting them, the
expulsion of the water forwards gives a motion backwards. A fisherman
at Guernsey told me that he had frequently seen oysters moving in this
way.”

Some still entertain the question “whether the oyster was indigenous in
Massachusetts Bay,” and whether Wellfleet harbor was a “natural
habitat” of this fish; but, to say nothing of the testimony of old
oystermen, which, I think, is quite conclusive, though the native
oyster may now be extinct there, I saw that their shells, opened by the
Indians, were strewn all over the Cape. Indeed, the Cape was at first
thickly settled by Indians on account of the abundance of these and
other fish. We saw many traces of their occupancy after this, in Truro,
near Great Hollow, and at High-Head, near East Harbor River,—oysters,
clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes and the bones of
deer and other quadrupeds. I picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in
an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them. The Indians
lived about the edges of the swamps, then probably in some instances
ponds, for shelter and water. Moreover, Champlain in the edition of his
“Voyages” printed in 1613, says that in the year 1606 he and
Poitrincourt explored a harbor (Barnstable Harbor?) in the southerly
part of what is now called Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42°, about
five leagues south, one point west of _Cap Blanc_ (Cape Cod), and there
they found many good oysters, and they named it “_le Port aux
Huistres_” (Oyster Harbor). In one edition of his map (1632), the _“R.
aux Escailles_” is drawn emptying into the same part of the bay, and on
the map “_Novi Belgii_,” in Ogilby’s “America” (1670), the words “_Port
aux Huistres_” are placed against the same place. Also William Wood,
who left New England in 1633, speaks, in his “New England’s Prospect,”
published in 1634, of “a great oyster-bank” in Charles River, and of
another in the Mistick, each of which obstructed the navigation of its
river. “The oysters,” says he, “be great ones in form of a shoehorn;
some be a foot long; these breed on certain banks that are bare every
spring tide. This fish without the shell is so big, that it must admit
of a division before you can well get it into your mouth.” Oysters are
still found there. (Also, see Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan,”
page 90.)

Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained; it
was raked up, but never on the Atlantic side, only cast ashore there in
small quantities in storms. The fisherman sometimes wades in water
several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before
him. When this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on
it, and is drawn out. It has been known to catch and hold coot and teal
which were preying on it. I chanced to be on the bank of the Acushnet
at New Bedford one day since this, watching some ducks, when a man
informed me that, having let out his young ducks to seek their food
amid the samphire (_Salicornia_) and other weeds along the river-side
at low tide that morning, at length he noticed that one remained
stationary, amid the weeds, something preventing it from following the
others, and going to it he found its foot tightly shut in a quahog’s
shell. He took up both together, carried them to his home, and his wife
opening the shell with a knife released the duck and cooked the quahog.
The old man said that the great clams were good to eat, but that they
always took out a certain part which was poisonous, before they cooked
them. “People said it would kill a cat.” I did not tell him that I had
eaten a large one entire that afternoon, but began to think that I was
tougher than a cat. He stated that pedlers came round there, and
sometimes tried to sell the women folks a skimmer, but he told them
that their women had got a better skimmer than _they_ could make, in
the shell of their clams; it was shaped just right for this
purpose.—They call them “skim-alls” in some places. He also said that
the sun-squall was poisonous to handle, and when the sailors came
across it, they did not meddle with it, but heaved it out of their way.
I told him that I had handled it that afternoon, and had felt no ill
effects as yet. But he said it made the hands itch, especially if they
had previously been scratched, or if I put it into my bosom I should
find out what it was.

He informed us that no ice ever formed on the back side of the Cape, or
not more than once in a century, and but little snow lay there, it
being either absorbed or blown or washed away. Sometimes in winter,
when the tide was down, the beach was frozen, and afforded a hard road
up the back side for some thirty miles, as smooth as a floor. One
winter when he was a boy, he and his father “took right out into the
back side before daylight, and walked to Provincetown and back to
dinner.”

When I asked what they did with all that barren-looking land, where I
saw so few cultivated fields,—“Nothing,” he said.

“Then why fence your fields?”

“To keep the sand from blowing and covering up the whole.”

“The yellow sand,” said he, “has some life in it, but the white little
or none.”

When, in answer to his questions, I told him that I was a surveyor, he
said that they who surveyed his farm were accustomed, where the ground
was uneven, to loop up each chain as high as their elbows; that was the
allowance they made, and he wished to know if I could tell him why they
did not come out according to his deed, or twice alike. He seemed to
have more respect for surveyors of the old school, which I did not
wonder at. “King George the Third,” said he, “laid out a road four rods
wide and straight the whole length of the Cape,” but where it was now
he could not tell.

This story of the surveyors reminded me of a Long-Islander, who once,
when I had made ready to jump from the bow of his boat to the shore,
and he thought that I underrated the distance and would fall
short,—though I found afterward that he judged of the elasticity of my
joints by his own,—told me that when he came to a brook which he wanted
to get over, he held up one leg, and then, if his foot appeared to
cover any part of the opposite bank, he knew that he could jump it.
“Why,” I told him, “to say nothing of the Mississippi, and other small
watery streams, I could blot out a star with my foot, but I would not
engage to jump that distance,” and asked how he knew when he had got
his leg at the right elevation. But he regarded his legs as no less
accurate than a pair of screw dividers or an ordinary quadrant, and
appeared to have a painful recollection of every degree and minute in
the arc which they described; and he would have had me believe that
there was a kind of hitch in his hip-joint which answered the purpose.
I suggested that he should connect his two ankles by a string of the
proper length, which should be the chord of an arc, measuring his
jumping ability on horizontal surfaces,—assuming one leg to be a
perpendicular to the plane of the horizon, which, however, may have
been too bold an assumption in this case. Nevertheless, this was a kind
of geometry in the legs which it interested me to hear of.

Our host took pleasure in telling us the names of the ponds, most of
which we could see from his windows, and making us repeat them after
him, to see if we had got them right. They were Gull Pond, the largest
and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more than a mile in
circumference, Newcomb’s, Swett’s, Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and
Herring Ponds, all connected at high water, if I do not mistake. The
coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he told them of
one which they had not detected. He said that they were not so high as
formerly. There was an earthquake about four years before he was born,
which cracked the pans of the ponds, which were of iron, and caused
them to settle. I did not remember to have read of this. Innumerable
gulls used to resort to them; but the large gulls were now very scarce,
for, as he said, the English robbed their nests far in the north, where
they breed. He remembered well when gulls were taken in the gull-house,
and when small birds were killed by means of a frying-pan and fire at
night. His father once lost a valuable horse from this cause. A party
from Wellfleet having lighted their fire for this purpose, one dark
night, on Billingsgate Island, twenty horses which were pastured there,
and this colt among them, being frightened by it, and endeavoring in
the dark to cross the passage which separated them from the neighboring
beach, and which was then fordable at low tide, were all swept out to
sea and drowned. I ob-served that many horses were still turned out to
pasture all summer on the islands and beaches in Wellfleet, Eastham,
and Orleans, as a kind of common. He also described the killing of what
he called “wild hens” here, after they had gone to roost in the woods,
when he was a boy. Perhaps they were “Prairie hens” (pinnated grouse).

He liked the Beach-pea (_Lathyrus maritimus_), cooked green, as well as
the cultivated. He had seen it growing very abundantly in Newfoundland,
where also the inhabitants ate them, but he had never been able to
obtain any ripe for seed. We read, under the head of Chatham, that “in
1555, during a time of great scarcity, the people about Orford, in
Sussex (England) were preserved from perishing by eating the seeds of
this plant, which grew there in great abundance on the sea-coast. Cows,
horses, sheep, and goats eat it.” But the writer who quoted this could
not learn that they had ever been used in Barnstable County.

He had been a voyager, then? O, he had been about the world in his day.
He once considered himself a pilot for all our coast; but now they had
changed the names so he might be bothered.

He gave us to taste what he called the Summer Sweeting, a pleasant
apple which he raised, and frequently grafted from, but had never seen
growing elsewhere, except once,—three trees on Newfoundland, or at the
Bay of Chaleur, I forget which, as he was sailing by. He was sure that
he could tell the tree at a distance.

At length the fool, whom my companion called the wizard, came in,
muttering between his teeth, “Damn book-pedlers,—all the time talking
about books. Better do something. Damn ’em. I’ll shoot ’em. Got a
doctor down here. Damn him, I’ll get a gun and shoot him”; never once
holding up his head. Whereat the old man stood up and said in a loud
voice, as if he was accustomed to command, and this was not the first
time he had been obliged to exert his authority there: “John, go sit
down, mind your business,—we’ve heard you talk before,—precious little
you’ll do,—your bark is worse than your bite.” But, without minding,
John muttered the same gibberish over again, and then sat down at the
table which the old folks had left. He ate all there was on it, and
then turned to the apples, which his aged mother was paring, that she
might give her guests some apple-sauce for breakfast, but she drew them
away and sent him off.

[Illustration: Welfleet]

When I approached this house the next summer, over the desolate hills
between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birthplace
of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the midst of a cornfield on the
hillside, but, as usual, he loomed so strangely, that I mistook him for
a scarecrow.

This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the
best preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough
to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather
he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis and Mnasilus, who
listened to his story.

“Not by Hæmonian hills the Thracian bard.
Nor awful Phœbus was on Pindus heard
With deeper silence or with more regard.”


There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation,
for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when
Napoleon and the moderns generally were born. He said that one day,
when the troubles between the Colonies and the mother country first
broke out, as he, a boy of fifteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one
Doane, an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said
to him, “Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that
pond into the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the Colonies to undertake
to gain their independence.” He remembered well General Washington, and
how he rode his horse along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to
show us how he looked.

“He was a r—a—ther large and portly-looking man, a manly and
resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his
horse.”—“There, I’ll tell you, this was the way with Washington.” Then
he jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show
as if he were waving his hat. Said he, _“That_ was Washington.”

He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and was much pleased when
we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account
agreed with the written.

“O,” he said, “I know, I know! I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my
ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide
awake, and likes to know everything that’s going on. O, I know!”

He told us the story of the wreck of the _Franklin_, which took place
there the previous spring: how a boy came to his house early in the
morning to know whose boat that was by the shore, for there was a
vessel in distress, and he, being an old man, first ate his breakfast,
and then walked over to the top of the hill by the shore, and sat down
there, having found a comfortable seat, to see the ship wrecked. She
was on the bar, only a quarter of a mile from him, and still nearer to
the men on the beach, who had got a boat ready, but could render no
assistance on account of the breakers, for there was a pretty high sea
running. There were the passengers all crowded together in the forward
part of the ship, and some were getting out of the cabin windows and
were drawn on deck by the others.

“I saw the captain get out his boat,” said he; “he had one little one;
and then they jumped into it one after another, down as straight as an
arrow. I counted them. There were nine. One was a woman, and she jumped
as straight as any of them. Then they shoved off. The sea took them
back, one wave went over them, and when they came up there were six
still clinging to the boat; I counted them. The next wave turned the
boat bottom upward, and emptied them all out. None of them ever came
ashore alive. There were the rest of them all crowded together on the
forecastle, the other parts of the ship being under water. They had
seen all that happened to the boat. At length a heavy sea separated the
forecastle from the rest of the wreck, and set it inside of the worst
breaker, and the boat was able to reach them, and it saved all that
were left, but one woman.”

He also told us of the steamer _Cambria’s_ getting aground on his shore
a few months before we were there, and of her English passengers who
roamed over his grounds, and who, he said, thought the prospect from
the high hill by the shore “the most delightsome they had ever seen,”
and also of the pranks which the ladies played with his scoop-net in
the ponds. He spoke of these travellers with their purses full of
guineas, just as our provincial fathers used to speak of British bloods
in the time of King George the Third.

_Quid loquar?_ Why repeat what he told us?

“Aut Scyllam Nisi, quam fama secuta est,
Candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris,
Dulichias vexâsse rates, et gurgite in alto
Ah timidos nautas canibus lacerâsse marinis?”


In the course of the evening I began to feel the potency of the clam
which I had eaten, and I was obliged to confess to our host that I was
no tougher than the cat he told of; but he answered, that he was a
plain-spoken man, and he could tell me that it was all imagination. At
any rate, it proved an emetic in my case, and I was made quite sick by
it for a short time, while he laughed at my expense. I was pleased to
read afterward, in Mourt’s Relation of the landing of the Pilgrims in
Provincetown Harbor, these words: “We found great muscles (the old
editor says that they were undoubtedly sea-clams) and very fat and full
of sea-pearl; but we could not eat them, for they made us all sick that
did eat, as well sailors as passengers, ... but they were soon well
again.” It brought me nearer to the Pilgrims to be thus reminded by a
similar experience that I was so like them. Moreover, it was a valuable
confirmation of their story, and I am prepared now to believe every
word of Mourt’s Relation. I was also pleased to find that man and the
clam lay still at the same angle to one another. But I did not notice
sea-pearl. Like Cleopatra, I must have swallowed it. I have since dug
these clams on a flat in the Bay and observed them. They could squirt
full ten feet before the wind, as appeared by the marks of the drops on
the sand.

“Now I’m going to ask you a question,” said the old man, “and I don’t
know as you can tell me; but you are a learned man, and I never had any
learning, only what I got by natur.”—It was in vain that we reminded
him that he could quote Josephus to our confusion.—“I’ve thought, if I
ever met a learned man I should like to ask him this question. Can you
tell me how _Axy_ is spelt, and what it means? _Axy_,” says he;
“there’s a girl over here is named _Axy_. Now what is it? What does it
mean? Is it Scripture? I’ve read my Bible twenty-five years over and
over, and I never came across it.”

“Did you read it twenty-five years for this object.’” I asked.

“Well, _how_ is it spelt? Wife, how is it spelt?” She said: “It is in
the Bible; I’ve seen it.”

“Well, how do you spell it?”

“I don’t know. A c h, ach, s e h, seh,—Achseh.”

“Does that spell Axy? Well, do _you_ know what it means?” asked he,
turning to me.

“No,” I replied, “I never heard the sound before.”

“There was a schoolmaster down here once, and they asked him what it
meant, and he said it had no more meaning than a bean-pole.”

I told him that I held the same opinion with the schoolmaster. I had
been a schoolmaster myself, and had had strange names to deal with. I
also heard of such names as Zoleth, Beriah, Amaziah, Bethuel, and
Shearjashub, hereabouts.

At length the little boy, who had a seat quite in the chimney-corner,
took off his stockings and shoes, warmed his feet, and having had his
sore leg freshly salved, went off to bed; then the fool made bare his
knotty-looking feet and legs, and followed him; and finally the old man
exposed his calves also to our gaze. We had never had the good fortune
to see an old man’s legs before, and were surprised to find them fair
and plump as an infant’s, and we thought that he took a pride in
exhibiting them. He then proceeded to make preparations for retiring,
discoursing meanwhile with Panurgic plainness of speech on the ills to
which old humanity is subject. We were a rare haul for him. He could
commonly get none but ministers to talk to, though sometimes ten of
them at once, and he was glad to meet some of the laity at leisure. The
evening was not long enough for him. As I had been sick, the old lady
asked if I would not go to bed,—it was getting late for old people; but
the old man, who had not yet done his stories, said, “You ain’t
particular, are you?”

“O, no,” said I, “I am in no hurry. I believe I have weathered the Clam
cape.”

“They are good,” said he; “I wish I had some of them now.”

“They never hurt me,” said the old lady.

“But then you took out the part that killed a cat,” said I.

At last we cut him short in the midst of his stories, which he promised
to resume in the morning. Yet, after all, one of the old ladies who
came into our room in the night to fasten the fire-board, which
rattled, as she went out took the precaution to fasten us in. Old women
are by nature more suspicious than old men. However, the winds howled
around the house, and made the fire-boards as well as the casements
rattle well that night. It was probably a windy night for any locality,
but we could not distinguish the roar which was proper to the ocean
from that which was due to the wind alone.

The sounds which the ocean makes must be very significant and
interesting to those who live near it. When I was leaving the shore at
this place the next summer, and had got a quarter of a mile distant,
ascending a hill, I was startled by a sudden, loud sound from the sea,
as if a large steamer were letting off steam by the shore, so that I
caught my breath and felt my blood run cold for an instant, and I
turned about, expecting to see one of the Atlantic steamers thus far
out of her course, but there was nothing unusual to be seen. There was
a low bank at the entrance of the Hollow, between me and the ocean, and
suspecting that I might have risen into another stratum of air in
ascending the hill,—which had wafted to me only the ordinary roar of
the sea,—I immediately descended again, to see if I lost _hearing_ of
it; but, without regard to my ascending or descending, it died away in
a minute or two, and yet there was scarcely any wind all the while. The
old man said that this was what they called the “rut,” a peculiar roar
of the sea before the wind changes, which, however, he could not
account for. He thought that he could tell all about the weather from
the sounds which the sea made.

Old Josselyn, who came to New England in 1638, has it among his
weather-signs, that “the resounding of the sea from the shore, and
murmuring of the winds in the woods, without apparent wind, sheweth
wind to follow.”

Being on another part of the coast one night since this, I heard the
roar of the surf a mile distant, and the inhabitants said it was a sign
that the wind would work round east, and we should have rainy weather.
The ocean was heaped up somewhere at the eastward, and this roar was
occasioned by its effort to preserve its equilibrium, the wave reaching
the shore before the wind. Also the captain of a packet between this
country and England told me that he sometimes met with a wave on the
Atlantic coming against the wind, perhaps in a calm sea, which
indicated that at a distance the wind was blowing from an opposite
quarter, but the undulation had travelled faster than it. Sailors tell
of “tide-rips” and “ground-swells,” which they suppose to have been
occasioned by hurricanes and earthquakes, and to have travelled many
hundred, and sometimes even two or three thousand miles.

[Illustration: Hunting for a Leak]

Before sunrise the next morning they let us out again, and I ran over
to the beach to see the sun come out of the ocean. The old woman of
eighty-four winters was already out in the cold morning wind,
bareheaded, tripping about like a young girl, and driving up the cow to
milk. She got the breakfast with despatch, and without noise or bustle;
and meanwhile the old man resumed his stories, standing before us, who
were sitting, with his back to the chimney, and ejecting his tobacco
juice right and left into the fire behind him, without regard to the
various dishes which were there preparing. At breakfast we had eels,
buttermilk cake, cold bread, green beans, doughnuts, and tea. The old
man talked a steady stream; and when his wife told him he had better
eat his breakfast, he said: “Don’t hurry me; I have lived too long to
be hurried.” I ate of the apple-sauce and the doughnuts, which I
thought had sustained the least detriment from the old man’s shots, but
my companion refused the apple-sauce, and ate of the hot cake and green
beans, which had appeared to him to occupy the safest part of the
hearth. But on comparing notes afterward, I told him that the
buttermilk cake was particularly exposed, and I saw how it suffered
repeatedly, and therefore I avoided it; but he declared that, however
that might be, he witnessed that the apple-sauce was seriously injured,
and had therefore declined that. After breakfast we looked at his
clock, which was out of order, and oiled it with some “hen’s grease,”
for want of sweet oil, for he scarcely could believe that we were not
tinkers or pedlers; meanwhile he told a story about visions, which had
reference to a crack in the clock-case made by frost one night. He was
curious to know to what religious sect we belonged. He said that he had
been to hear thirteen kinds of preaching in one month, when he was
young, but he did not join any of them,—he stuck to his Bible. There
was nothing like any of them in his Bible. While I was shaving in the
next room, I heard him ask my companion to what sect he belonged, to
which he answered:—

“O, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood.”

“What’s that?” he asked, “Sons o’ Temperance?”

Finally, filling our pockets with doughnuts, which he was pleased to
find that we called by the same name that he did, and paying for our
entertainment, we took our departure; but he followed us out of doors,
and made us tell him the names of the vegetables which he had raised
from seeds that came out of the _Franklin_. They were cabbage,
broccoli, and parsley. As I had asked him the names of so many things,
he tried me in turn with all the plants which grew in his garden, both
wild and cultivated. It was about half an acre, which he cultivated
wholly himself. Besides the common garden vegetables, there were
Yellow-Dock, Lemon Balm, Hyssop, Gill-go-over-the-ground. Mouse-ear,
Chick-weed, Roman Wormwood, Elecampane, and other plants. As we stood
there, I saw a fish-hawk stoop to pick a fish out of his pond.

“There,” said I, “he has got a fish.”

“Well,” said the old man, who was looking all the while, but could see
nothing, “he didn’t dive, he just wet his claws.”

And, sure enough, he did not this time, though it is said that they
often do, but he merely stooped low enough to pick him out with his
talons; but as he bore his shining prey over the bushes, it fell to the
ground, and we did not see that he recovered it. That is not their
practice.

Thus, having had another crack with the old man, he standing bareheaded
under the eaves, he directed us “athwart the fields,” and we took to
the beach again for another day, it being now late in the morning.

It was but a day or two after this that the safe of the Provincetown
Bank was broken open and robbed by two men from the interior, and we
learned that our hospitable entertainers did at least transiently
harbor the suspicion that we were the men.



VI
THE BEACH AGAIN


Our way to the high sand-bank, which I have described as extending all
along the coast, led, as usual, through patches of Bayberry bushes
which straggled into the sand. This, next to the Shrub-oak, was perhaps
the most common shrub thereabouts. I was much attracted by its
odoriferous leaves and small gray berries which are clustered about the
short twigs, just below the last year’s growth. I know of but two
bushes in Concord, and they, being staminate plants, do not bear fruit.
The berries gave it a venerable appearance, and they smelled quite
spicy, like small confectionery. Robert Beverley, in his “History of
Virginia,” published in 1705, states that “at the mouth of their
rivers, and all along upon the sea and bay, and near many of their
creeks and swamps, grows the myrtle, bearing a berry, of which they
make a hard brittle wax, of a curious green color, which by refining
becomes almost transparent. Of this they make candles, which are never
greasy to the touch nor melt with lying in the hottest weather; neither
does the snuff of these ever offend the smell, like that of a tallow
candle; but, instead of being disagreeable, if an accident puts a
candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy to all that are in the room;
insomuch that nice people often put them out on purpose to have the
incense of the expiring snuff. The melting of these berries is said to
have been first found out by a surgeon in New England, who performed
wonderful things with a salve made of them.” From the abundance of
berries still hanging on the bushes, we judged that the inhabitants did
not generally collect them for tallow, though we had seen a piece in
the house we had just left. I have since made some tallow myself.
Holding a basket beneath the bare twigs in April, I rubbed them
together between my hands and thus gathered about a quart in twenty
minutes, to which were added enough to make three pints, and I might
have gathered them much faster with a suitable rake and a large shallow
basket. They have little prominences like those of an orange all
creased in tallow, which also fills the interstices down to the stone.
The oily part rose to the top, making it look like a savory black
broth, which smelled much like balm or other herb tea. You let it cool,
then skim off the tallow from the surface, melt this again and strain
it. I got about a quarter of a pound weight from my three pints, and
more yet remained within the berries. A small portion cooled in the
form of small flattish hemispheres, like crystallizations, the size of
a kernel of corn (nuggets I called them as I picked them out from amid
the berries), Loudon says, that “cultivated trees are said to yield
more wax than those that are found wild.” (See Duplessy, _Végetaux
Résineux_, Vol. II. p. 60.) If you get any pitch on your hands in the
pine-woods you have only to rub some of these berries between your
hands to start it off. But the ocean was the grand fact there, which
made us forget both bay berries and men.

To-day the air was beautifully clear, and the sea no longer dark and
stormy, though the waves still broke with foam along the beach, but
sparkling and full of life. Already that morning I had seen the day
break over the sea as if it came out of its bosom:—

“The saffron-robed Dawn rose in haste from the streams
Of Ocean, that she might bring light to immortals and to mortals.”


The sun rose visibly at such a distance over the sea that the
cloud-bank in the horizon, which at first concealed him, was not
perceptible until he had risen high behind it, and plainly broke and
dispersed it, like an arrow. But as yet I looked at him as rising over
land, and could not, without an effort, realize that he was rising over
the sea. Already I saw some vessels on the horizon, which had rounded
the Cape in the night, and were now well on their watery way to other
lands.

We struck the beach again in the south part of Truro. In the early part
of the day, while it was flood tide and the beach was narrow and soft,
we walked on the bank, which was very high here, but not so level as
the day before, being more interrupted by slight hollows. The author of
the Description of the Eastern Coast says of this part, that “the bank
is very high and steep. From the edge of it west, there is a strip of
sand a hundred yards in breadth. Then succeeds low brushwood, a quarter
of a mile wide, and almost impassable. After which comes a thick,
perplexing forest, in which not a house is to be discovered. Seamen,
therefore, though the distance between these two hollows (Newcomb’s and
Brush Hollows) is great, must not attempt to enter the wood, as in a
snowstorm they must undoubtedly perish.” This is still a true
description of the country, except that there is not much high wood
left.

[Illustration: Truro—Starting on a voyage]

There were many vessels, like gulls, skimming over the surface of the
sea, now half concealed in its troughs, their dolphin-strikers
ploughing the water, now tossed on the top of the billows. One, a bark
standing down parallel with the coast, suddenly furled her sails, came
to anchor, and swung round in the wind, near us, only half a mile from
the shore. At first we thought that her captain wished to communicate
with us, and perhaps we did not regard the signal of distress, which a
mariner would have understood, and he cursed us for cold-hearted
wreckers who turned our backs on him. For hours we could still see her
anchored there behind us, and we wondered how she could afford to
loiter so long in her course. Or was she a smuggler who had chosen that
wild beach to land her cargo on? Or did they wish to catch fish, or
paint their vessel? Erelong other barks, and brigs, and schooners,
which had in the mean while doubled the Cape, sailed by her in the
smacking breeze, and our consciences were relieved. Some of these
vessels lagged behind, while others steadily went ahead. We narrowly
watched their rig, and the cut of their jibs, and how they walked the
water, for there was all the difference between them that there is
between living creatures. But we wondered that they should be
remembering Boston and New York and Liverpool, steering for them, out
there; as if the sailor might forget his peddling business on such a
grand highway. They had perchance brought oranges from the Western
Isles; and were they carrying back the peel? We might as well transport
our old traps across the ocean of eternity. Is _that_ but another
“trading-flood,” with its blessed isles? Is Heaven such a harbor as the
Liverpool docks?

Still held on without a break, the inland barrens and shrubbery, the
desert and the high sand bank with its even slope, the broad white
beach, the breakers, the green water on the bar, and the Atlantic
Ocean; and we traversed with delight new reaches of the shore; we took
another lesson in sea-horses’ manes and sea-cows’ tails, in sea-jellies
and sea-clams, with our new-gained experience. The sea ran hardly less
than the day before. It seemed with every wave to be subsiding, because
such was our expectation, and yet when hours had elapsed we could see
no difference. But there it was, balancing itself, the restless ocean
by our side, lurching in its gait. Each wave left the sand all braided
or woven, as it were, with a coarse woof and warp, and a distinct
raised edge to its rapid work. We made no haste, since we wished to see
the ocean at our leisure; and indeed that soft sand was no place in
which to be in a hurry, for one mile there was as good as two
elsewhere. Besides, we were obliged frequently to empty our shoes of
the sand which one took in in climbing or descending the bank.

As we were walking close to the water’s edge this morning we turned
round, by chance, and saw a large black object which the waves had just
cast up on the beach behind us, yet too far off for us to distinguish
what it was; and when we were about to return to it, two men came
running from the bank, where no human beings had appeared before, as if
they had come out of the sand, in order to save it before another wave
took it. As we approached, it took successively the form of a huge
fish, a drowned man, a sail or a net, and finally of a mass of
tow-cloth, part of the cargo of the _Franklin_, which the men loaded
into a cart.

Objects on the beach, whether men or inanimate things, look not only
exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they
actually are. Lately, when approaching the seashore several degrees
south of this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what
appeared like bold and rugged cliffs on the beach, fifteen feet high,
and whitened by the sun and waves; but after a few steps it proved to
be low heaps of rags,—part of the cargo of a wrecked vessel,—scarcely
more than a foot in height. Once also it was my business to go in
search of the relics of a human body, mangled by sharks, which had just
been cast up, a week after a wreck, having got the direction from a
light-house: I should find it a mile or two distant over the sand, a
dozen rods from the water, covered with a cloth, by a stick stuck up. I
expected that I must look very narrowly to find so small an object, but
the sandy beach, half a mile wide, and stretching farther than the eye
could reach, was so perfectly smooth and bare, and the mirage toward
the sea so magnifying, that when I was half a mile distant the
insignificant sliver which marked the spot looked like a bleached spar,
and the relics were as conspicuous as if they lay in state on that
sandy plain, or a generation had labored to pile up their cairn there.
Close at hand they were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering
to them, in fact, only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore.
There was nothing at all remarkable about them, and they were
singularly inoffensive both to the senses and the imagination. But as I
stood there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the
beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I
was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the
ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies.
That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it
as no living one, could, in the name of a certain majesty which
belonged to it.

We afterward saw many small pieces of tow-cloth washed up, and I learn
that it continued to be found in good condition, even as late as
November in that year, half a dozen bolts at a time.

We eagerly filled our pockets with the smooth round pebbles which in
some places, even here, were thinly sprinkled over the sand, together
with flat circular shells (_Scutellæ?_); but, as we had read, when they
were dry they had lost their beauty, and at each sitting we emptied our
pockets again of the least remarkable, until our collection was well
culled. Every material was rolled into the pebble form by. the waves;
not only stones of various kinds, but the hard coal which some vessel
had dropped, bits of glass, and in one instance a mass of peat three
feet long, where there was nothing like it to be seen for many miles.
All the great rivers of the globe are annually, if not constantly,
discharging great quantities of lumber, which drifts to distant shores.
I have also seen very perfect pebbles of brick, and bars of Castile
soap from a wreck rolled into perfect cylinders, and still spirally
streaked with red, like a barber’s pole. When a cargo of rags is washed
ashore, every old pocket and bag-like recess will be filled to bursting
with sand by being rolled on the beach; and on one occasion, the
pockets in the clothing of the wrecked being thus puffed up, even after
they had been ripped open by wreckers, deluded me into the hope of
identifying them by the contents. A pair of gloves looked exactly as if
filled by a hand. The water in such clothing is soon wrung out and
evaporated, but the sand, which works itself into every seam, is not so
easily got rid of. Sponges, which are picked up on the shore, as is
well known, retain some of the sand of the beach to the latest day, in
spite of every effort to extract it.

I found one stone on the top of the bank, of a dark gray color, shaped
exactly like a giant clam (_Mactra solidissima_), and of the same size;
and, what was more remarkable, one-half of the outside had shelled off
and lay near it, of the same form and depth with one of the valves of
this clam, while the other half was loose, leaving a solid core of a
darker color within it. I afterward saw a stone resembling a razor
clam, but it was a solid one. It appeared as if the stone, in the
process of formation, had filled the mould which a clam-shell
furnished; or the same law that shaped the clam had made a clam of
stone. Dead clams, with shells full of sand, are called sand clams.
There were many of the large clamshells filled with sand; and sometimes
one valve was separately filled exactly even, as if it had been heaped
and then scraped. Even, among the many small stones on the top of the
bank, I found one arrow-head.

Beside the giant clam and barnacles, we found on the shore a small clam
(_Mesodesma arctata_), which I dug with my hands in numbers on the
bars, and which is sometimes eaten by the inhabitants, in the absence
of the _Mya arenaria_, on this side. Most of their empty shells had
been perforated by some foe.—Also, the

_Astarte castanea_.

The Edible Mussel (_Mytilus edulis_) on the few rocks, and washed up in
curious bunches of forty or fifty, held together by its rope-like
_byssus_.

The Scollop Shell (_Pecten concentricus_), used for card-racks and
pin-cushions.

Cockles, or Cuckoos (_Natica heros_), and their remarkable _nidus_,
called “sand-circle,” looking like the top of a stone jug without the
stopple, and broken on one side, or like a flaring dickey made of
sand-paper. Also,

_Cancellaria Couthouyi_ (?), and

Periwinkles (?) (_Fusus decemcostatus_).

We afterward saw some other kinds on the Bay-side. Gould states that
this Cape “has Hitler proved a barrier to the migrations of many
species of Mollusca.”—“Of the one hundred and ninety-seven species
[which he described in 1840 as belonging to Massachusetts],
eighty-three do not pass to the South shore, and fifty are not found on
the North shore of the Cape.”

Among Crustacea, there were the shells of Crabs and Lobsters, often
bleached quite white high up the beach; Sea or Beach Fleas
(_Amphipoda_); and the cases of the Horse-shoe Crab, or Saucepan Fish
(_Limulus Polyphemus_), of which we saw many alive on the Bay side,
where they feed pigs on them. Their tails were used as arrow-heads by
the Indians.

Of Radiata, there were the Sea Chestnut or Egg (_Echinus granulatus_),
commonly divested of its spines; flat circular shells (_Scutella
parma?_) covered with chocolate-colored spines, but becoming smooth and
white, with five petal-like figures; a few Star-fishes or Five-fingers
(_Asterias rubens_); and Sun-fishes or Sea-jellies (_Aureliæ_).

There was also at least one species of Sponge.

The plants which I noticed here and there on the pure sandy shelf,
between the ordinary high-water mark and the foot of the bank, were Sea
Rocket (_Cakile Americana_), Saltwort (_Salsola kali_), Sea Sandwort
(_Honkenya peploides_), Sea Burdock (_Xanthium echinatum_), Sea-side
Spurge (_Euphorbia poylgonifolia_); also, Beach Grass (_Arundo,
Psamma_, or _Calamagrostis arenaria_), Sea-side Golden-rod (_Solidago
sempervirens_), and the Beach Pea (_Lathyrus maritimus_).

Sometimes we helped a wrecker turn over a larger log than usual, or we
amused ourselves with rolling stones down the bank, but we rarely could
make one reach the water, the beach was so soft and wide; or we bathed
in some shallow within a bar, where the sea covered us with sand at
every flux, though it was quite cold and windy. The ocean there is
commonly but a tantalizing prospect in hot weather, for with all that
water before you, there is, as we were afterward told, no bathing on
the Atlantic side, on account of the undertow and the rumor of sharks.
At the lighthouse both in Eastham and Truro, the only houses quite on
the shore, they declared, the next year, that they would not bathe
there “for any sum,” for they sometimes saw the sharks tossed up and
quiver for a moment on the sand. Others laughed at these stories, but
perhaps they could afford to because they never bathed anywhere. One
old wrecker told us that he killed a regular man-eating shark fourteen
feet long, and hauled him out with his oxen, where we had bathed; and
another, that his father caught a smaller one of the same kind that was
stranded there, by standing him up on his snout so that the waves could
not take him. They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the
Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,—how they will sometimes
upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can
easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a
dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred
miles long. I should add, however, that in July we walked on the bank
here a quarter of a mile parallel with a fish about six feet in length,
possibly a shark, which was prowling slowly along within two rods of
the shore. It was of a pale brown color, singularly film-like and
indistinct in the water, as if all nature abetted this child of ocean,
and showed many darker transverse bars or rings whenever it came to the
surface. It is well known that different fishes even of the same
species are colored by the water they inhabit. We saw it go into a
little cove or bathing-tub, where we had just been bathing, where the
water was only four or five feet deep at that time, and after exploring
it go slowly out again; but we continued to bathe there, only observing
first from the bank if the cove was preoccupied. We thought that the
water was fuller of life, more aerated perhaps than that of the Bay,
like soda-water, for we were as particular as young salmon, and the
expectation of encountering a shark did not subtract anything from its
life-giving qualities.

Sometimes we sat on the wet beach and watched the beach birds,
sand-pipers, and others, trotting along close to each wave, and waiting
for the sea to cast up their breakfast. The former (_Charadrius
melodus_) ran with great rapidity and then stood stock still remarkably
erect and hardly to be distinguished from the beach. The wet sand was
covered with small skipping Sea Fleas, which apparently make a part of
their food. These last are the little scavengers of the beach, and are
so numerous that they will devour large fishes, which have been cast
up, in a very short time. One little bird not larger than a sparrow,—it
may have been a Phalarope.—would alight on the turbulent surface where
the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like
a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet
through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes
outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when
its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature
thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its
way as the breakers in theirs. There was also an almost uninterrupted
line of coots rising and falling with the waves, a few rods from the
shore, the whole length of the Cape. They made as constant a part of
the ocean’s border as the pads or pickerel-weed do of that of a pond.
We read the following as to the Storm Petrel (_Thalassidroma
Wilsonii_), which is seen in the Bay as well as on the outside. “The
feathers on the breast of the Storm Petrel are, like those of all
swimming birds, water-proof; but substances not susceptible of being
wetted with water are, for that very reason, the best fitted for
collecting oil from its surface. That function is performed by the
feathers on the breast of the Storm Petrels as they touch on the
surface; and though that may not be the only way in which they procure
their food, it is certainly that in which they obtain great part of it.
They dash along till they have loaded their feathers and then they
pause upon the wave and remove the oil with their bills.”

Thus we kept on along the gently curving shore, seeing two or three
miles ahead at once,—along this ocean side-walk, where there was none
to turn out for, with the middle of the road the highway of nations on
our right, and the sand cliffs of the Cape on our left. We saw this
forenoon a part of the wreck of a vessel, probably the _Franklin_, a
large piece fifteen feet square, and still freshly painted. With a
grapple and a line we could have saved it, for the waves repeatedly
washed it within cast, but they as often took it back. It would have
been a lucky haul for some poor wrecker, for I have been told that one
man who paid three or four dollars for a part of the wreck of that
vessel, sold fifty or sixty dollars’ worth of iron out of it. Another,
the same who picked up the Captain’s valise with the memorable letter
in it, showed me, growing in his garden, many pear and plum trees which
washed ashore from her, all nicely tied up and labelled, and he said
that he might have got five hundred dollars’ worth; for a Mr. Bell was
importing the nucleus of a nursery to be established near Boston. His
turnip-seed came from the same source. Also valuable spars from the
same vessel and from the _Cactus_ lay in his yard. In short the
inhabitants visit the beach to see what they have caught as regularly
as a fisherman his weir or a lumberer his boom; the Cape is their boom.
I heard of one who had recently picked up twenty barrels of apples in
good condition, probably a part of a deck load thrown over in a storm.

Though there are wreck-masters appointed to look after valuable
property which must be advertised, yet undoubtedly a great deal of
value is secretly carried off. But are we not all wreckers contriving
that some treasure may be washed up on our beach, that we may secure
it, and do we not infer the habits of these Nauset and Barnegat
wreckers from the common modes of getting a living?

The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of
human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not
vomit up. It lets nothing lie; not even the giant clams which cling to
its bottom. It is still heaving up the tow-cloth of the _Franklin_, and
perhaps a piece of some old pirate’s ship, wrecked more than a hundred
years ago, comes ashore to-day. Some years since, when a vessel was
wrecked here which had nutmegs in her cargo, they were strewn all along
the beach, and for a considerable time were not spoiled by the salt
water. Soon afterward, a fisherman caught a cod which was full of them.
Why, then, might not the Spice-Islanders shake their nutmeg trees into
the ocean, and let all nations who stand in need of them pick them up?
However, after a year, I found that the nutmegs from the _Franklin_ had
become soft.

You might make a curious list of articles which fishes have
swallowed,—sailors’ open clasp-knives, and bright tin snuff-boxes, not
knowing what was in them,—and jugs, and jewels, and Jonah. The other
day I came across the following scrap in a newspaper.

“A Religious Fish.—A short time ago, mine host Stewart, of the Denton
Hotel, purchased a rock-fish, weighing about sixty pounds. On opening
it he found in it a certificate of membership of the M. E. Church,
which we read as follows:—

                                    Member Methodist E. Church. Founded
                                    A. D. 1784. Quarterly Ticket. 18
                                    Minister.

‘For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a
far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.’—2 Cor. iv. 17.


‘O what are all my sufferings here,
    If, Lord, thou count me meet
With that enraptured host t’ appear,
    And worship at thy feet!’


“The paper was of course in a crumpled and wet condition, but on
exposing it to the sun, and ironing the kinks out of it, it became
quite legible.—_Denton_ (_Md._) _Journal_.”

From time to time we saved a wreck ourselves, a box or barrel, and set
it on its end, and appropriated it with crossed sticks; and it will lie
there perhaps, respected by brother wreckers, until some more violent
storm shall take it, really lost to man until wrecked again. We also
saved, at the cost of wet feet only, a valuable cord and buoy, part of
a seine, with which the sea was playing, for it seemed ungracious to
refuse the least gift which so great a personage offered you. We
brought this home and still use it for a garden line. I picked up a
bottle half buried in the wet sand, covered with barnacles, but
stoppled tight, and half full of red ale, which still smacked of
juniper,—all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy
world,—that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale
on the other, preserving their separate characters. What if it could
tell us its adventures over countless ocean waves! Man would not be man
through such ordeals as it had passed. But as I poured it slowly out on
to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied
bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for
a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances; but destined
erelong to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the
sands of a distant shore.

In the summer I saw two men fishing for Bass hereabouts. Their bait was
a bullfrog, or several small frogs in a bunch, for want of squid. They
followed a retiring wave and whirling their lines round and round their
heads with increasing rapidity, threw them as far as they could into
the sea; then retreating, sat down, flat on the sand, and waited for a
bite. It was literally (or _littorally_) walking down to the shore, and
throwing your line into the Atlantic. I should not have known what
might take hold of the other end, whether Proteus or another. At any
rate, if you could not pull him in, why, you might let him go without
being pulled in yourself. And _they_ knew by experience that it would
be a Striped Bass, or perhaps a Cod, for these fishes play along near
the shore.

From time to time we sat under the lee of a sand-hill on the bank,
thinly covered with coarse Beach-grass, and steadily gazed on the sea,
or watched the vessels going south, all Blessings of the Bay of course.
We could see a little more than half a circle of ocean, besides the
glimpses of the Bay which we got behind us; the sea there was not wild
and dreary in all respects, for there were frequently a hundred sail in
sight at once on the Atlantic. You can commonly count about eighty in a
favorable summer day and pilots sometimes land and ascend the bank to
look out for these which require their services. These had been waiting
for fair weather, and had come out of Boston Harbor together. The same
is the case when they have been assembled in the Vineyard Sound, so
that you may see but few one day, and a large fleet the next. Schooners
with many jibs and stay-sails crowded all the sea road; square-rigged
vessels with their great height and breadth of canvas were ever and
anon appearing out of the far horizon, or disappearing and sinking into
it; here and there a pilot-boat was towing its little boat astern
toward some distant foreigner who had just fired a gun, the echo of
which along the shore sounded like the caving of the bank. We could see
the pilot looking through his glass toward the distant ship which was
putting back to speak with him. He sails many a mile to meet her; and
now she puts her sails aback, and communicates with him
alongside,—sends some important message to the owners, and then bids
farewell to these shores for good and all; or, perchance a propeller
passed and made fast to some disabled craft, or one that had been
becalmed, whose cargo of fruit might spoil. Though silently, and for
the most part incommunicatively, going about their business, they were,
no doubt, a source of cheerfulness and a kind of society to one
another.

[Illustration: Unloading the day's catch]

To-day it was the Purple Sea, an epithet which I should not before have
accepted. There were distinct patches of the color of a purple grape
with the bloom rubbed off. But first and last the sea is of all colors.
Well writes Gilpin concerning “the brilliant hues which are continually
playing on the surface of a quiet ocean,” and this was not too
turbulent at a distance from the shore. “Beautiful,” says he, “no doubt
in a high degree are those glimmering tints which often invest the tops
of mountains; but they are mere coruscations compared with these marine
colors, which are continually varying and shifting into each other in
all the vivid splendor of the rainbow, through the space often of
several leagues.” Commonly, in calm weather, for half a mile from the
shore, where the bottom tinges it, the sea is green, or greenish, as
are some ponds; then blue for many miles, often with purple tinges,
bounded in the distance by a light almost silvery stripe; beyond which
there is generally a dark-blue rim, like a mountain-ridge in the
horizon, as if, like that, it owed its color to the intervening
atmosphere. On another day it will be marked with long streaks,
alternately smooth and rippled, light-colored and dark, even like our
inland meadows in a freshet, and showing which way the wind sets.

Thus we sat on the foaming shore, looking on the wine-colored ocean,—

Φίν’ ἔφ’ ἁλὸς πολιῆς, ὁρόων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον.


Here and there was a darker spot on its surface, the shadow of a cloud,
though the sky was so clear that no cloud would have been noticed
otherwise, and no shadow would have been seen on the land, where a much
smaller surface is visible at once. So, distant clouds and showers may
be seen on all sides by a sailor in the course of a day, which do not
necessarily portend rain where he is. In July we saw similar dark-blue
patches where schools of Menhaden rippled the surface, scarcely to be
distinguished from the shadows of clouds. Sometimes the sea was spotted
with them far and wide, such is its inexhaustible fertility. Close at
hand you see their back fin, which is very long and sharp, projecting
two or three inches above water. From time to time also we saw the
white bellies of the Bass playing along the shore.

It was a poetic recreation to watch those distant sails steering for
half-fabulous ports, whose very names are a mysterious music to our
ears: Fayal, and Babelmandel, ay, and Chagres, and Panama,—bound to the
famous Bay of San Francisco, and the golden streams of Sacramento and
San Joaquin, to Feather River and the American Fork, where Sutter’s
Fort presides, and inland stands the City de los Angeles. It is
remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing
remarkable was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood. The heroes and
discoverers have found true more than was previously believed, only
when they were expecting and dreaming of something more than their
contemporaries dreamed of, or even themselves discovered, that is, when
they were in a frame of mind fitted to behold the truth. Referred to
the world’s standard, they are always insane. Even savages have
indirectly surmised as much. Humboldt, speaking of Columbus approaching
the New World, says: “The grateful coolness of the evening air, the
ethereal purity of the starry firmament, the balmy fragrance of
flowers, wafted to him by the land breeze, all led him to suppose (as
we are told by Herrara, in the Decades) that he was approaching the
garden of Eden, the sacred abode of our first parents. The Orinoco
seemed to him one of the four rivers which, according to the venerable
tradition of the ancient world, flowed from Paradise, to water and
divide the surface of the earth, newly adorned with plants.” So even
the expeditions for the discovery of El Dorado, and of the Fountain of
Youth, led to real, if not compensatory discoveries.

We discerned vessels so far off, when once we began to look, that only
the tops of their masts in the horizon were visible, and it took a
strong intention of the eye, and its most favorable side, to see them
at all, and sometimes we doubted if we were not counting our eyelashes.
Charles Darwin states that he saw, from the base of the Andes, “the
masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although not
less than twenty-six geographical miles distant,” and that Anson had
been surprised at the distance at which his vessels were discovered
from the coast, without knowing the reason, namely, the great height of
the land and the transparency of the air. Steamers may be detected much
farther than sailing vessels, for, as one says, when their hulls and
masts of wood and iron are down, their smoky masts and streamers still
betray them; and the same writer, speaking of the comparative
advantages of bituminous and anthracite coal for war-steamers, states
that, “from the ascent of the columns of smoke above the horizon, the
motions of the steamers in Calais Harbor [on the coast of France] are
at all times observable at Ramsgate [on the English coast], from the
first lighting of the fires to the putting out at sea; and that in
America the steamers burning the fat bituminous coal can be tracked at
sea at least seventy miles before the hulls become visible, by the
dense columns of black smoke pouring out of their chimneys, and
trailing along the horizon.”

Though there were numerous vessels at this great distance in the
horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces between them, like the
spaces between the stars, far as they were distant from us, so were
they from one another,—nay, some were twice as far from each other as
from us,—impressed us with a sense of the immensity of the ocean, the
“unfruitful ocean,” as it has been called, and we could see what
proportion man and his works bear to the globe. As we looked off, and
saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the
farther we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it appeared to
have no relation to the friendly land, either as shore or bottom,—of
what use is a bottom if it is out of sight, if it is two or three miles
from the surface, and you are to be drowned so long before you get to
it, though it were made of the same stuff with your native soil?—over
that ocean, where, as the Veda says, “there is nothing to give support,
nothing to rest upon, nothing to cling to,” I felt that I was a land
animal. The man in a balloon even may commonly alight on the earth in a
few moments, but the sailor’s only hope is that he may reach the
distant shore. I could then appreciate the heroism of the old
navigator. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, of whom it is related that, being
overtaken by a storm when on his return from America, in the year 1583,
far northeastward from where we were, sitting abaft with a book in his
hand, just before he was swallowed up in the deep, he cried out to his
comrades in the _Hind_, as they came within hearing, “We are as near to
Heaven by sea as by land.” I saw that it would not be easy to realize.

On Cape Cod, the next most eastern land you hear of is St. George’s
Bank (the fishermen tell of “Georges,” “Cashus,” and other sunken lands
which they frequent). Every Cape man has a theory about George’s Bank
having been an island once, and in their accounts they gradually reduce
the shallowness from six, five, four, two fathoms, to somebody’s
confident assertion that he has seen a mackerel-gull sitting; on a
piece of dry land there. It reminded me, when I thought of the
shipwrecks which had taken place there, of the Isle of Demons, laid
down off this coast in old charts of the New World. There must be
something monstrous, methinks, in a vision of the sea bottom from over
some bank a thousand miles from the shore, more awful than its imagined
bottomlessness; a drowned continent, all livid and frothing at the
nostrils, like the body of a drowned man, which is better sunk deep
than near the surface.

I have been surprised to discover from a steamer the shallowness of
Massachusetts Bay itself. Off Billingsgate Point I could have touched
the bottom with a pole, and I plainly saw it variously shaded with
sea-weed, at five or six miles from the shore. This is “The
Shoal-ground of the Cape,” it is true, but elsewhere the bay is not
much deeper than a country pond. We are told that the deepest water in
the English Channel between Shakespeare’s Cliff and Cape Grinéz, in
France, is one hundred and eighty feet; and Guyot says that “the Baltic
Sea has a depth of only one hundred and twenty feet between the coasts
of Germany and those of Sweden,” and “the Adriatic between Venice and
Trieste has a depth of only one hundred and thirty feet.” A pond in my
native town, only half a mile long, is more than one hundred feet deep.

The ocean is but a larger lake. At midsummer you may sometimes see a
strip of glassy smoothness on it, a few rods in width and many miles
long, as if the surface there were covered with a thin pellicle of oil,
just as on a country pond; a sort of stand-still, you would say, at the
meeting or parting of two currents of air (if it does not rather mark
the unrippled steadiness of a current of water beneath), for sailors
tell of the ocean and land breeze meeting between the fore and aft
sails of a vessel, while the latter are full, the former being suddenly
taken aback. Daniel Webster, in one of his letters describing
blue-fishing off Martha’s Vineyard, referring to those smooth places,
which fishermen and sailors call “slicks,” says: “We met with them
yesterday, and our boatman made for them, whenever discovered. He said
they were caused by the blue-fish chopping up their prey. That is to
say, those voracious fellows get into a school of menhaden, which are
too large to swallow whole, and they bite them into pieces to suit
their tastes. And the oil from this butchery, rising to the surface,
makes the ‘slick.’”

Yet this same placid Ocean, as civil now as a city’s harbor, a place
for ships and commerce, will erelong be lashed into sudden fury, and
all its caves and cliffs will resound with tumult. It will ruthlessly
heave these vessels to and fro, break them in pieces in its sandy or
stony jaws, and deliver their crews to sea-monsters. It will play with
them like sea-weed, distend them like dead frogs, and carry them about,
now high, now low, to show to the fishes, giving them a nibble. This
gentle Ocean will toss and tear the rag of a man’s body like the father
of mad bulls, and his relatives may be seen seeking the remnants for
weeks along the strand. From some quiet inland hamlet they have rushed
weeping to the unheard-of shore, and now stand uncertain where a sailor
has recently been buried amid the sandhills.

It is generally supposed that they who have long been conversant with
the Ocean can foretell by certain indications, such as its roar and the
notes of sea-fowl, when it will change from calm to storm; but probably
no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists; they know no more, at
least, than the older sailors do about this voyage of life on which we
are all embarked. Nevertheless, we love to hear the sayings of old
sailors, and their accounts of natural phenomena, which totally ignore,
and are ignored by, science; and possibly they have not always looked
over the gunwale so long in vain. Kalm repeats a story which was told
him in Philadelphia by a Mr. Cock, who was one day sailing to the West
Indies in a small yacht, with an old man on board who was well
acquainted with those seas. “The old man sounding the depth, called to
the mate to tell Mr. Cock to launch the boats immediately, and to put a
sufficient number of men into them, in order to tow the yacht during
the calm, that they might reach the island before them as soon as
possible, as within twenty-four hours there would be a strong
hurricane. Mr. Cock asked him what reasons he had to think so; the old
man replied that, on sounding, he saw the lead in the water at a
distance of many fathoms more than he had seen it before; that
therefore the water was become clear all of a sudden, which he looked
upon as a certain sign of an impending hurricane in the sea.” The
sequel of the story is that, by good fortune and by dint of rowing they
managed to gain a safe harbor before the hurricane had reached its
height; but it finally raged with so much violence that not only many
ships were lost and houses unroofed, but even their own vessel in
harbor was washed so far on shore that several weeks elapsed before it
could be got off.

The Greeks would not have called the ocean ἀτρύγετος, or unfruitful,
though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of
modern science; for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the
land, is the principal seat of life,”—though not of vegetable life.
Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost
as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions
of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with
animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme point of flowering
plants”; but they add that “experiments of dredging in very deep water
have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a
desert”;—“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor,
“merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by
the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all
things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale
of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,”
says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after
having lived in its lower stage on dry land.” but as in the case of the
tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In
short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water in its way
to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we
come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did
not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with
water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as ἀτρύγετος, or
unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of
continents.”

Though we have indulged in some placid reflections of late, the reader
must not forget that the dash and roar of the waves were incessant.
Indeed, it would be well if he were to read with a large conch-shell at
his ear. But notwithstanding that it was very cold and windy to-day, it
was such a cold as we thought would not cause one to take cold who was
exposed to it, owing to the saltness of the air and the dryness of the
soil. Yet the author of the old Description of Wellfleet says: “The
atmosphere is very much impregnated with saline particles, which,
perhaps, with the great use of fish, and the neglect of cider and
spruce-beer, may be a reason why the people are more subject to sore
mouths and throats than in other places.”



VII
ACROSS THE CAPE


When we have returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why
we did not spend more time in gazing at the sea; but very soon the
traveller does not look as the sea more than at the heavens. As for the
interior, if the elevated sand-bar in the midst of the ocean can be
said to have any interior, it was an exceedingly desolate landscape,
with rarely a cultivated or cultivable field in sight. We saw no
villages, and seldom a house, for these are generally on the Bay side.
It was a succession of shrubby hills and valleys, now wearing an
autumnal tint. You would frequently think, from the character of the
surface, the dwarfish trees, and the bearberries around, that you were
on the top of a mountain. The only wood in Eastham was on the edge of
Wellfleet. The pitch-pines were not commonly more than fifteen or
eighteen feet high. The larger ones covered with lichens,—often hung
with the long gray _Usnea_. There is scarcely a white-pine on the
forearm of the Cape. Yet in the northwest part of Eastham, near the
Camp Ground, we saw, the next summer, some quite rural, and even sylvan
retreats, for the Cape, where small rustling groves of oaks and locusts
and whispering pines, on perfectly level ground, made a little
paradise. The locusts, both transplanted and growing naturally about
the houses there, appeared to flourish better than any other tree.
There were thin belts of wood in Wellfleet and Truro, a mile or more
from the Atlantic, but, for the most part, we could see the horizon
through them, or, if extensive, the trees were not large. Both oaks and
pines had often the same flat look with the apple-trees. Commonly, the
oak woods twenty-five years old were a mere scraggy shrubbery nine or
ten feet high, and we could frequently reach to their topmost leaf.
Much that is called “woods” was about half as high as this,—only
patches of shrub-oak, bayberry, beach-plum, and wild roses, overrun
with woodbine. When the roses were in bloom, these patches in the midst
of the sand displayed such a profusion of blossoms, mingled with the
aroma of the bayberry, that no Italian or other artificial rose-garden
could equal them. They were perfectly Elysian, and realized my idea of
an oasis in the desert. Huckleberry-bushes were very abundant, and the
next summer they bore a remarkable quantity of that kind of gall called
Huckleberry-apple, forming quite handsome though monstrous blossoms.
But it must be added, that this shrubbery swarmed with wood-ticks,
sometimes very troublesome parasites, and which it takes very horny
fingers to crack.

[Illustration: A Truro footpath]

The inhabitants of these towns have a great regard for a tree, though
their standard for one is necessarily neither large nor high; and when
they tell you of the large trees that once grew here, you must think of
them, not as absolutely large, but large compared with the present
generation. Their “brave old oaks,” of which they speak with so much
respect, and which they will point out to you as relics of the
primitive forest, one hundred or one hundred and fifty, ay, for aught
they know, two hundred years old, have a ridiculously dwarfish
appearance, which excites a smile in the beholder. The largest and most
venerable which they will show you in such a case are, perhaps, not
more than twenty or twenty-five feet high. I was especially amused by
the Liliputian old oaks in the south part of Truro. To the
inexperienced eye, which appreciated their proportions only, they might
appear vast as the tree which saved his royal majesty, but measured,
they were dwarfed at once almost into lichens which a deer might eat up
in a morning. Yet they will tell you that large schooners were once
built of timber which grew in Wellfleet. The old houses also are built
of the timber of the Cape; but instead of the forests in the midst of
which they originally stood, barren heaths, with poverty-grass for
heather, now stretch away on every side. The modern houses are built of
what is called “dimension timber,” _imported_ from Maine, all ready to
be set up, so that commonly they do not touch it again with an axe.
Almost all the wood used for fuel is imported by vessels or currents,
and of course all the coal. I was told that probably a quarter of the
fuel and a considerable part of the lumber used in North Truro was
drift-wood. Many get _all_ their fuel from the beach.

Of birds not found in the interior of the State,—at least in my
neighborhood,—I heard, in the summer, the Black-throated Bunting
(_Fringilla Americana_) amid the shrubbery, and in the open land the
Upland Plover (_Totanus Bartramius_), whose quivering notes were ever
and anon prolonged into a clear, somewhat plaintive, yet hawk-like
scream, which sounded at a very indefinite distance. The bird may have
been in the next field, though it sounded a mile off.

To-day we were walking through Truro, a town of about eighteen hundred
inhabitants. We had already come to Pamet River, which empties into the
Bay. This was the limit of the Pilgrims’ journey up the Cape from
Provincetown, when seeking a place for settlement. It rises in a hollow
within a few rods of the Atlantic, and one who lives near its source
told us that in high tides the sea leaked through, yet the wind and
waves preserve intact the barrier between them, and thus the whole
river is steadily driven westward butt-end foremost,—fountain-head,
channel, and light-house at the mouth, all together.

Early in the afternoon we reached the Highland Light, whose white tower
we had seen rising out of the bank in front of us for the last mile or
two. It is fourteen miles from the Nauset Lights, on what is called the
Clay Pounds, an immense bed of clay abutting on the Atlantic, and, as
the keeper told us, stretching quite across the Cape, which is here
only about two miles wide. We perceived at once a difference in the
soil, for there was an interruption of the desert, and a slight
appearance of a sod under our feet, such as we had not seen for the
last two days.

After arranging to lodge at the light-house, we rambled across the Cape
to the Bay, over a singularly bleak and barren-looking country,
consisting of rounded hills and hollows, called by geologists diluvial
elevations and depressions,—a kind of scenery which has been compared
to a chopped sea, though this suggests too sudden a transition. There
is a delineation of this very landscape in Hitchcock’s Report on the
Geology of Massachusetts, a work which, by its size at least, reminds
one of a diluvial elevation itself. Looking southward from the
light-house, the Cape appeared like an elevated plateau, sloping very
regularly, though slightly, downward from the edge of the bank on the
Atlantic side, about one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, to
that on the Bay side. On traversing this we found it to be interrupted
by broad valleys or gullies, which become the hollows in the bank when
the sea has worn up to them. They are commonly at right angles with the
shore, and often extend quite across the Cape. Some of the valleys,
however, are circular, a hundred feet deep without any outlet, as if
the Cape had sunk in those places, or its sands had run out. The few
scattered houses which we passed, being placed at the bottom of the
hollows for shelter and fertility, were, for the most part, concealed
entirely, as much as if they had been swallowed up in the earth. Even a
village with its meeting-house, which we had left little more than a
stone’s throw behind, had sunk into the earth, spire and all, and we
saw only the surface of the upland and the sea on either hand. When
approaching it, we had mistaken the belfry for a summer-house on the
plain. We began to think that we might tumble into a village before we
were aware of it, as into an ant-lion’s hole, and be drawn into the
sand irrecoverably. The most conspicuous objects on the land were a
distant windmill, or a meeting-house standing alone, for only they
could afford to occupy an exposed place. A great part of the township,
however, is a barren, heath-like plain, and perhaps one third of it
lies in common, though the property of individuals. The author of the
old “Description of Truro,” speaking of the soil, says: “The snow,
which would be of essential service to it provided it lay level and
covered the ground, is blown into drifts and into the sea.” This
peculiar open country, with here and there a patch of shrubbery,
extends as much as seven miles, or from Pamet River on the south to
High Head on the north, and from Ocean to Bay. To walk over it makes on
a stranger such an impression as being at sea, and he finds it
impossible to estimate distances in any weather. A windmill or a herd
of cows may seem to be far away in the horizon, yet, after going a few
rods, he will be close upon them. He is also deluded by other kinds of
mirage. When, in the summer, I saw a family a-blueberrying a mile off,
walking about amid the dwarfish bushes which did not come up higher
than their ankles, they seemed to me to be a race of giants, twenty
feet high at least.

The highest and sandiest portion next the Atlantic was thinly covered
with Beach-grass and Indigo-weed. Next to this the surface of the
upland generally consisted of white sand and gravel, like coarse salt,
through which a scanty vegetation found its way up. It will give an
ornithologist some idea of its barrenness if I mention that the next
June, the month of grass. I found a night-hawk’s eggs there, and that
almost any square rod thereabouts, taken at random, would be an
eligible site for such a deposit. The kildeer-plover, which loves a
similar locality, also drops its eggs there, and fills the air above
with its din. This upland also produced _Cladonia_ lichens,
poverty-grass, savory-leaved aster (_Diplopappus linariifolius_),
mouse-ear, bear-berry, &c. On a few hillsides the savory-leaved aster
and mouse-ear alone made quite a dense sward, said to be very pretty
when the aster is in bloom. In some parts the two species of
poverty-grass (_Hudsonia tomentosa_ and _ericoides_), which deserve a
better name, reign for miles in littli hemispherical tufts or islets,
like moss, scattered over the waste. They linger in bloom there till
the middle of July. Occasionally near the beach these rounded beds, as
also those of the sea-sandwort (_Honkenya peploides_), were filled with
sand within an inch of their tops, and were hard, like large ant-hills,
while the surrounding sand was soft. In summer, if the poverty-grass
grows at the head of a Hollow looking toward the sea, in a bleak
position where the wind rushes up, the northern or exposed half of the
tuft is sometimes all black and dead like an oven-broom, while the
opposite half is yellow with blossoms, the whole hillside thus
presenting a remarkable contrast when seen from the poverty-stricken
and the flourishing side. This plant, which in many places would be
esteemed an ornament, is here despised by many on account of its being
associated with barrenness. It might well be adopted for the Barnstable
coat-of-arms, in a field _sableux_. I should be proud of it. Here and
there were tracts of Beach-grass mingled with the Sea-side Goldenrod
and Beach-pea, which reminded us still more forcibly of the ocean.

[Illustration: Truro meeting-house on the hill]

We read that there was not a brook in Truro. Yet there were deer here
once, which must often have panted in vain; but I am pretty sure that I
afterward saw a small fresh-water brook emptying into the south side of
Pamet River, though I was so heedless as not to taste it. At any rate,
a little boy near by told me that he drank at it. There was not a tree
as far as we could see, and that was many miles each way, the general
level of the upland being about the same everywhere. Even from the
Atlantic side we overlooked the Bay, and saw to Manomet Point in
Plymouth, and better from that side because it was the highest. The
almost universal bareness and smoothness of the landscape were as
agreeable as novel, making it so much the more like the deck of a
vessel. We saw vessels sailing south into the Bay, on the one hand, and
north along the Atlantic shore, on the other, all with an aft wind.

The single road which runs lengthwise the Cape, now winding over the
plain, now through the shrubbery which scrapes the wheels of the stage,
was a mere cart-track in the sand, commonly without any fences to
confine it, and continually changing from this side to that, to harder
ground, or sometimes to avoid the tide. But the inhabitants travel the
waste here and there pilgrim-wise and staff in hand, by narrow
footpaths, through which the sand flows out and reveals the nakedness
of the land. We shuddered at the thought of living there and taking our
afternoon walks over those barren swells, where we could overlook every
step of our walk before taking it, and would have to pray for a fog or
a snow-storm to conceal our destiny. The walker there must soon eat his
heart.

In the north part of the town there is no house from shore to shore for
several miles, and it is as wild and solitary as the Western
Prairies—used to be. Indeed, one who has seen every house in Truro will
be surprised to hear of the number of the inhabitants, but perhaps five
hundred of the men and boys of this small town were then abroad on
their fishing grounds. Only a few men stay at home to till the sand or
watch for blackfish. The farmers are fishermen-farmers and understand
better ploughing the sea than the land. They do not disturb their sands
much, though there is a plenty of sea-weed in the creeks, to say
nothing of blackfish occasionally rotting the shore. Between the Pond
and East Harbor Village there was an interesting plantation of
pitch-pines, twenty or thirty acres in extent, like those which we had
already seen from the stage. One who lived near said that the land was
purchased by two men for a shilling or twenty-five cents an acre. Some
is not considered worth writing a deed for. This soil or sand, which
was partially covered with poverty and beach grass, sorrel, &c., was
furrowed at intervals of about four feet and the seed dropped by a
machine. The pines had come up admirably and grown the first year three
or four inches, and the second six inches and more. Where the seed had
been lately planted the white sand was freshly exposed in an endless
furrow winding round and round the sides of the deep hollows, in a
vertical spiral manner, which produced a very singular effect, as if
you were looking into the reverse side of a vast banded shield. This
experiment, so important to the Cape, appeared very successful, and
perhaps the time will come when the greater part of this kind of land
in Barnstable County will be thus covered with an artificial pine
forest, as has been done in some parts of France. In that country
12,500 acres of downs had been thus covered in 1811 near Bayonne. They
are called _pignadas_, and according to Loudon “constitute the
principal riches of the inhabitants, where there was a drifting desert
before.” It seemed a nobler kind of grain to raise than corn even.

[Illustration: A herd of cows]

A few years ago Truro was remarkable among the Cape towns for the
number of sheep raised in it; but I was told that at this time only two
men kept sheep in the town, and in 1855, a Truro boy ten years old told
me that he had never seen one. They were formerly pastured on the
unfenced lands or general fields, but now the owners were more
particular to assert their rights, and it cost too much for fencing.
The rails are cedar from Maine, and two rails will answer for ordinary
purposes, but four are required for sheep. This was the reason assigned
by one who had formerly kept them for not keeping them any longer.
Fencing stuff is so expensive that I saw fences made with only one
rail, and very often the rail when split was carefully tied with a
string. In one of the villages I saw the next summer a cow tethered by
a rope six rods long, the rope long in proportion as the feed was short
and thin. Sixty rods, ay, all the cables of the Cape, would have been
no more than fair. Tethered in the desert for fear that she would get
into Arabia Felix! I helped a man weigh a bundle of hay which he was
selling to his neighbor, holding one end of a pole from which it swung
by a steel-yard hook, and this was just half his whole crop. In short,
the country looked so barren that I several times refrained from asking
the inhabitants for a string or a piece of wrapping-paper, for fear I
should rob them, for they plainly were obliged to import these things
as well as rails, and where there were no newsboys, I did not see what
they would do for waste paper.

The objects around us, the make-shifts of fishermen ashore, often made
us look down to see if we were standing on terra firma. In the wells
everywhere a block and tackle were used to raise the bucket, instead of
a windlass, and by almost every house was laid up a spar or a plank or
two full of auger-holes, saved from a wreck. The windmills were partly
built of these, and they were worked into the public bridges. The
light-house keeper, who was having his barn shingled, told me casually
that he had made three thousand good shingles for that purpose out of a
mast. You would sometimes see an old oar used for a rail. Frequently
also some fair-weather finery ripped off a vessel by a storm near the
coast was nailed up against an outhouse. I saw fastened to a shed near
the lighthouse a long new sign with the words “ANGLO SAXON” on it in
large gilt letters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could
afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the same time
with the pilot. But it interested somewhat as if it had been a part of
the Argo, clipped off in passing through the Symplegades.

To the fisherman, the Cape itself is a sort of store-ship laden with
supplies,—a safer and larger craft which carries the women and
children, the old men and the sick; and indeed sea-phrases are as
common on it as on board a vessel. Thus is it ever with a sea-going
people. The old Northmen used to speak of the “keel-ridge” of the
country, that is, the ridge of the Doffrafield Mountains, as if the
land were a boat turned bottom up. I was frequently reminded of the
Northmen here. The inhabitants of the Cape are often at once farmers
and sea-rovers; they are more than vikings or kings of the bays, for
their sway extends over the open sea also. A farmer in Wellfleet, at
whose house I afterward spent a night, who had raised fifty bushels of
potatoes the previous year, which is a large crop for the Cape, and had
extensive salt-works, pointed to his schooner, which lay in sight, in
which he and his man and boy occasionally ran down the coast a-trading
as far as the Capes of Virginia. This was his market-cart, and his
hired man knew how to steer her. Thus he drove two teams a-field,

“ere the high _seas_ appeared
Under the opening eyelids of the mom.”


Though probably he would not hear much of the “gray fly” on his way to
Virginia.

A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus
abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the
history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic
expedition into the shade. I have just heard of a Cape Cod captain who
was expected home in the beginning of the winter from the West Indies,
but was long since given up for lost, till his relations at length have
heard with joy, that, after getting within forty miles of Cape Cod
light, he was driven back by nine successive gales to Key West, between
Florida and Cuba, and was once again shaping his course for home. Thus
he spent his winter. In ancient times the adventures of these two or
three men and boys would have been made the basis of a myth, but now
such tales are crowded into a line of shorthand signs, like an
algebraic formula in the shipping news. “Wherever over the world,” said
Palfrey in his oration at Barnstable, “you see the stars and stripes
floating, you may have good hope that beneath them some one will be
found who can tell you the soundings of Barnstable, or Wellfleet, or
Chatham Harbor.”

I passed by the home of somebody’s (or everybody’s) Uncle Bill, one day
over on the Plymouth shore. It was a schooner half keeled-up on the
mud: we aroused the master out of a sound sleep at noonday, by thumping
on the bottom of his vessel till he presented himself at the hatchway,
for we wanted to borrow his clam-digger. Meaning to make him a call, I
looked out the next morning, and lo! he had run over to “the Pines” the
evening before, fearing an easterly storm. He outrode the _great_ gale
in the spring of 1851, dashing about alone in Plymouth Bay. He goes
after rockweed, lighters vessels, and saves wrecks. I still saw him
lying in the mud over at “the Pines” in the horizon, which place he
could not leave if he would till flood tide. But he would not then
probably. This waiting for the tide is a singular feature in life by
the sea-shore. A frequent answer is, “Well! you can’t start for two
hours yet.” It is something new to a landsman, and at first he is not
disposed to wait. History says that “two inhabitants of Truro were the
first who adventured to the Falkland Isles in pursuit of whales. This
voyage was undertaken in the year 1774, by the advice of Admiral
Montague of the British navy, and was crowned with success.”

At the Pond Village we saw a pond three eighths of a mile long densely
filled with cat-tail flags, seven feet high,—enough for all the coopers
in New England.

[Illustration: Pond Village]

The western shore was nearly as sandy as the eastern, but the water was
much smoother, and the bottom was partially covered with the slender
grass-like seaweed (_Zostera_), which we had not seen on the Atlantic
side; there were also a few rude sheds for trying fish on the beach
there, which made it appear less wild. In the few marshes on this side
we afterward saw Samphire, Rosemary, and other plants new to us
inlanders.

In the summer and fall sometimes, hundreds of blackfish (the Social
Whale, _Globicephalus Melas_ of De Kay; called also Black Whale-fish,
Howling Whale, Bottlehead, etc.), fifteen feet or more in length, are
driven ashore in a single school here. I witnessed such a scene in
July, 1855. A carpenter who was working at the lighthouse arriving
early in the morning remarked that he did not know but he had lost
fifty dollars by coming to his work; for as he came along the Bay side
he heard them driving a school of blackfish ashore, and he had debated
with himself whether he should not go and join them and take his share,
but had concluded to come to his work. After breakfast I came over to
this place, about two miles distant, and near the beach met some of the
fishermen returning from their chase. Looking up and down the shore, I
could see about a mile south some large black masses on the sand, which
I knew must be blackfish, and a man or two about them. As I walked
along towards them I soon came to a huge carcass whose head was gone
and whose blubber had been stripped off some weeks before; the tide was
just beginning to move it, and the stench compelled me to go a long way
round. When I came to Great Hollow I found a fisherman and some boys on
the watch, and counted about thirty blackfish, just killed, with many
lance wounds, and the water was more or less bloody around. They were
partly on shore and partly in the water, held by a rope round their
tails till the tide should leave them. A boat had been somewhat stove
by the tail of one. They were a smooth shining black, like
India-rubber, and had remarkably simple and lumpish forms for animated
creatures, with a blunt round snout or head, whale-like, and simple
stiff-looking flippers. The largest were about fifteen feet long, but
one or two were only five feet long, and still without teeth. The
fisherman slashed one with his jackknife, to show me how thick the
blubber was,—about three inches; and as I passed my finger through the
cut it was covered thick with oil. The blubber looked like pork, and
this man said that when they were trying it the boys would sometimes
come round with a piece of bread in one hand, and take a piece of
blubber in the other to eat with it, preferring it to pork scraps. He
also cut into the flesh beneath, which was firm and red like beef, and
he said that for his part he preferred it when fresh to beef. It is
stated that in 1812 blackfish were used as food by the poor of
Bretagne. They were waiting for the tide to leave these fishes high and
dry, that they might strip off the blubber and carry it to their
try-works in their boats, where they try it on the beach. They get
commonly a barrel of oil, worth fifteen or twenty dollars, to a fish.
There were many lances and harpoons in the boats,—much slenderer
instruments than I had expected. An old man came along the beach with a
horse and wagon distributing the dinners of the fishermen, which their
wives had put up in little pails and jugs, and which he had collected
in the Pond Village, and for this service, I suppose, he received a
share of the oil. If one could not tell his own pail, he took the first
he came to.

As I stood there they raised the cry of “another school,” and we could
see their black backs and their blowing about a mile northward, as they
went leaping over the sea like horses. Some boats were already in
pursuit there, driving them toward the beach. Other fishermen and boys
running up began to jump into the boats and push them off from where I
stood, and I might have gone too had I chosen. Soon there were
twenty-five or thirty boats in pursuit, some large ones under sail, and
others rowing with might and main, keeping outside of the school, those
nearest to the fishes striking on the sides of their boats and blowing
horns to drive them on to the beach. It was an exciting race. If they
succeed in driving them ashore each boat takes one share, and then each
man, but if they are compelled to strike them off shore each boat’s
company take what they strike. I walked rapidly along the shore toward
the north, while the fishermen were rowing still more swiftly to join
their companions, and a little boy who walked by my side was
congratulating himself that his father’s boat was beating another one.
An old blind fisherman whom we met, inquired, “Where are they? I can’t
see. Have they got them?” In the mean while the fishes had turned and
were escaping northward toward Provincetown, only occasionally the back
of one being seen. So the nearest crews were compelled to strike them,
and we saw several boats soon made fast, each to its fish, which, four
or five rods ahead, was drawing it like a race-horse straight toward
the beach, leaping half out of water, blowing blood and water from its
hole, and leaving a streak of foam behind. But they went ashore too far
north for us, though we could see the fishermen leap out and lance them
on the sand. It was just like pictures of whaling which I have seen,
and a fisherman told me that it was nearly as dangerous. In his first
trial he had been much excited, and in his haste had used a lance with
its scabbard on, but nevertheless had thrust it quite through his fish.

I learned that a few days before this one hundred and eighty blackfish
had been driven ashore in one school at Eastham, a little farther
south, and that the keeper of Billingsgate Point light went out one
morning about the same time and cut his initials on the backs of a
large school which had run ashore in the night, and sold his right to
them to Provincetown for one thousand dollars, and probably
Provincetown made as much more. Another fisherman told me that nineteen
years ago three hundred and eighty were driven ashore in one school at
Great Hollow. In the Naturalists’ Library, it is said that, in the
winter of 1809-10, one thousand one hundred and ten “approached the
shore of Hralfiord, Iceland, and were captured.” De Kay says it is not
known why they are stranded. But one fisherman declared to me that they
ran ashore in pursuit of squid, and that they generally came on the
coast about the last of July.

About a week afterward, when I came to this shore, it was strewn, as
far as I could see with a glass, with the carcasses of blackfish
stripped of their blubber and their heads cut off; the latter lying
higher up. Walking on the beach was out of the question on account of
the stench. Between Provincetown and Truro they lay in the very path of
the stage. Yet no steps were taken to abate the nuisance, and men were
catching lobsters as usual just off the shore. I was told that they did
sometimes tow them out and sink them; yet I wondered where they got the
stones to sink them with. Of course they might be made into guano, and
Cape Cod is not so fertile that her inhabitants can afford to do
without this manure,—to say nothing of the diseases they may produce.

After my return home, wishing to learn what was known about the
Blackfish, I had recourse to the reports of the zoological surveys of
the State, and I found that Storer had rightfully omitted it in his
Report on the Fishes, since it is not a fish; so I turned to Emmons’s
Report of the Mammalia, but was surprised to find that the seals and
whales were omitted by him, because he had had no opportunity to
observe them. Considering how this State has risen and thriven by its
fisheries.—that the legislature which authorized the Zoological Survey
sat under the emblem of a codfish,—that Nantucket and New Bedford are
within our limits,—that an early riser may find a thousand or fifteen
hundred dollars’ worth of blackfish on the shore in a morning,—that the
Pilgrims saw the Indians cutting up a blackfish on the shore at
Eastham, and called a part of that shore “Grampus Bay,” from the number
of blackfish they found there, before they got to Plymouth,—and that
from that time to this these fishes have continued to enrich one or two
counties almost annually, and that their decaying carcasses were now
poisoning the air of one county for more than thirty miles,—I thought
it remarkable that neither the popular nor scientific name was to be
found in a report on our mammalia,—a catalogue of the productions of
our land and water.

We had here, as well as all across the Cape, a fair view of
Provincetown, five or six miles distant over the water toward the west,
under its shrubby sand-hills, with its harbor now full of vessels whose
masts mingled with the spires of its churches, and gave it the
appearance of a quite large seaport town.

The inhabitants of all the lower Cape towns enjoy thus the prospect of
two seas. Standing on the western or larboard shore, and looking;
across to where the distant mainland looms, they can say. This is
Massachusetts Bay; and then, after an hour’s sauntering walk, they may
stand on the starboard side, beyond which no land is seen to loom, and
say, This is the Atlantic Ocean.

On our way back to the lighthouse, by whose white-washed tower we
steered as securely as the mariner by its light at night, we passed
through a graveyard, which apparently was saved from being blown away
by its slates, for they had enabled a thick bed of huckleberry-bushes
to root themselves amid the graves. We thought it would be worth the
while to read the epitaphs where so many were lost at sea; however, as
not only their lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lost or not
identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we expected,
though there were not a few. Their graveyard is the ocean. Near the
eastern side we started up a fox in a hollow, the only kind of wild
quadruped, if I except a skunk in a salt-marsh, that we saw in all our
walk (unless painted and box tortoises may be called quadrupeds). He
was a large, plump, shaggy fellow, like a yellow dog, with, as usual, a
white tip to his tail, and looked as if he fared well on the Cape. He
cantered away into the shrub-oaks and bayberry-bushes which chanced to
grow there, but were hardly high enough to conceal him. I saw another
the next summer leaping over the top of a beach-plum a little farther
north, a small arc of his course (which I trust is not yet run), from
which I endeavored in vain to calculate his whole orbit: there were too
many unknown attractions to be allowed for. I also saw the exuviae of a
third fast sinking into the sand, and added the skull to my collection.
Hence I concluded that they must be plenty thereabouts; but a traveller
may meet with more than an inhabitant, since he is more likely to take
an unfrequented route across the country. They told me that in some
years they died off in great numbers by a kind of madness, under the
effect of which they were seen whirling round and round as if in
pursuit of their tails. In Crantz’s account of Greenland, he says:
“They (the foxes) live upon birds and their eggs, and, when they can’t
get them, upon crowberries, mussels, crabs, and what the sea casts
out.”

Just before reaching the light-house, we saw the sun set in the
Bay,—for standing on that narrow Cape was, as I have said, like being
on the deck of a vessel, or rather at the masthead of a man-of-war,
thirty miles at sea, though we knew that at the same moment the sun was
setting behind our native hills, which were just below the horizon in
that direction. This sight drove everything else quite out of our
heads, and Homer and the Ocean came in again with a rush,—

Ἐν δ’ ἔπεσ’ Ὠκεανῷ λαμπρὸν φάος ἠελίοιο,


the shining torch of the sun fell into the ocean.



VIII
THE HIGHLAND LIGHT


This light-house, known to mariners as the Cape Cod or Highland Light,
is one of our “primary sea-coast lights,” and is usually the first seen
by those approaching the entrance of Massachusetts Bay from Europe. It
is forty-three miles from Cape Ann Light, and forty-one from Boston
Light. It stands about twenty rods from the edge of the bank, which is
here formed of clay. I borrowed the plane and square, level and
dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and using
one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of
quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of
elevation of the Bank opposite the light-house, and with a couple of
cod-lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the
shingle. It rises one hundred and ten feet above its immediate base, or
about one hundred and twenty-three feet above mean low water. Graham,
who has carefully surveyed the extremity of the Cape, makes it one
hundred and thirty feet. The mixed sand and clay lay at an angle of
forty degrees with the horizon, where I measured it, but the clay is
generally much steeper. No cow nor hen ever gets down it. Half a mile
farther south the bank is fifteen or twenty-five feet higher, and that
appeared to be the highest land in North Truro. Even this vast clay
bank is fast wearing away. Small streams of water trickling down it at
intervals of two or three rods, have left the intermediate clay in the
form of steep Gothic roofs fifty feet high or more, the ridges as sharp
and rugged-looking as rocks; and in one place the bank is curiously
eaten out in the form of a large semicircular crater.

[Illustration: Dragging a dory up on the beach]

According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both
sides, though most on the eastern. In some places it had lost many rods
within the last year, and, erelong, the light-house must be moved. We
calculated, _from his data_, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away
at this point, “for,” said he, “I can remember sixty years back.” We
were even more surprised at this last announcement,—that is, at the
slow waste of life and energy in our informant, for we had taken him to
be not more than forty,—than at the rapid wasting of the Cape, and we
thought that he stood a fair chance to outlive the former.

Between this October and June of the next year I found that the bank
had lost about forty feet in one place, opposite the light-house, and
it was cracked more than forty feet farther from the edge at the last
date, the shore being strewn with the recent rubbish. But I judged that
generally it was not wearing away here at the rate of more than six
feet annually. Any conclusions drawn from the observations of a few
years or one generation only are likely to prove false, and the Cape
may balk expectation by its durability. In some places even a wrecker’s
foot-path down the bank lasts several years. One old inhabitant told us
that when the light-house was built, in 1798, it was calculated that it
would stand forty-five years, allowing the bank to waste one length of
fence each year, “but,” said he, “there it is” (or rather another near
the same site, about twenty rods from the edge of the bank).

The sea is not gaining on the Cape everywhere, for one man told me of a
vessel wrecked long ago on the north of Provincetown whose “bones”
(this was his word) are still visible many rods within the present line
of the beach, half buried in sand. Perchance they lie alongside the
timbers of a whale. The general statement of the inhabitants is that
the Cape is wasting on both sides, but extending itself on particular
points on the south and west, as at Chatham and Monomoy Beaches, and at
Billingsgate, Long, and Race Points. James Freeman stated in his day
that above three miles had been added to Monomoy Beach during the
previous fifty years, and it is said to be still extending as fast as
ever. A writer in the Massachusetts Magazine, in the last century,
tells us that “when the English first settled upon the Cape, there was
an island off Chatham, at three leagues’ distance, called Webbs’
Island, containing twenty acres, covered with red-cedar or savin. The
inhabitants of Nantucket used to carry wood from it”; but he adds that
in his day a large rock alone marked the spot, and the water was six
fathoms deep there. The entrance to Nauset Harbor, which was once in
Eastham, has now travelled south into Orleans. The islands in Wellfleet
Harbor once formed a continuous beach, though now small vessels pass
between them. And so of many other parts of this coast.

Perhaps what the Ocean takes from one part of the Cape it gives to
another,—robs Peter to pay Paul. On the eastern side the sea appears to
be everywhere encroaching on the land. Not only the land is undermined,
and its ruins carried off by currents, but the sand is blown from the
beach directly up the steep bank where it is one hundred and fifty feet
high, and covers the original surface there many feet deep. If you sit
on the edge you will have ocular demonstration of this by soon getting
your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves its height as fast as it is
worn away. This sand is steadily travelling westward at a rapid rate,
“more than a hundred yards,” says one writer, within the memory of
inhabitants now living; so that in some places peat-meadows are buried
deep under the sand, and the peat is cut through it; and in one place a
large peat-meadow has made its appearance on the shore in the bank
covered many feet deep, and peat has been cut there. This accounts for
that great pebble of peat which we saw in the surf. The old oysterman
had told us that many years ago he lost a “crittur” by her being mired
in a swamp near the Atlantic side east of his house, and twenty years
ago he lost the swamp itself entirely, but has since seen signs of it
appearing on the beach. He also said that he had seen cedar stumps “as
big as cart-wheels”(!) on the bottom of the Bay, three miles off
Billingsate Point, when leaning over the side of his boat in pleasant
weather, and that that was dry land not long ago. Another told us that
a log canoe known to have been buried many years before on the Bay side
at East Harbor in Truro, where the Cape is extremely narrow, appeared
at length on the Atlantic side, the Cape having rolled over it, and an
old woman said,—“Now, you see, it is true what I told you, that the
Cape is moving.”

The bars along the coast shift with every storm, and in many places
there is occasionally none at all. We ourselves observed the effect of
a single storm with a high tide in the night, in July, 1855. It moved
the sand on the beach opposite the light-house to the depth of six
feet, and three rods in width as far as we could see north and south,
and carried it bodily off no one knows exactly where, laying bare in
one place a large rock five feet high which was invisible before, and
narrowing the beach to that extent. There is usually, as I have said,
no bathing on the back-side of the Cape, on account of the undertow,
but when we were there last, the sea had, three months before, cast up
a bar near this lighthouse, two miles long and ten rods wide, over
which the tide did not flow, leaving a narrow cove, then a quarter of a
mile long, between it and the shore, which afforded excellent bathing.
This cove had from time to time been closed up as the bar travelled
northward, in one instance imprisoning four or five hundred whiting and
cod, which died there, and the water as often turned fresh, and finally
gave place to sand. This bar, the inhabitants assured us, might be
wholly removed, and the water six feet deep there in two or three days.

The light-house keeper said that when the wind blowed strong on to the
shore, the waves ate fast into the bank, but when it blowed off they
took no sand away; for in the former case the wind heaped up the
surface of the water next to the beach, and to preserve its equilibrium
a strong undertow immediately set back again into the sea which carried
with it the sand and whatever else was in the way, and left the beach
hard to walk on; but in the latter case the undertow set on and carried
the sand with it, so that it was particularly difficult for shipwrecked
men to get to land when the wind blowed on to the shore, but easier
when it blowed off. This undertow, meeting the next surface wave on the
bar which itself has made, forms part of the dam over which the latter
breaks, as over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land
holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat
plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at last. The
sea sends its rapacious east wind to rob the land, but before the
former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west wind
to recover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the
forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally
determined, not by winds and waves but by tides.

Our host said that you would be surprised if you were on the beach when
the wind blew a hurricane directly on to it, to see that none of the
drift-wood came ashore, but all was carried directly northward and
parallel with the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the inshore
current, which sets strongly in that direction at flood tide. The
strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, and never gain an
inch toward the beach. Even a large rock has been moved half a mile
northward along-the beach. He assured us that the sea was never still
on the back-side of the Cape, but ran commonly as high as your head, so
that a great part of the time you could not launch a boat there, and
even in the calmest weather the waves run six or eight feet up the
beach, though then you could get off on a plank. Champlain and
Pourtrincourt could not land here in 1606, on account of the swell (_la
houlle_), yet the savages came off to them in a canoe. In the Sieur de
la Borde’s “Relation des Caraibes,” my edition of which was published
at Amsterdam in 1711, at page 530 he says:—

“Couroumon a Caraibe, also a star [_i.e._ a god], makes the great
_lames à la mer_, and overturns canoes. _Lames à la mer_ are the long
_vagues_ which are not broken (_entrecoupées_), and such as one sees
come to land all in one piece, from one end of a beach to another, so
that, however little wind there may be, a shallop or a canoe could
hardly land (_aborder terre_) without turning over, or being filled
with water.”

But on the Bay side the water even at its edge is often as smooth and
still as in a pond. Commonly there are no boats used along this beach.
There was a boat belonging to the Highland Light which the next keeper
after he had been there a year had not launched, though he said that
there was good fishing just off the shore. Generally the Life Boats
cannot be used when needed. When the waves run very high it is
impossible to get a boat off, however skilfully you steer it, for it
will often be completely covered by the curving edge of the approaching
breaker as by an arch, and so filled with water, or it will be lifted
up by its bows, turned directly over backwards, and all the contents
spilled out. A spar thirty feet long is served in the same way.

I heard of a party who went off fishing back of Wellfleet some years
ago, in two boats, in calm weather, who, when they had laden their
boats with fish, and approached the land again, found such a swell
breaking on it, though there was no wind, that they were afraid to
enter it. At first they thought to pull for Provincetown, but night was
coming on, and that was many miles distant. Their case seemed a
desperate one. As often as they approached the shore and saw the
terrible breakers that intervened, they were deterred. In short, they
were thoroughly frightened. Finally, having thrown their fish
overboard, those in one boat chose a favorable opportunity, and
succeeded, by skill and good luck, in reaching the land, but they were
unwilling to take the responsibility of telling the others when to come
in, and as the other helmsman was inexperienced, their boat was swamped
at once, yet all managed to save themselves.

Much smaller waves soon make a boat “nail-sick,” as the phrase is. The
keeper said that after a long and strong blow there would be three
large waves, each successively larger than the last, and then no large
ones for some time, and that, when they wished to land in a boat, they
came in on the last and largest wave. Sir Thomas Browne (as quoted in
Brand’s Popular Antiquities, p. 372), on the subject of the tenth wave
being “greater or more dangerous than any other,” after quoting Ovid,—

“Qui venit hic fluctus, fluctus supereminet omnes
Posterior nono est, undecimo que prior,”—


says, “Which, notwithstanding, is evidently false; nor can it be made
out either by observation either upon the shore or the ocean, as we
have with diligence explored in both. And surely in vain we expect
regularity in the waves of the sea, or in the particular motions
thereof, as we may in its general reciprocations, whose causes are
constant, and effects therefore correspondent; whereas its fluctuations
are but motions subservient, which winds, storms, shores, shelves, and
every interjacency, irregulates.”

We read that the Clay Pounds, were so called “because vessels have had
the misfortune to be pounded against it in gales of wind,” which we
regard as a doubtful derivation. There are small ponds here, upheld by
the clay, which were formerly called the Clay Pits. Perhaps this, or
Clay Ponds, is the origin of the name. Water is found in the clay quite
near the surface; but we heard of one man who had sunk a well in the
sand close by, “till he could see stars at noonday,” without finding
any. Over this bare Highland the wind has full sweep. Even in July it
blows the wings over the heads of the young turkeys, which do not know
enough to head against it; and in gales the doors and windows are blown
in, and you must hold on to the lighthouse to prevent being blown into
the Atlantic. They who merely keep out on the beach in a storm in the
winter are sometimes rewarded by the Humane Society. If you would feel
the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount
Washington, or at the Highland Light, in Truro.

It was said in 1794 that more vessels were cast away on the east shore
of Truro than anywhere in Barnstable County. Notwithstanding that this
light-house has since been erected, after almost every storm we read of
one or more vessels wrecked here, and sometimes more than a dozen
wrecks are visible from this point at one time. The inhabitants hear
the crash of vessels going to pieces as they sit round their hearths,
and they commonly date from some memorable shipwreck. If the history of
this beach could be written from beginning to end, it would be a
thrilling page in the history of commerce.

Truro was settled in the year 1700 as _Dangerfield_. This was a very
appropriate name, for I afterward read on a monument in the graveyard,
near Pamet River, the following inscription:—

Sacred
to the memory of
57 citizens of Truro,
who were lost in seven
vessels, which
foundered at sea in
the memorable gale
of Oct. 3d, 1841.


Their names and ages by families were recorded on different sides of
the stone. They are said to have been lost on George’s Bank, and I was
told that only one vessel drifted ashore on the backside of the Cape,
with the boys locked into the cabin and drowned. It is said that the
homes of all were “within a circuit of two miles.” Twenty-eight
inhabitants of Dennis were lost in the same gale; and I read that “in
one day, immediately after this storm, nearly or quite one hundred
bodies were taken up and buried on Cape Cod.” The Truro Insurance
Company failed for want of skippers to take charge of its vessels. But
the surviving inhabitants went a-fishing again the next year as usual.
I found that it would not do to speak of shipwrecks there, for almost
every family has lost some of its members at sea. “Who lives in that
house?” I inquired. “Three widows,” was the reply. The stranger and the
inhabitant view the shore with very different eyes. The former may have
come to see and admire the ocean in a storm; but the latter looks on it
as the scene where his nearest relatives were wrecked. When I remarked
to an old wrecker partially blind, who was sitting on the edge of the
bank smoking a pipe, which he had just lit with a match of dried
beach-grass, that I supposed he liked to hear the sound of the surf, he
answered: “No, I do not like to hear the sound of the surf.” He had
lost at least one son in “the memorable gale,” and could tell many a
tale of the shipwrecks which he had witnessed there.

In the year 1717, a noted pirate named Bellamy was led on to the bar
off Wellfleet by the captain of a _snow_ which he had taken, to whom he
had offered his vessel again if he would pilot him into Provincetown
Harbor. Tradition says that the latter threw over a burning tar-barrel
in the night, which drifted ashore, and the pirates followed it. A
storm coming on, their whole fleet was wrecked, and more than a hundred
dead bodies lay along the shore. Six who escaped shipwreck were
executed. “At times to this day” (1793), says the historian of
Wellfleet, “there are King William and Queen Mary’s coppers picked up,
and pieces of silver called cob-money. The violence of the seas moves
the sands on the outer bar, so that at times the iron caboose of the
ship [that is, Bellamy’s] at low ebbs has been seen.” Another tells us
that, “For many years after this shipwreck, a man of a very singular
and frightful aspect used every spring and autumn to be seen travelling
on the Cape, who was supposed to have been one of Bellamy’s crew. The
presumption is that he went to some place where money had been secreted
by the pirates, to get such a supply as his exigencies required. When
he died, many pieces of gold were found in a girdle which he constantly
wore.”

[Illustration: An old wrecker at home]

As I was walking on the beach here in my last visit, looking for shells
and pebbles, just after that storm, which I have mentioned as moving
the sand to a great depth, not knowing but I might find some cob-money,
I did actually pick up a French crown piece, worth about a dollar and
six cents, near high-water mark, on the still moist sand, just under
the abrupt, caving base of the bank. It was of a dark slate color, and
looked like a flat pebble, but still bore a very distinct and handsome
head of Louis XV., and the usual legend on the reverse. _Sit Nomen
Domini Benedictum_ (Blessed be the Name of the Lord), a pleasing
sentiment to read in the sands of the sea-shore, whatever it might be
stamped on, and I also made out the date, 1741. Of course, I thought at
first that it was that same old button which I have found so many
times, but my knife soon showed the silver. Afterward, rambling on the
bars at low tide, I cheated my companion by holding up round shells
(_Scutellæ_) between my fingers, whereupon he quickly stripped and came
off to me.

In the Revolution, a British ship of war called the Somerset was
wrecked near the Clay Pounds, and all on board, some hundreds in
number, were taken prisoners. My informant said that he had never seen
any mention of this in the histories, but that at any rate he knew of a
silver watch, which one of those prisoners by accident left there,
which was still going to tell the story. But this event is noticed by
some writers.

The next summer I saw a sloop from Chatham dragging for anchors and
chains just oft’ this shore. She had her boats out at the work while
she shuffled about on various tacks, and, when anything was found, drew
up to hoist it on board. It is a singular employment, at which men are
regularly hired and paid for their industry, to hunt to-day in pleasant
weather for anchors which have been lost,—the sunken faith and hope of
mariners, to which they trusted in vain; now, perchance, it is the
rusty one of some old pirate’s ship or Norman fisherman, whose cable
parted here two hundred years ago; and now the best bower anchor of a
Canton or a California ship, which has gone about her business. If the
roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, what rusty
flukes of hope deceived and parted chain-cables of faith might again be
windlassed aboard! enough to sink the finder’s craft, or stock new
navies to the end of time. The bottom of the sea is strewn with
anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and
uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable
still attached,—to which where is the other end? So many unconcluded
tales to be continued another time. So, if we had diving-bells adapted
to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables
attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward
their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man
has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or
can find,—not be Chatham men, dragging for anchors.

The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it
were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only
in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which
their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a
single strand has witnessed. The ancients would have represented it as
a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.
An inhabitant of Truro told me that about a fortnight after the _St.
John_ was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the
Clay Pounds. They were those of a man, and a corpulent woman. The man
had thick boots on, though his head was off, but “it was alongside.” It
took the finder some weeks to get over the sight. Perhaps they were man
and wife, and whom God had joined the ocean currents had not put
asunder. Yet by what slight accidents at first may they have been
associated in their drifting. Some of the bodies of those passengers
were picked up far out at sea, boxed up and sunk; some brought ashore
and buried. There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the
underwriters notice. The Gulf Stream may return some to their native
shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where time
and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.—But to return
to land again.

In this bank, above the clay, I counted in the summer, two hundred
holes of the Bank Swallow within a space six rods long, and there were
at least one thousand old birds within three times that distance,
twittering over the surf. I had never associated them in my thoughts
with the beach before. One little boy who had been a-birds-nesting had
got eighty swallows’ eggs for his share! Tell it not to the Humane
Society. There were many young birds on the clay beneath, which had
tumbled out and died. Also there were many Crow-blackbirds hopping
about in the dry fields, and the Upland Plover were breeding close by
the light-house. The keeper had once cut off one’s wing while mowing,
as she sat on her eggs there. This is also a favorite resort for
gunners in the fall to shoot the Golden Plover. As around the shores of
a pond are seen devil’s-needles, butterflies, etc., so here, to my
surprise, I saw at the same season great devil’s-needles of a size
proportionably larger, or nearly as big as my finger, incessantly
coasting up and down the edge of the bank, and butterflies also were
hovering over it, and I never saw so many dorr-bugs and beetles of
various kinds as strewed the beach. They had apparently flown over the
bank in the night, and could not get up again, and some had perhaps
fallen into the sea and were washed ashore. They may have been in part
attracted by the light-house lamps.

The Clay Pounds are a more fertile tract than usual. We saw some fine
patches of roots and corn here. As generally on the Cape, the plants
had little stalk or leaf, but ran remarkably to seed. The corn was
hardly more than half as high as in the interior, yet the ears were
large and full, and one farmer told us that he could raise forty
bushels on an acre without manure, and sixty with it. The heads of the
rye also were remarkably large. The Shadbush (_Amelanchier_), Beach
Plums, and Blueberries (_Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum_), like the
apple-trees and oaks, were very dwarfish, spreading over the sand, but
at the same time very fruitful. The blueberry was but an inch or two
high, and its fruit often rested on the ground, so that you did not
suspect the presence of the bushes, even on those bare hills, until you
were treading on them. I thought that this fertility must be owing
mainly to the abundance of moisture in the atmosphere, for I observed
that what little grass there was was remarkably laden with dew in the
morning, and in summer dense imprisoning fogs frequently last till
midday, turning one’s beard into a wet napkin about his throat, and the
oldest inhabitant may lose his way within a stone’s throw of his house
or be obliged to follow the beach for a guide. The brick house attached
to the light-house was exceedingly damp at that season, and,
writing-paper lost all its stiffness in it. It was impossible to dry
your towel after bathing, or to press flowers without their mildewing.
The air was so moist that we rarely wished to drink, though we could at
all times taste the salt on our lips. Salt was rarely used at table,
and our host told us that his cattle invariably refused it when it was
offered them, they got so much with their grass and at every breath,
but he said that a sick horse or one just from the country would
sometimes take a hearty draught of salt water, and seemed to like it
and be the better for it.

It was surprising to see how much water was contained in the terminal
bud of the sea-side golden-rod, standing in the sand early in July, and
also how turnips, beets, carrots, etc., flourished even in pure sand. A
man travelling by the shore near there not long before us noticed
something green growing in the pure sand of the beach, just at
high-water mark, and on approaching found it to be a bed of beets
flourishing vigorously, probably from seed washed out of the
_Franklin_. Also beets and turnips came up in the sea-weed used for
manure in many parts of the Cape. This suggests how various plants may
have been dispersed over the world to distant islands and continents.
Vessels, with seeds in their cargoes, destined for particular ports,
where perhaps they were not needed, have been cast away on desolate
islands, and though their crews perished, some of their seeds have been
preserved. Out of many kinds a few would find a soil and climate
adapted to them, become naturalized, and perhaps drive out the native
plants at last, and so fit the land for the habitation of man. It is an
ill wind that blows nobody any good, and for the time lamentable
shipwrecks may thus contribute a new vegetable to a continent’s stock,
and prove on the whole a lasting blessing to its inhabitants. Or winds
and currents might effect the same without the intervention of man.
What indeed are the various succulent plants which grow on the beach
but such beds of beets and turnips, sprung originally from seeds which
perhaps were cast on the waters for this end, though we do not know the
_Franklin_ which they came out of? In ancient times some Mr. Bell (?)
was sailing this way in his ark with seeds of rocket, salt-wort,
sandwort, beachgrass, samphire, bayberry, poverty-grass, etc., all
nicely labelled with directions, intending to establish a nursery
somewhere; and did not a nursery get established, though he thought
that he had failed?

About the light-house I observed in the summer the pretty _Polygala
polygama_, spreading ray-wise flat on the ground, white pasture
thistles (_Cirsium pumilum_), and amid the shrubbery the _Smilax
glauca_, which is commonly said not to grow so far north; near the edge
of the banks about half a mile southward, the broom crow-berry
(_Empetrum Conradii_), for which Plymouth is the only locality in
Massachusetts usually named, forms pretty green mounds four or five
feet in diameter by one foot high,—soft, springy beds for the wayfarer.
I saw it afterward in Provincetown, but prettiest of all the scarlet
pimpernel, or poor-man’s weather-glass (_Anagallis-arvensis_), greets
you in fair weather on almost every square yard of sand. From Yarmouth,
I have received the _Chrysopsis falcata_ (golden aster), and _Vaccinium
stamineum_ (Deerberry or Squaw Huckleberry), with fruit not edible,
sometimes as large as a cranberry (Sept. 7).

[Illustration: The Highland Light]

The Highland Light-house,[1] where we were staying, is a
substantial-looking building of brick, painted white, and surmounted by
an iron cap. Attached to it is the dwelling of the keeper, one story
high, also of brick, and built by government. As we were going to spend
the night in a light-house, we wished to make the most of so novel an
experience, and therefore told our host that we would like to accompany
him when he went to light up. At rather early candle-light he lighted a
small Japan lamp, allowing it to smoke rather more than we like on
ordinary occasions, and told us to follow him. He led the way first
through his bedroom, which was placed nearest to the light-house, and
then through a long, narrow, covered passage-way, between whitewashed
walls like a prison entry, into the lower part of the light-house,
where many great butts of oil were arranged around; thence we ascended
by a winding and open iron stairway, with a steadily increasing scent
of oil and lamp-smoke, to a trap-door in an iron floor, and through
this into the lantern. It was a neat building, with everything in
apple-pie order, and no danger of anything; rusting there for want of
oil. The light consisted of fifteen argand lamps, placed within smooth
concave reflectors twenty-one inches in diameter, and arranged in two
horizontal circles one above the other, facing every way excepting
directly down the Cape. These were surrounded, at a distance of two or
three feet, by large plate-glass windows, which defied the storms, with
iron sashes, on which rested the iron cap. All the iron work, except
the floor, was painted white. And thus the light-house was completed.
We walked slowly round in that narrow space as the keeper lighted each
lamp in succession, conversing with him at the same moment that many a
sailor on the deep witnessed the lighting of the Highland Light. His
duty was to fill and trim and light his lamps, and keep bright the
reflectors. He filled them every morning, and trimmed them commonly
once in the course of the night. He complained of the quality of the
oil which was furnished. This house consumes about eight hundred
gallons in a year, which cost not far from one dollar a gallon; but
perhaps a few lives would be saved if better oil were provided. Another
light-house keeper said that the same proportion of winter-strained oil
was sent to the southernmost light-house in the Union as to the most
northern. Formerly, when this light-house had windows with small and
thin panes, a severe storm would sometimes break the glass, and then
they were obliged to put up a wooden shutter in haste to save their
lights and reflectors,—and sometimes in tempests, when the mariner
stood most in need of their guidance, they had thus nearly converted
the light-house into a dark lantern, which emitted only a few feeble
rays, and those commonly on the land or lee side. He spoke of the
anxiety and sense of responsibility which he felt in cold and stormy
nights in the winter; when he knew that many a poor fellow was
depending on him, and his lamps burned dimly, the oil being chilled.
Sometimes he was obliged to warm the oil in a kettle in his house at
midnight, and fill his lamps over again,—for he could not have a fire
in the light-house, it produced such a sweat on the windows. His
successor told me that he could not keep too hot a fire in such a case.
All this because the oil was poor. The government lighting the mariners
on its wintry coast with summer-strained oil, to save expense! That
were surely a summer-strained mercy.

This keeper’s successor, who kindly entertained me the next year stated
that one extremely cold night, when this and all the neighboring lights
were burning summer oil, but he had been provident enough to reserve a
little winter oil against emergencies, he was waked up with anxiety,
and found that his oil was congealed, and his lights almost
extinguished; and when, after many hours’ exertion, he had succeeded in
replenishing his reservoirs with winter oil at the wick end, and with
difficulty had made them burn, he looked out and found that the other
lights in the neighborhood, which were usually visible to him, had gone
out, and he heard afterward that the Pamet River and Billingsgate
Lights also had been extinguished.

Our host said that the frost, too, on the windows caused him much
trouble, and in sultry summer nights the moths covered them and dimmed
his lights; sometimes even small birds flew against the thick plate
glass, and were found on the ground beneath in the morning with their
necks broken. In the spring of 1855 he found nineteen small
yellow-birds, perhaps goldfinches or myrtle-birds, thus lying dead
around the light-house; and sometimes in the fall he had seen where a
golden plover had struck the glass in the night, and left the down and
the fatty part of its breast on it.

Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before
men. Surely the light-house keeper has a responsible, if an easy,
office. When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such
accident is pardoned.

I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live there, to
profit by all that light, since he would not rob the mariner. “Well,”
he said, “I do sometimes come up here and read the newspaper when they
are noisy down below.” Think of fifteen argand lamps to read the
newspaper by! Government oil!—light, enough, perchance, to read the
Constitution by! I thought that he should read nothing less than his
Bible by that light. I had a classmate who fitted for college by the
lamps of a light-house, which was more light, we think, than the
University afforded.

When we had come down and walked a dozen rods from the light-house, we
found that we could not get the full strength of its light on the
narrow strip of land between it and the shore, being too low for the
focus, and we saw only so many feeble and rayless stars; but at forty
rods inland we could see to read, though we were still indebted to only
one lamp. Each reflector sent forth a separate “fan” of light,—one
shone on the windmill, and one in the hollow, while the intervening
spaces were in shadow. This light is said to be visible twenty nautical
miles and more from an observer fifteen feet above the level of the
sea. We could see the revolving light at Race Point, the end of the
Cape, about nine miles distant, and also the light on Long Point, at
the entrance of Provincetown Harbor, and one of the distant Plymouth
Harbor Lights, across the Bay, nearly in a range with the last, like a
star in the horizon. The keeper thought that the other Plymouth Light
was concealed by being exactly in a range with the Long Point Light. He
told us that the mariner was sometimes led astray by a mackerel
fisher’s lantern, who was afraid of being run down in the night, or
even by a cottager’s light, mistaking them for some well-known light on
the coast, and, when he discovered his mistake, was wont to curse the
prudent fisher or the wakeful cottager without reason.

Though it was once declared that Providence placed this mass of clay
here on purpose to erect a light-house on, the keeper said that the
light-house should have been erected half a mile farther south, where
the coast begins to bend, and where the light could be seen at the same
time with the Nauset Lights, and distinguished from them. They now talk
of building one there. It happens that the present one is the more
useless now, so near the extremity of the Cape, because other
light-houses have since been erected there.

Among the many regulations of the Light-house Board, hanging against
the wall here, many of them excellent, perhaps, if there were a
regiment stationed here to attend to them, there is one requiring the
keeper to keep an account of the number of vessels which pass his light
during the day. But there are a hundred vessels in sight at once,
steering in all directions, many on the very verge of the horizon, and
he must have more eyes than Argus, and be a good deal farther-sighted,
to tell which are passing his light. It is an employment in some
respects best suited to the habits of the gulls which coast up and down
here, and circle over the sea.

I was told by the next keeper, that on the 8th of June following, a
particularly clear and beautiful morning, he rose about half an hour
before sunrise, and having a little time to spare, for his custom was
to extinguish his lights at sunrise, walked down toward the shore to
see what he might find. When he got to the edge of the bank he looked
up, and, to his astonishment, saw the sun rising, and already part way
above the horizon. Thinking that his clock was wrong, he made haste
back, and though it was still too early by the clock, extinguished his
lamps, and when he had got through and come down, he looked out the
window, and, to his still greater astonishment, saw the sun just where
it was before, two-thirds above the horizon. He showed me where its
rays fell on the wall across the room. He proceeded to make a fire, and
when he had done, there was the sun still at the same height.
Whereupon, not trusting to his own eyes any longer, he called up his
wife to look at it, and she saw it also. There were vessels in sight on
the ocean, and their crews, too, he said, must have seen it, for its
rays fell on them. It remained at that height for about fifteen minutes
by the clock, and then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary
happened during that day. Though accustomed to the coast, he had never
witnessed nor heard of such a phenomenon before. I suggested that there
might have been a cloud in the horizon invisible to him, which rose
with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the average; or
perhaps, as he denied the possibility of this, it was such a looming of
the sun as is said to occur at Lake Superior and elsewhere. Sir John
Franklin, for instance, says in his Narrative, that when he was on the
shore of the Polar Sea, the horizontal refraction varied so much one
morning that “the upper limb of the sun twice appeared at the horizon
before it finally rose.”

He certainly must be a son of Aurora to whom the sun looms, when there
are so many millions to whom it _glooms_ rather, or who never see it
till an hour _after_ it has risen. But it behooves us old stagers to
keep our lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to the
sun’s looming.

This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame should be exactly
opposite the centre of the reflectors, and that accordingly, if he was
not careful to turn down his wicks in the morning, the sun falling on
the reflectors on the south side of the building would set fire to
them, like a burning-glass, in the coldest day, and he would look up at
noon and see them all lighted! When your light is ready to give light,
it is readiest to receive it, and the sun will light it. His successor
said that he had never known them to blaze in such a case, but merely
to smoke.

I saw that this was a place of wonders. In a sea turn or shallow fog
while I was there the next summer, it being clear overhead, the edge of
the bank twenty rods distant, appeared like a mountain pasture in the
horizon. I was completely deceived by it, and I could then understand
why mariners sometimes ran ashore in such cases, especially in the
night, supposing it to be far away, though they could see the land.
Once since this, being in a large oyster boat two or three hundred
miles from here, in a dark night, when there was a thin veil of mist on
land and water, we came so near to running on to the land before our
skipper was aware of it, that the first warning was my hearing the
sound of the surf under my elbow. I could almost have jumped ashore,
and we were obliged to go about very suddenly to prevent striking. The
distant light for which we were steering, supposing it a light-house
five or six miles off, came through the cracks of a fisherman’s bunk
not more than six rods distant.

The keeper entertained us handsomely in his solitary little ocean
house. He was a man of singular patience and intelligence, who, when
our queries struck him, rung as clear as a bell in response. The
light-house lamps a few feet distant shone full into my chamber, and
made it as bright as day, so I knew exactly how the Highland Light bore
all that night, and I was in no danger of being wrecked. Unlike the
last, this was as still as a summer night. I thought, as I lay there,
half awake and half asleep, looking upward through the window at the
lights above my head, how many sleepless eyes from far out on the Ocean
stream—mariners of all nations spinning their yarns through the various
watches of the night—were directed toward my couch.

 [1] The light-house has since been rebuilt, and shows a _Fresnel_
 light.



IX
THE SEA AND THE DESERT


The light-house lamps were still burning, though now with a silvery
lustre, when I rose to see the sun come out of the Ocean; for he still
rose eastward of us; but I was convinced that he must have come out of
a dry bed beyond that stream, though he seemed to come out of the
water.

“The sun once more touched the fields,
Mounting to heaven from the fair flowing
Deep-running Ocean.”


Now we saw countless sails of mackerel fishers abroad on the deep, one
fleet in the north just pouring round the Cape, another standing down
toward Chatham, and our host’s son went off to join some lagging member
of the first which had not yet left the Bay.

Before we left the light-house we were obliged to anoint our shoes
faithfully with tallow, for walking on the beach, in the salt water and
the sand, had turned them red and crisp. To counterbalance this, I have
remarked that the seashore, even where muddy, as it is not here, is
singularly clean; for notwithstanding the spattering of the water and
mud and squirting of the clams while walking to and from the boat, your
best black pants retain no stain nor dirt, such as they would acquire
from walking in the country.

We have heard that a few days after this, when the Provincetown Bank
was robbed, speedy emissaries from Provincetown made particular
inquiries concerning us at this light-house. Indeed, they traced us all
the way down the Cape, and concluded that we came by this unusual route
down the back-side and on foot, in order that we might discover a way
to get off with our booty when we had committed the robbery. The Cape
is so long and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is wellnigh
impossible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge of its
inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to it in the night. So,
when this robbery occurred, all their suspicions seem to have at once
centred on us two travellers who had just passed down it. If we had not
chanced to leave the Cape so soon, we should probably have been
arrested. The real robbers were two young men from Worcester County who
travelled with a centre-bit, and are said to have done their work very
neatly. But the only bank that we pried into was the great Cape Cod
sand-bank, and we robbed it only of an old French crown piece, some
shells and pebbles, and the materials of this story.

Again we took to the beach for another day (October 13), walking along
the shore of the resounding sea, determined to get it into us. We
wished to associate with the Ocean until it lost the pond-like look
which it wears to a country-man. We still thought that we could see the
other side. Its surface was still more sparkling than the day before,
and we beheld “the countless smilings of the ocean waves”; though some
of them were pretty broad grins, for still the wind blew and the
billows broke in foam along the beach. The nearest beach to us on the
other side, whither we looked, due east, was on the coast of Galicia,
in Spain, whose capital is Santiago, though by old poets’ reckoning it
should have been Atlantis or the Hesperides; but heaven is found to be
farther west now. At first we were abreast of that part of Portugal
_entre Douro e Mino_, and then Galicia and the port of Pontevedra
opened to us as we walked along; but we did not enter, the breakers ran
so high. The bold headland of Cape Finisterre, a little north of east,
jutted toward us next, with its vain brag, for we flung back,—“Here is
Cape Cod,—Cape Land’s-Beginning.” A little indentation toward the
north,—for the land loomed to our imaginations by a common mirage,—we
knew was the Bay of Biscay, and we sang:—

“There we lay, till next day.
    In the Bay of Biscay O!”


A little south of east was Palos, where Columbus weighed anchor, and
farther yet the pillars which Hercules set up; concerning which when we
inquired at the top of our voices what was written on them,—for we had
the morning sun in our faces, and could not see distinctly,—the
inhabitants shouted _Ne plus ultra_ (no more beyond), but the wind bore
to us the truth only, _plus ultra_ (more beyond), and over the Bay
westward was echoed _ultra_ (beyond). We spoke to them through the surf
about the Far West, the true Hesperia, ἕω πέρας or end of the day, the
This Side Sundown, where the sun was extinguished in the _Pacific_, and
we advised them to pull up stakes and plant those pillars of theirs on
the shore of California, whither all our folks were gone,—the only _ne_
plus ultra now. Whereat they looked crestfallen on their cliffs, for we
had taken the wind out of all their sails.

We could not perceive that any of their leavings washed up here, though
we picked up a child’s toy, a small dismantled boat, which may have
been lost at Pontevedra.

The Cape became narrower and narrower as we approached its wrist
between Truro and Provincetown, and the shore inclined more decidedly
to the west. At the head of East Harbor Creek, the Atlantic is
separated but by half a dozen rods of sand from the tide-waters of the
Bay. From the Clay Pounds the bank flatted off for the last ten miles
to the extremity at Race Point, though the highest parts, which are
called “islands” from their appearance at a distance on the sea, were
still seventy or eighty feet above the Atlantic, and afforded a good
view of the latter, as well as a constant view of the Bay, there being
no trees nor a hill sufficient to interrupt it. Also the sands began to
invade the land more and more, until finally they had entire possession
from sea to sea, at the narrowest part. For three or four miles between
Truro and Provincetown there were no inhabitants from shore to shore,
and there were but three or four houses for twice that distance.

As we plodded along, either by the edge of the ocean, where the sand
was rapidly drinking up the last wave that wet it, or over the
sand-hills of the bank, the mackerel fleet continued to pour round the
Cape north of us, ten or fifteen miles distant, in countless numbers,
schooner after schooner, till they made a city on the water. They were
so thick that many appeared to be afoul of one another; now all
standing on this tack, now on that. We saw how well the New-Englanders
had followed up Captain John Smith’s suggestions with regard to the
fisheries, made in 1616,—to what a pitch they had carried “this
contemptible trade of fish,” as he significantly styles it, and were
now equal to the Hollanders whose example he holds up for the English
to emulate; notwithstanding that “in this faculty,” as he says, “the
former are so naturalized, and of their vents so certainly acquainted,
as there is no likelihood they will ever be paralleled, having two or
three thousand busses, flat-bottoms, sword-pinks, todes, and such like,
that breeds them sailors, mariners, soldiers, and merchants, never to
be wrought out of that trade and fit for any other.” We thought that it
would take all these names and more to describe the numerous craft
which we saw. Even then, some years before our “renowned sires” with
their “peerless dames” stepped on Plymouth Rock, he wrote,
“Newfoundland doth yearly freight neir eight hundred sail of ships with
a silly, lean, skinny, poor-john, and cor fish,” though all their
supplies must be annually transported from Europe. Why not plant a
colony here then, and raise those supplies on the spot? “Of all the
four parts of the world,” says he, “that I have yet seen, not
inhabited, could I have but means to transport a colony, I would rather
live here than anywhere. And if it did not maintain itself, were we but
once indifferently well fitted, let us starve.” Then “fishing before
your doors,” you “may every night sleep quietly ashore, with good cheer
and what fires you will, or, when you please, with your wives and
family.” Already he anticipates “the new towns in New England in memory
of their old,”—and who knows what may be discovered in the “heart and
entrails” of the land, “seeing even the very edges,” etc., etc.

[Illustration: Towing along shore]

All this has been accomplished, and more, and where is Holland now?
Verily the Dutch have taken it. There was no long interval between the
suggestion of Smith and the eulogy of Burke.

Still one after another the mackerel schooners hove in sight round the
head of the Cape, “whitening all the sea road,” and we watched each one
for a moment with an undivided interest. It seemed a pretty sport. Here
in the country it is only a few idle boys or loafers that go a-fishing
on a rainy day; but there it appeared as if every able-bodied man and
helpful boy in the Bay had gone out on a pleasure excursion in their
yachts, and all would at last land and have a chowder on the Cape. The
gazetteer tells you gravely how many of the men and boys of these towns
are engaged in the whale, cod, and mackerel fishery, how many go to the
banks of Newfoundland, or the coast of Labrador, the Straits of Belle
Isle or the Bay of Chaleurs (Shalore the sailors call it); as if I were
to reckon up the number of boys in Concord who are engaged during the
summer in the perch, pickerel, bream, hornpout, and shiner fishery, of
which no one keeps the statistics,—though I think that it is pursued
with as much profit to the moral and intellectual man (or boy), and
certainly with less danger to the physical one.

One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat
of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and
his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he
said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type
again as if only an afternoon had intervened.

I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole
day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a
serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally
shiftlessness and a grovelling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like
industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus
everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, _viewed from
the shore_, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less
frivolous.

I once sailed three miles on a mackerel cruise myself. It was a Sunday
evening after a very warm day in which there had been frequent
thunder-showers, and I had walked along the shore from Cohasset to
Duxbury. I wished to get over from the last place to Clark’s Island,
but no boat could stir, they said, at that stage of the tide, they
being left high on the mud. At length I learned that the tavern-keeper,
Winsor, was going out mackerelling with seven men that evening, and
would take me. When there had been due delay, we one after another
straggled down to the shore in a leisurely manner, as if waiting for
the tide still, and in India-rubber boots, or carrying our shoes in our
hands, waded to the boats, each of the crew bearing an armful of wood,
and one a bucket of new potatoes besides. Then they resolved that each
should bring one more armful of wood, and that would be enough. They
had already got a barrel of water, and had some more in the schooner.
We shoved the boats a dozen rods over the mud and water till they
floated, then rowing half a mile to the vessel climbed aboard, and
there we were in a mackerel schooner, a fine stout vessel of
forty-three tons, whose name I forget. The baits were not dry on the
hooks. There was the mill in which they ground the mackerel, and the
trough to hold it, and the long-handled dipper to cast it overboard
with; and already in the harbor we saw the surface rippled with schools
of small mackerel, the real _Scomber vernalis_. The crew proceeded
leisurely to weigh anchor and raise their two sails, there being a fair
but very slight wind;—and the sun now setting clear and shining on the
vessel after the thundershowers, I thought that I could not have
commenced the voyage under more favorable auspices. They had four
dories and commonly fished in them, else they fished on the starboard
side aft where their fines hung ready, two to a man. The boom swung
round once or twice, and Winsor cast overboard the foul juice of
mackerel mixed with rain-water which remained in his trough, and then
we gathered about the helmsman and told stories. I remember that the
compass was affected by iron in its neighborhood and varied a few
degrees. There was one among us just returned from California, who was
now going as passenger for his health and amusement. They expected to
be gone about a week, to begin fishing the next morning, and to carry
their fish fresh to Boston. They landed me at Clark’s Island, where the
Pilgrims landed, for my companions wished to get some milk for the
voyage. But I had seen the whole of it. The rest was only going to sea
and catching the mackerel. Moreover, it was as well that I did not
remain with them, considering the small quantity of supplies they had
taken.

Now I saw the mackerel fleet _on its fishing-ground_, though I was not
at first aware of it. So my experience was complete.

It was even more cold and windy to-day than before, and we were
frequently glad to take shelter behind a sand-hill. None of the
elements were resting. On the beach there is a ceaseless activity,
always something going on, in storm and in calm, winter and summer,
night and day. Even the sedentary man here enjoys a breadth of view
which is almost equivalent to motion. In clear weather the laziest may
look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the
Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or
if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the
ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any
moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the
reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report
the news it brings. No creature could move slowly where there was so
much life around. The few wreckers were either going or coming, and the
ships and the sand-pipers, and the screaming gulls overhead; nothing
stood still but the shore. The little beach-birds trotted past close to
the water’s edge, or paused but an instant to swallow their food,
keeping time with the elements. I wondered how they ever got used to
the sea, that they ventured so near the waves. Such tiny inhabitants
the land brought forth! except one fox. And what could a fox do,
looking on the Atlantic from that high bank? What is the sea to a fox?
Sometimes we met a wrecker with his cart and dog,—and his dog’s faint
bark at us wayfarers, heard through the roaring of the surf, sounded
ridiculously faint. To see a little trembling dainty-footed cur stand
on the margin of the ocean, and ineffectually bark at a beach-bird,
amid the roar of the Atlantic! Come with design to bark at a whale,
perchance! That sound will do for farmyards. All the dogs looked out of
place there, naked and as if shuddering at the vastness; and I thought
that they would not have been there had it not been for the countenance
of their masters. Still less could you think of a cat bending her steps
that way, and shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic; yet even this
happens sometimes, they tell me. In summer I saw the tender young of
the Piping Plover, like chickens just hatched, mere pinches of down on
two legs, running in troops, with a faint peep, along the edge of the
waves. I used to see packs of half-wild dogs haunting the lonely beach
on the south shore of Staten Island, in New York Bay, for the sake of
the carrion there cast up; and I remember that once, when for a long
time I had heard a furious barking in the tall grass of the marsh, a
pack of half a dozen large dogs burst forth on to the beach, pursuing a
little one which ran straight to me for protection, and I afforded it
with some stones, though at some risk to myself; but the next day the
little one was the first to bark at me. under these circumstances I
could not but remember the words of the poet:—

“Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
    As _his_ ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
    Although thy breath be rude.

“Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
    As benefits forgot;
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
    As friend remembered not.”


Sometimes, when I was approaching the carcass of a horse or ox which
lay on the beach there, where there was no living creature in sight, a
dog would unexpectedly emerge from it and slink away with a mouthful of
offal.

The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point
from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The
waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable
to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall
and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of
sea-slime.

It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with
crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up,—a
vast _morgue_, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come
daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses
of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and
bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds,
and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature, inhumanly
sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where
gulls wheel amid the spray.

We saw this forenoon what, at a distance, looked like a bleached log
with a branch still left on it. It proved to be one of the principal
bones of a whale, whose carcass, having been stripped of blubber at sea
and cut adrift, had been washed up some months before. It chanced that
this was the most conclusive evidence which we met with to prove, what
the Copenhagen antiquaries assert, that these shores were the
_Furdustrandas_ which Thorhall, the companion of Thorfinn during his
expedition to Vinland in 1007. sailed past in disgust. It appears that
after they had left the Cape and explored the country about
Straum-Fiordr (Buzzards’ Bay!), Thorhall, who was disappointed at not
getting any wine to drink there, determined to sail north again in
search of Vinland. Though the antiquaries have given us the original
Icelandic. I prefer to quote their translation, since theirs is the
only Latin which I know to have been aimed at Cape Cod.

“Cum parati erant, sublato
velo, cecinit Thorhallus:
Eò redeamus, ubi conterranei
sunt nostri! faciamus aliter,
expansi arenosi peritum,
lata navis explorare curricula:
dum procellam incitantes gladii
moræ impatientes, qui terram
collaudant, Furdustrandas
inhabitant et coquunt balænas.”


In other words: “When they were ready and their sail hoisted, Thorhall
sang: Let us return thither where our fellow-countrymen are. Let us
make a bird[1] skilful to fly through the heaven of sand,[2] to explore
the broad track of ships; while warriors who impel to the tempest of
swords,[3] who praise the land, inhabit Wonder-Strands, _and cook
whales_.’” And so he sailed north past Cape Cod, as the antiquaries
say, “and was shipwrecked on to Ireland.”

Though once there were more whales cast up here, I think that it was
never more wild than now. We do not associate the idea of antiquity
with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do
of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always. The
Indians have left no traces on its surface, but it is the same to the
civilized man and the savage. The aspect of the shore only has changed.
The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a
Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our
cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears,
hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most
populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.
It is no further advanced than Singapore, with its tigers, in this
respect. The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in
the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other
outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you
may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to
me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail
over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of
Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.

We saw no fences as we walked the beach, no birchen _riders_, highest
of rails, projecting into the sea to keep the cows from wading round,
nothing to remind us that man was proprietor of the shore. Yet a Truro
man did tell us that owners of land on the east side of that town were
regarded as owning the beach, in order that they might have the control
of it so far as to defend themselves against the encroachments of the
sand and the beach-grass,—for even this friend is sometimes regarded as
a foe; but he said that this was not the case on the Bay side. Also I
have seen in sheltered parts of the Bay temporary fences running to
low-water mark, the posts being set in sills or sleepers placed
transversely.

After we had been walking many hours, the mackerel fleet still hovered
in the northern horizon nearly in the same direction, but farther off,
hull down. Though their sails were set they never sailed away, nor yet
came to anchor, but stood on various tacks as close together as vessels
in a haven, and we in our ignorance thought that they were contending
patiently with adverse winds, beating eastward; but we learned
afterward that they were even then on their fishing-ground, and that
they caught mackerel without taking in their mainsails or coming to
anchor, “a smart breeze” (thence called a mackerel breeze) “being,” as
one says, “considered most favorable” for this purpose. We counted
about two hundred sail of mackerel fishers within one small arc of the
horizon, and a nearly equal number had disappeared southward. Thus they
hovered about the extremity of the Cape, like moths round a candle; the
lights at Race Point and Long Point being bright candles for them at
night,—and at this distance they looked fair and white, as if they had
not yet flown into the light, but nearer at hand afterward, we saw how
some had formerly singed their wings and bodies.

A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all ploughing the
ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls
may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are
harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with
hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’
wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field.
But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.

Having passed the narrowest part of the waist of the Cape, though still
in Truro, for this township is about twelve miles long on the shore, we
crossed over to the Bay side, not half a mile distant, in order to
spend the noon on the nearest shrubby sand-hill in Provincetown, called
Mount Ararat, which rises one hundred feet above the ocean. On our way
thither we had occasion to admire the various beautiful forms and
colors of the sand, and we noticed an interesting mirage, which I have
since found that Hitchcock also observed on the sands of the Cape. We
were crossing a shallow valley in the Desert, where the smooth and
spotless sand sloped upward by a small angle to the horizon on every
side, and at the lowest part was a long chain of clear but shallow
pools. As we were approaching these for a drink in a diagonal direction
across the valley, they appeared inclined at a slight but decided angle
to the horizon, though they were plainly and broadly connected with one
another, and there was not the least ripple to suggest a current; so
that by the time we had reached a convenient part of one we seemed to
have ascended several feet. They appeared to lie by magic on the side
of the vale, like a mirror left in a slanting position. It was a very
pretty mirage for a Provincetown desert, but not amounting to what, in
Sanscrit, is called “the thirst of the gazelle,” as there was real
water here for a base, and we were able to quench our thirst after all.

Professor Rafn, of Copenhagen, thinks that the mirage which I noticed,
but which an old inhabitant of Provincetown, to whom I mentioned it,
had never seen nor heard of, had something to do with the name
“Furdustrandas,” i.e. Wonder-Strands, given, as I have said, in the old
Icelandic account of Thorfinn’s expedition to Vinland in the year 1007,
to a part of the coast on which he landed. But these sands are more
remarkable for their length than for their mirage, which is common to
all deserts, and the reason for the name which the Northmen them-selves
give,—“because it took a long time to sail by them,”—is sufficient and
more applicable to these shores. However, if you should sail all the
way from Greenland to Buzzards’ Bay along the coast, you would get
sight of a good many sandy beaches. But whether Thorfinn saw the mirage
here or not, Thor-eau, one of the same family, did; and perchance it
was because Lief the Lucky had, in a previous voyage, taken Thor-er and
his people off the rock in the middle of the sea, that Thor-eau was
born to see it.

This was not the only mirage which I saw on the Cape. That half of the
beach next the bank is commonly level, or nearly so, while the other
slopes downward to the water. As I was walking upon the edge of the
bank in Wellfleet at sundown, it seemed to me that the inside half of
the beach sloped upward toward the water to meet the other, forming a
ridge ten or twelve feet high the whole length of the shore, but higher
always opposite to where I stood; and I was not convinced of the
contrary till I descended the bank, though the shaded outlines left by
the waves of a previous tide but half-way down the apparent declivity
might have taught me better. A stranger may easily detect what is
strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province. The
old oysterman, speaking of gull-shooting, had said that you must aim
under, when firing down the bank.

A neighbor tells me that one August, looking through a glass from
Naushon to some vessels which were sailing along near Martha’s
Vineyard, the water about them appeared perfectly smooth, so that they
were reflected in it, and yet their full sails proved that it must be
rippled, and they who were with him thought that it was mirage, _i.e._
a reflection from a haze.

From the above-mentioned sand-hill we over-looked Provincetown and its
harbor, now emptied of vessels, and also a wide expanse of ocean. As we
did not wish to enter Provincetown before night, though it was cold and
windy, we returned across the Deserts to the Atlantic side, and walked
along the beach again nearly to Race Point, being still greedy of the
sea influence. All the while it was not so calm as the reader may
suppose, but it was blow, blow, blow,—roar, roar, roar,—tramp, tramp,
tramp,—without interruption. The shore now trended nearly east and
west.

Before sunset, having already seen the mackerel fleet returning into
the Bay, we left the sea-shore on the north of Provincetown, and made
our way across the Desert to the eastern extremity of the town. From
the first high sand-hill, covered with beach-grass and bushes to its
top, on the edge of the desert, we overlooked the shrubby hill and
swamp country which surrounds Provincetown on the north, and protects
it, in some measure, from the invading sand. Notwithstanding the
universal barrenness, and the contiguity of the desert, I 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, mingled 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. Coming from the country as I did,
and many autumnal woods as I had seen, this was perhaps the most novel
and remarkable sight that I saw on the Cape. Probably the brightness of
the tints was enhanced by contrast with the sand which surrounded this
tract. This was a part of the furniture of Cape Cod. We had for days
walked up the long and bleak piazza which runs along her Atlantic side,
then over the sanded floor of her halls, and now we were being
introduced into her boudoir. The hundred white sails crowding round
Long Point into Provincetown Harbor, seen over the painted hills in
front, looked like toy ships upon a mantel-piece.

The peculiarity of this autumnal landscape consisted in the lowness and
thickness of the shrubbery, no less than in the brightness of the
tints. It was like a thick stuff of worsted or a fleece, and looked as
if a giant could take it up by the hem, or rather the tasselled fringe
which trailed out on the sand, and shake it, though it needed not to be
shaken. But no doubt the dust would fly in that case, for not a little
has accumulated underneath it. Was it not such an autumnal landscape as
this which suggested our high-colored rugs and carpets? Hereafter when
I look on a richer rug than usual, and study its figures, I shall
think, there are the huckleberry hills, and there the denser swamps of
boxberry and blueberry: there the shrub-oak patches and the bayberries,
there the maples and the birches and the pines. What other dyes are to
be compared to these? They were warmer colors than I had associated
with the New England coast.

After threading a swamp full of boxberry, and climbing several hills
covered with shrub-oaks, without a path, where shipwrecked men would be
in danger of perishing in the night, we came down upon the eastern
extremity of the four planks which run the whole length of Provincetown
street. This, which is the last town on the Cape, lies mainly in one
street along the curving beach fronting the southeast. The sand-hills,
covered with shrubbery and interposed with swamps and ponds, rose
immediately behind it in the form of a crescent, which is from half a
mile to a mile or more wide in the middle, and beyond these is the
desert, which is the greater part of its territory, stretching to the
sea on the east and west and north. The town is compactly built in the
narrow space, from ten to fifty rods deep, between the harbor and the
sand-hills, and contained at that time about twenty-six hundred
inhabitants. The houses, in which a more modern and pretending style
has at length prevailed over the fisherman’s hut, stand on the inner or
plank side of the street, and the fish and store houses, with the
picturesque-looking windmills of the Salt-works, on the water side. The
narrow portion of the beach between, forming the street, about eighteen
feet wide, the only one where one carriage could pass another, if there
was more than one carriage in the town, looked much “heavier” than any
portion of the beach or the desert which we had walked on, it being
above the reach of the highest tide, and the sand being kept loose by
the occasional passage of a traveller. We learned that the four planks
on which we were walking had been bought by the town’s share of the
Surplus Revenue, the disposition of which was a bone of contention
between the inhabitants, till they wisely resolved thus to put it under
foot. Yet some, it was said, were so provoked because they did not
receive their particular share in money, that they persisted in walking
in the sand a long time after the sidewalk was built. This is the only
instance which I happen to know in which the surplus revenue proved a
blessing to any town. A surplus revenue of dollars from the treasury to
stem the greater evil of a surplus revenue of sand from the ocean. They
expected to make a hard road by the time these planks were worn out.
Indeed, they have already done so since we were there, and have almost
forgotten their sandy baptism.

As we passed along we observed the inhabitants engaged in curing either
fish or the coarse salt hay which they had brought home and spread on
the beach before their doors, looking as yellow as if they had raked it
out of the sea. The front-yard plots appeared like what indeed they
were, portions of the beach fenced in, with Beach-grass growing in
them, as if they were sometimes covered by the tide. You might still
pick up shells and pebbles there. There were a few trees among the
houses, especially silver abeles, willows, and balm-of-Gileads; and one
man showed me a young oak which he had transplanted from behind the
town, thinking it an apple-tree. But every man to his trade. Though he
had little woodcraft, he was not the less weatherwise, and gave us one
piece of information; viz., he had observed that when a thunder-cloud
came up with a flood-tide it did not rain. This was the most completely
maritime town that we were ever in. It was merely a good harbor,
surrounded by land dry, if not firm,—an inhabited beach, whereon
fishermen cured and stored their fish, without any back country. When
ashore the inhabitants still walk on planks. A few small patches have
been reclaimed from the swamps, containing commonly half a dozen square
rods only each. We saw one which was fenced with four lengths of rail;
also a fence made wholly of hogshead-staves stuck in the ground. These,
and such as these, were all the cultivated and cultivable land in
Provincetown. We were told that there were thirty or forty acres in
all, but we did not discover a quarter part so much, and that was well
dusted with sand, and looked as if the desert was claiming it. They are
now turning some of their swamps into Cranberry Meadows on quite an
extensive scale.

[Illustration: A cranberry meadow]

Yet far from being out of the way. Provincetown is directly in the way
of the navigator, and he is lucky who does not run afoul of it in the
dark. It is situated on one of the highways of commerce, and men from
all parts of the globe touch there in the course of a year.

The mackerel fleet had nearly all got in before us, it being Saturday
night, excepting that division which had stood down towards Chatham in
the morning; and from a hill where we went to see the sun set in the
Bay we counted two hundred goodly looking schooners at anchor in the
harbor at various distances from the shore, and more were yet coming
round the Cape. As each came to anchor, it took in sail and swung round
in the wind, and lowered its boat. They belonged chiefly to Wellfleet,
Truro, and Cape Ann. This was that city of canvas which we had seen
hull down in the horizon. Near at hand, and under bare poles, they were
unexpectedly black-looking vessels, μέλαιναι νῆες. A fisherman told us
that there were fifteen hundred vessels in the mackerel fleet, and that
he had counted three hundred and fifty in Provincetown Harbor at one
time. Being obliged to anchor at a considerable distance from the shore
on account of the shallowness of the water, they made the impression of
a larger fleet than the vessels at the wharves of a large city. As they
had been manœuvring out there all day seemingly for our entertainment,
while we were walking north-westward along the Atlantic, so now we
found them flocking into Provincetown Harbor at night, just as we
arrived, as if to meet us, and exhibit themselves close at hand.
Standing by Race Point and Long Point with various speed, they reminded
me of fowls coming home to roost.

These were genuine New England vessels. It is stated in the Journal of
Moses Prince, a brother of the annalist, under date of 1721, at which
time he visited Gloucester, that the first vessel of the class called
schooner was built at Gloucester about eight years before, by Andrew
Robinson; and late in the same century one Cotton Tufts gives us the
tradition with some particulars, which he learned on a visit to the
same place. According to the latter, Robinson having constructed a
vessel which he masted and rigged in a peculiar manner, on her going
off the stocks a bystander cried out, “_O, how she scoons!_” whereat
Robinson replied, “_A schooner let her be!_” “From which time,” says
Tufts, “vessels thus masted and rigged have gone by the name of
schooners; before which, vessels of this description were not known in
Europe.” (See Mass. Hist. Coll., Vol. IX., 1st Series, and Vol. I., 4th
Series.) Yet I can hardly believe this, for a schooner has always
seemed to me—the typical vessel.

According to C. E. Potter of Manchester, New Hampshire, the very word
_schooner_ is of New England origin, being from the Indian _schoon_ or
_scoot_, meaning to rush, as Schoodic, from _scoot_ and _anke_, a place
where water rushes. N. B. Somebody of Gloucester was to read a paper on
this matter before a genealogical society, in Boston, March 3, 1859,
according to the _Boston Journal_, q. v.

Nearly all who come out must walk on the four planks which I have
mentioned, so that you are pretty sure to meet all the inhabitants of
Provincetown who come out in the course of a day, provided you keep out
yourself. This evening the planks were crowded with mackerel fishers,
to whom we gave and from whom we took the wall, as we returned to our
hotel. This hotel was kept by a tailor, his shop on the one side of the
door, his hotel on the other, and his day seemed to be divided between
carving meat and carving broadcloth.

The next morning, though it was still more cold and blustering than the
day before, we took to the Deserts again, for we spent our days wholly
out of doors, in the sun when there was any, and in the wind which
never failed. After threading the shrubby hill country at the southwest
end of the town, west of the Shank-Painter Swamp, whose expressive
name—for we understood it at first as a landsman naturally would—gave
it importance in our eyes, we crossed the sands to the shore south of
Race Point and three miles distant, and thence roamed round eastward
through the desert to where we had left the sea the evening before. We
travelled five or six miles after we got out there, on a curving line,
and might have gone nine or ten, over vast platters of pure sand, from
the midst of which we could not see a particle of vegetation, excepting
the distant thin fields of Beach-grass, which crowned and made the
ridges toward which the sand sloped upward on each side;—all the while
in the face of a cutting wind as cold as January; indeed, we
experienced no weather so cold as this for nearly two months afterward.
This desert extends from the extremity of the Cape, through
Provincetown into Truro, and many a time as we were traversing it we
were reminded of “Riley’s Narrative” of his captivity in the sands of
Arabia, notwithstanding the cold. Our eyes magnified the patches of
Beach-grass into cornfields in the horizon, and we probably exaggerated
the height of the ridges on account of the mirage. I was pleased to
learn afterward, from Kalm’s Travels in North America, that the
inhabitants of the Lower St. Lawrence call this grass (_Calamagrostis
arenaria_), and also Sea-lyme grass (_Elymus arenarius_), _seigle de
me_; and he adds, “I have been assured that these plants grow in great
plenty in Newfoundland, and on other North American shores; the places
covered with them looking, at a distance, like cornfields; which might
explain the passage in our northern accounts [he wrote in 1749] of the
excellent wine land [_Vinland det goda_, Translator], which mentions
that they had found whole fields of wheat growing wild.”

The Beach-grass is “two to four feet high, of a seagreen color,” and it
is said to be widely diffused over the world. In the Hebrides it is
used for mats, pack-saddles, bags, hats, etc.; paper has been made of
it at Dorchester in this State, and cattle eat it when tender. It has
heads somewhat like rye, from six inches to a foot in length, and it is
propagated both by roots and seeds. To express its love for sand, some
botanists have called it _Psamma arenaria_, which is the Greek for
sand, qualified by the Latin for sandy,—or sandy sand. As it is blown
about by the wind, while it is held fast by its roots, it describes
myriad circles in the sand as accurately as if they were made by
compasses.

It was the dreariest scenery imaginable. The only animals which we saw
on the sand at that time were spiders, which are to be found almost
everywhere whether on snow or ice-water or sand,—and a
venomous-looking, long, narrow worm, one of the myriapods, or
thousand-legs. We were surprised to see spider-holes in that flowing
sand with an edge as firm as that of a stoned well.

In June this sand was scored with the tracks of turtles both large and
small, which had been out in the night, leading to and from the swamps.
I was told by a _terræ filius_ who has a “farm” on the edge of the
desert, and is familiar with the fame of Provincetown, that one man had
caught twenty-five snapping-turtles there the previous spring. His own
method of catching them was to put a toad on a mackerel-hook and cast
it into a pond, tying the line to a stump or stake on shore. Invariably
the turtle when hooked crawled up the line to the stump, and was found
waiting there by his captor, however long afterward. He also said that
minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no
squirrels. We heard of sea-turtle as large as a barrel being found on
the beach and on East Harbor marsh, but whether they were native there,
or had been lost out of some vessel, did not appear. Perhaps they were
the Salt-water Terrapin, or else the Smooth Terrapin, found thus far
north. Many toads were met with where there was nothing but sand and
beach-grass. In Truro I had been surprised at the number of large
light-colored toads everywhere hopping over the dry and sandy fields,
their color corresponding to that of the sand. Snakes also are common
on these pure sand beaches, and I have never been so much troubled by
mosquitoes as in such localities. At the same season strawberries grew
there abundantly in the little hollows on the edge of the desert
standing amid the beach-grass in the sand, and the fruit of the
shadbush or Amelanchier, which the inhabitants call Josh-pears (some
think from juicy?), is very abundant on the hills. I fell in with an
obliging man who conducted me to the best locality for strawberries. He
said that he would not have shown me the place if he had not seen that
I was a stranger, and could not anticipate him another year; I
therefore feel bound in honor not to reveal it. When we came to a pond,
he being the native did the honors and carried me over on his
shoulders, like Sindbad. One good turn deserves another, and if he ever
comes our way I will do as much for him.

In one place we saw numerous dead tops of trees projecting through the
otherwise uninterrupted desert, where, as we afterward learned, thirty
or forty years before a flourishing forest had stood, and now, as the
trees were laid bare from year to year, the inhabitants cut off their
tops for fuel.

We saw nobody that day outside of the town; it was too wintry for such
as had seen the Backside before, or for the greater number who never
desire to see it, to venture out; and we saw hardly a track to show
that any had ever crossed this desert. Yet I was told that some are
always out on the Back-side night and day in severe weather, looking
for wrecks, in order that they may get the job of discharging the
cargo, or the like,—and thus shipwrecked men are succored. But,
generally speaking, the inhabitants rarely visit these sands. One who
had lived in Provincetown thirty years told me that he had not been
through to the north side within that time. Sometimes the natives
themselves come near perishing by losing their way in snow-storms
behind the town.

The wind was not a Sirocco or Simoon, such as we associate with the
desert, but a New England northeaster,—and we sought shelter in vain
under the sand-hills, for it blew all about them, rounding them into
cones, and was sure to find us out on whichever side we sat. From time
to time we lay down and drank at little pools in the sand, filled with
pure fresh water, all that was left, probably, of a pond or swamp. The
air was filled with dust like snow, and cutting sand which made the
face tingle, and we saw what it must be to face it when the weather was
drier, and, if possible, windier still,—to face a migrating sand-bar in
the air, which has picked up its duds and is off,—to be whipped with a
cat, not o’ nine-tails, but of a myriad of tails, and each one a sting
to it. A Mr. Whitman, a former minister of Wellfleet, used to write to
his inland friends that the blowing sand scratched the windows so that
he was obliged to have one new pane set every week, that he might see
out.

On the edge of the shrubby woods the sand had the appearance of an
inundation which was overwhelming them, terminating in an abrupt bank
many feet higher than the surface on which they stood, and having
partially buried the out-side trees. The moving sand-hills of England,
called Dunes or Downs, to which these have been likened, are either
formed of sand cast up by the sea, or of sand taken from the land
itself in the first place by the wind, and driven still farther inward.
It is here a tide of sand impelled by waves and wind, slowly flowing
from the sea toward the town. The northeast winds are said to be the
strongest, but the northwest to move most sand, because they are the
driest. On the shore of the Bay of Biscay many villages were formerly
destroyed in this way. Some of the ridges of beach-grass which we saw
were planted by government many years ago, to preserve the harbor of
Provincetown and the extremity of the Cape. I talked with some who had
been employed in the planting. In the “Description of the Eastern
Coast,” which I have already referred to, it is said: “Beach-grass
during the spring and summer grows about two feet and a half. If
surrounded by naked beach, the storms of autumn and winter heap up the
sand on all sides, and cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant.
In the ensuing spring the grass mounts anew; is again covered with sand
in the winter; and thus a hill or ridge continues to ascend as long as
there is a sufficient base to support it, or till the circumscribing
sand, being also covered with beach-grass, will no longer yield to the
force of the winds.” Sand-hills formed in this way are sometimes one
hundred feet high and of every variety of form, like snow-drifts, or
Arab tents, and are continually shifting. The grass roots itself very
firmly. When I endeavored to pull it up, it usually broke off ten
inches or a foot below the surface, at what had been the surface the
year before, as appeared by the numerous offshoots there, it being a
straight, hard, round shoot, showing by its length how much the sand
had accumulated the last year; and sometimes the dead stubs of a
previous season were pulled up with it from still deeper in the sand,
with their own more decayed shoot attached,—so that the age of a
sand-hill, and its rate of increase for several years, is pretty
accurately recorded in this way.

[Illustration: The sand dunes drifting in upon the trees]

Old Gerard, the English herbalist, says, p. 1250: “I find mention in
Stowe’s Chronicle, in Anno 1555, of a certain pulse or pease, as they
term it, wherewith the poor people at that time, there being a great
dearth, were miraculously helped: he thus mentions it. In the month of
August (saith he), in Suffolke, at a place by the sea side all of hard
stone and pibble, called in those parts a shelf, lying between the
towns of Orford and Aldborough, where neither grew grass nor any earth
was ever seen; it chanced in this barren place suddenly to spring up
without any tillage or sowing, great abundance of peason, whereof the
poor gathered (as men judged) above one hundred quarters, yet remained
some ripe and some blossoming, as many as ever there were before: to
the which place rode the Bishop of Norwich and the Lord Willoughby,
with others in great number, who found nothing but hard, rocky stone
the space of three yards under the roots of these peason, which roots
were great and long, and very sweet.” He tells us also that Gesner
learned from Dr. Cajus that there were enough there to supply thousands
of men. He goes on to say that “they without doubt grew there many
years before, but were not observed till hunger made them take notice
of them, and quickened their invention, which commonly in our people is
very dull, especially in finding out food of this nature. My worshipful
friend Dr. Argent hath told me that many years ago he was in this
place, and caused his man to pull among the beach with his hands, and
follow the roots so long until he got some equal in length unto his
height, yet could come to no ends of them.” Gerard never saw them, and
is not certain what kind they were.

In Dwight’s Travels in New England it is stated that the inhabitants of
Truro were formerly regularly warned under the authority of law in the
month of April yearly, to plant beachgrass, as elsewhere they are
warned to repair the highways. They dug up the grass in bunches, which
were afterward divided into several smaller ones, and set about three
feet apart, in rows, so arranged as to break joints and obstruct the
passage of the wind. It spread itself rapidly, the weight of the seeds
when ripe bending the heads of the grass, and so dropping directly by
its side and vegetating there. In this way, for instance, they built up
again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the
sea broke over in the last century. They have now a public road near
there, made by laying sods, which were full of roots, bottom upward and
close together on the sand, double in the middle of the track, then
spreading brush evenly over the sand on each side for half a dozen
feet, planting beachgrass on the banks in regular rows, as above
described, and sticking a fence of brush against the hollows.

The attention of the general government was first attracted to the
danger which threatened Cape Cod Harbor from the inroads of the sand,
about thirty years ago, and commissioners were at that time appointed
by Massachusetts, to examine the premises. They reported in June, 1825,
that, owing to “the trees and brush having been cut down, and the
beach-grass destroyed on the seaward side of the Cape, opposite the
Harbor,” the original surface of the ground had been broken up and
removed by the wind toward the Harbor,—during the previous fourteen
years,—over an extent of “one half a mile in breadth, and about four
and a half miles in length.”—“The space where a few years since were
some of the highest lands on the Cape, covered with trees and bushes,”
presenting “an extensive waste of undulating sand “;—and that, during
the previous twelve months, the sand “had approached the Harbor an
average distance of fifty rods, for an extent of four and a half
miles!” and unless some measures were adopted to check its progress, it
would in a few years destroy both the harbor and the town. They
therefore recommended that beach-grass be set out on a curving line
over a space ten rods wide and four and a half miles long, and that
cattle, horses, and sheep be prohibited from going abroad, and the
inhabitants from cutting the brush.

I was told that about thirty thousand dollars in all had been
appropriated to this object, though it was complained that a great part
of this was spent foolishly, as the public money is wont to be. Some
say that while the government is planting beach-grass behind the town
for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand
into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to make house-lots. The
Patent-Office has recently imported the seed of this grass from
Holland, and distributed it over the country, but probably we have as
much as the Hollanders.

Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad
little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a
total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom. Formerly, the cows were
permitted to go at large, and they ate many strands of the cable by
which the Cape is moored, and well-nigh set it adrift, as the bull did
the boat which was moored with a grass rope; but now they are not
permitted to wander.

A portion of Truro which has considerable taxable property on it has
lately been added to Provincetown, and I was told by a Truro man that
his townsmen talked of petitioning the legislature to set off the next
mile of their territory also to Provincetown, in order that she might
have her share of the lean as well as the fat, and take care of the
road through it; for its whole value is literally to hold the Cape
together, and even this it has not always done. But Provincetown
strenuously declines the gift.

The wind blowed so hard from the northeast that, cold as it was, we
resolved to see the breakers on the Atlantic side, whose din we had
heard all the morning; so we kept on eastward through the Desert, till
we struck the shore again northeast of Provincetown, and exposed
ourselves to the full force of the piercing blast. There are extensive
shoals there over which the sea broke with great force. For half a mile
from the shore it was one mass of white breakers, which, with the wind,
made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak. Of this part
of the coast it is said: “A northeast storm, the most violent and fatal
to seamen, as it is frequently accompanied with snow, blows directly on
the land: a strong current sets along the shore; add to which that
ships, during the operation of such a storm, endeavor to work
northward, that they may get into the bay. Should they be unable to
weather Race Point, the wind drives them on the shore, and a shipwreck
is inevitable. Accordingly, the strand is everywhere covered with the
fragments of vessels.” But since the Highland Light was erected, this
part of the coast is less dangerous, and it is said that more
shipwrecks occur south of that light, where they were scarcely known
before.

[Illustration: The white breakers on the Atlantic side]

This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed,—more _tumultuous_, my
companion affirmed, than the rapids of Niagara, and, of course, on a
far greater scale. It was the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with
only one sail in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously
seeking a harbor. It was high tide when we reached the shore, and in
one place, for a considerable distance, each wave dashed up so high
that it was difficult to pass between it and the bank. Further south,
where the bank was higher, it would have been dangerous to attempt it.
A native of the Cape has told me that, many years ago, three boys, his
playmates, having gone to this beach in Wellfleet to visit a wreck,
when the sea receded ran down to the wreck, and when it came in ran
before it to the bank, but the sea following fast at their heels,
caused the bank to cave and bury them alive.

It was the roaring sea, θάλασσα ἠχήεσσα,—

ἀμφὶ δὲ τ’ ἄκραι
Ἠϊόνες βοόωσιν, ἐρευγομένης ἁλὸς ἔξω.


And the summits of the bank
Around resound, the sea being vomited forth.


As we stood looking on this scene we were gradually convinced that
fishing here and in a pond were not, in all respects, the same, and
that he who waits for fair weather and a calm sea may never see the
glancing skin of a mackerel, and get no nearer to a cod than the wooden
emblem in the State House.

Having lingered on the shore till we were well-nigh chilled to death by
the wind, and were ready to take shelter in a Charity-house, we turned
our weather-beaten faces toward Provincetown and the Bay again, having
now more than doubled the Cape.

 [1] _I. e._ a vessel.


 [2] The sea, which is arched over its sandy bottom like a heaven.


 [3] Battle.



X
PROVINCETOWN


Early the next morning I walked into a fish-house near our hotel, where
three or four men were engaged in trundling out the pickled fish on
barrows, and spreading them to dry. They told me that a vessel had
lately come in from the Banks with forty-four thousand codfish. Timothy
Dwight says that, just before he arrived at Provincetown, “a schooner
come in from the Great Bank with fifty-six thousand fish, almost one
thousand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage; the main deck
being, on her return, eight inches under water in calm weather.” The
cod in this fish-house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet
deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching
them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron
point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly.
Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to
you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It reminded
me of the figs of Smyrna. “How long does it take to cure these fish? I
asked.

“Two good drying days, sir,” was the answer.

I walked across the street again into the hotel to breakfast, and mine
host inquired if I would take “hashed fish or beans.” I took beans,
though they never were a favorite dish of mine. I found next summer
that this was still the only alternative proposed here, and the
landlord was still ringing the changes on these two words. In the
former dish there was a remarkable proportion of fish. As you travel
inland the potato predominates. It chanced that I did not taste fresh
fish of any kind on the Cape, and I was assured that they were not so
much used there as in the country. That is where they are cured, and
where, sometimes, travellers are cured of eating them. No fresh meat
was slaughtered in Provincetown, but the little that was used at the
public houses was brought from Boston by the steamer.

[Illustration: In Provincetown harbor]

A great many of the houses here were surrounded by fish-flakes close up
to the sills on all sides, with only a narrow passage two or three feet
wide, to the front door; so that instead of looking out into a flower
or grass plot, you looked on to so many square rods of cod turned wrong
side outwards. These parterres were said to be least like a
flower-garden in a good drying day in mid-summer. There were flakes of
every age and pattern, and some so rusty and overgrown with lichens
that they looked as if they might have served the founders of the
fishery here. Some had broken down under the weight of successive
harvests. The principal employment of the inhabitants at this time
seemed to be to trundle out their fish and spread them in the morning,
and bring them in at night. I saw how many a loafer who chanced to be
out early enough got a job at wheeling out the fish of his neighbor who
was anxious to improve the whole of a fair day. Now, then, I knew where
salt fish were caught. They were everywhere lying on their backs, their
collar-bones standing out like the lapels of a man-o’-war-man’s jacket,
and inviting all things to come and rest in their bosoms; and all
things, with a few exceptions, accepted the invitation. I think, by the
way, that if you should wrap a large salt fish round a small boy, he
would have a coat of such a fashion as I have seen many a one wear to
muster. Salt fish were stacked up on the wharves, looking like corded
wood, maple and yellow birch with the bark left on. I mistook them for
this at first, and such in one sense they were,—fuel to maintain our
vital fires,—an eastern wood which grew on the Grand Banks. Some were
stacked in the form of huge flower-pots, being laid in small circles
with the tails outwards, each circle successively larger than the
preceding until the pile was three or four feet high, when the circles
rapidly diminished, so as to form a conical roof. On the shores of New
Brunswick this is covered with birch-bark, and stones are placed upon
it, and being thus rendered impervious to the rain, it is left to
season before being packed for exportation.

It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes fed on
cod’s-heads! The godlike part of the cod, which, like the human head,
is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain
in it,—coming; to such an end I to be craunched by cows I I felt my own
skull crack from sympathy. What if the heads of men were to be cut off
to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands
in the ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and
instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal!—However, an inhabitant
assured me that they did not make a practice of feeding cows on
cod’s-heads; the cows merely would eat them sometimes; but I might live
there all my days and never see it done. A cow wanting salt would also
sometimes lick out all the soft part of a cod on the flakes. This he
would have me believe was the foundation of this fish-story.

It has been a constant traveller’s tale and perhaps slander, now for
thousands of years, the Latins and Greeks have repeated it, that this
or that nation feeds its cattle, or horses, or sheep, on fish, as may
be seen in OElian and Pliny, but in the Journal of Nearchus, who was
Alexander’s admiral, and made a voyage from the Indus to the Euphrates
three hundred and twenty-six years before Christ, it is said that the
inhabitants of a portion of the intermediate coast, whom he called
Ichthyophagi or Fish-eaters, not only ate fishes raw and also dried and
pounded in a whale’s vertebra for a mortar and made into a paste, but
gave them to their cattle, there being no grass on the coast; and
several modern travellers—Braybosa, Niebuhr, and others—make the same
report. Therefore in balancing the evidence I am still in doubt about
the Provincetown cows. As for other domestic animals. Captain King in
his continuation of Captain Cook’s Journal in 1779, says of the dogs of
Kamtschatka, “Their food in the winter consists entirely of the heads,
entrail, and backbones of salmon, which are put aside and dried for
that purpose; and with this diet they are fed but sparingly.” (Cook’s
Journal, Vol. VII., p. 315.)

As we are treating of fishy matters, let me insert what Pliny says,
that “the commanders of the fleets of Alexander the Great have related
that the Gedrosi, who dwell on the banks of the river Arabis, are in
the habit of making the doors of their houses with the jaw-bones of
fishes, and raftering the roofs with their bones.” Strabo tells the
same of the Ichthyophagi. “Hardouin remarks that the Basques of his day
were in the habit of fencing their gardens with the ribs of the whale,
which sometimes exceeded twenty feet in length; and Cuvier says that at
the present time the jaw-bone of the whale is used in Norway for the
purpose of making beams or posts for buildings.” (Bohn’s ed., trans, of
Pliny, Vol. II., p. 361.) Herodotus says the inhabitants on Lake
Prasias in Thrace (living on piles) “give fish for fodder to their
horses and beasts of burden.”

Provincetown was apparently what is called a flourishing town. Some of
the inhabitants asked me if I did not think that they appeared to be
well off generally. I said that I did, and asked how many there were in
the almshouse. “O, only one or two, infirm or idiotic,” answered they.
The outward aspect of the houses and shops frequently suggested a
poverty which their interior comfort and even richness disproved. You
might meet a lady daintily dressed in the Sabbath morning, wading in
among the sandhills, from church, where there appeared no house fit to
receive her, yet no doubt the interior of the house answered to the
exterior of the lady. As for the interior of the inhabitants I am still
in the dark about it. I had a little intercourse with some whom I met
in the street, and was often agreeably disappointed by discovering the
intelligence of rough, and what would be considered unpromising
specimens. Nay, I ventured to call on one citizen the next summer, by
special invitation. I found him sitting in his front doorway, that
Sabbath evening, prepared for me to come in unto him; but unfortunately
for his reputation for keeping open house, there was stretched across
his gateway a circular cobweb of the largest kind and quite entire.
This looked so ominous that I actually turned aside and went in the
back way.

This Monday morning was beautifully mild and calm, both on land and
water, promising us a smooth passage across the Bay, and the fishermen
feared that it would not be so good a drying day as the cold and windy
one which preceded it. There could hardly have been a greater contrast.
This was the first of the Indian summer days, though at a late hour in
the morning we found the wells in the sand behind the town still
covered with ice, which had formed in the night. What with wind and sun
my most prominent feature fairly cast its slough. But I assure you it
will take more than two good drying days to cure me of rambling. After
making an excursion among the hills in the neighborhood of the
Shank-Painter Swamp, and getting a little work done in its line, we
took our seat upon the highest sand-hill overlooking the town, in
mid-air, on a long plank stretched across between two hillocks of sand,
where some boys were endeavoring in vain to fly their kite; and there
we remained the rest of that forenoon looking out over the placid
harbor, and watching for the first appearance of the steamer from
Wellfleet, that we might be in readiness to go on board when we heard
the whistle off Long Point.

We got what we could out of the boys in the meanwhile. Provincetown
boys are of course all sailors and have sailors’ eyes. When we were at
the Highland Light the last summer, seven or eight miles from
Provincetown Harbor, and wished to know one Sunday morning if the
_Olata_, a well-known yacht, had got in from Boston, so that we could
return in her, a Provincetown boy about ten years old, who chanced to
be at the table, remarked that she had. I asked him how he knew. “I
just saw her come in,” said he. When I expressed surprise that he could
distinguish her from other vessels so far, he said that there were not
so many of those two-topsail schooners about but that he could tell
her. Palfrey said, in his oration at Barnstable, the duck does not take
to the water with a surer instinct than the Barnstable boy. [He might
have said the Cape Cod boy as well.] He leaps from his leading-strings
into the shrouds, it is but a bound from the mother’s lap to the
masthead. He boxes the compass in his infant soliloquies. He can hand,
reef, and steer by the time he flies a kite.

This was the very day one would have chosen to sit upon a hill
overlooking sea and land, and muse there. The mackerel fleet was
rapidly taking its departure, one schooner after another, and standing
round the Cape, like fowls leaving their roosts in the morning to
disperse themselves in distant fields. The turtle-like sheds of the
salt-works were crowded into every nook in the hills, immediately
behind the town, and their now idle windmills lined the shore. It was
worth the while to see by what coarse and simple chemistry this almost
necessary of life is obtained, with the sun for journeyman, and a
single apprentice to do the chores for a large establishment. It is a
sort of tropical labor, pursued too in the sunniest season; more
interesting than gold or diamond-washing, which, I fancy, it somewhat
resembles at a distance. In the production of the necessaries of life
Nature is ready enough to assist man. So at the potash works which I
have seen at Hull, where they burn the stems of the kelp and boil the
ashes. Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got
half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory. It is said, that owing to
the reflection of the sun from the sand-hills, and there being
absolutely no fresh water emptying into the harbor, the same number of
superficial feet yields more salt here than in any other part of the
county. A little rain is considered necessary to clear the air, and
make salt fast and good, for as paint does not dry, so water does not
evaporate in dog-day weather. But they were now, as elsewhere on the
Cape, breaking up their salt-works and selling them for lumber.

From that elevation we could overlook the operations of the inhabitants
almost as completely as if the roofs had been taken off. They were
busily covering the wicker-worked flakes about their houses with salted
fish, and we now saw that the back yards were improved for this purpose
as much as the front; where one man’s fish ended another’s began. In
almost every yard we detected some little building from which these
treasures were being trundled forth and systematically spread, and we
saw that there was an art as well as a knack even in spreading fish,
and that a division of labor was profitably practised. One man was
withdrawing his fishes a few inches beyond the nose of his neighbor’s
cow which had stretched her neck over a paling to get at them. It
seemed a quite domestic employment, like drying clothes, and indeed in
some parts of the county the women take part in it.

I noticed in several places on the Cape a sort of clothes-_flakes_.
They spread brush on the ground, and fence it round, and then lay their
clothes on it, to keep them from the sand. This is a Cape Cod
clothes-yard.

The sand is the great enemy here. The tops of some of the hills were
enclosed and a board put up, forbidding all persons entering the
enclosure, lest their feet should disturb the sand, and set it
a-blowing or a-sliding. The inhabitants are obliged to get leave from
the authorities to cut wood behind the town for fish-flakes,
bean-poles, pea-brush, and the like, though, as we were told, they may
transplant trees from one part of the township to another without
leave. The sand drifts like snow, and sometimes the lower story of a
house is concealed by it, though it is kept off by a wall. The houses
were formerly built on piles, in order that the driving sand might pass
under them. We saw a few old ones here still standing on their piles,
but they were boarded up now, being protected by their younger
neighbors. There was a school-house, just under the hill on which we
sat, filled with sand up to the tops of the desks, and of course the
master and scholars had fled. Perhaps they had imprudently left the
windows open one day, or neglected to mend a broken pane. Yet in one
place was advertised “Fine sand for sale here,”—I could hardly believe
my eyes,—probably some of the street sifted,—a good instance of the
fact that a man confers a value on the most worthless thing by mixing
himself with it, according to which rule we must have conferred a value
on the whole back-side of Cape Cod;—but I thought that if they could
have advertised “Fat Soil,” or perhaps “Fine sand got rid of,” ay, and
“Shoes emptied here,” it would have been more alluring. As we looked
down on the town, I thought that I saw one man, who probably lived
beyond the extremity of the planking, steering and tacking for it in a
sort of snow-shoes, but I may have been mistaken. In some pictures of
Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the
ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand. Nevertheless,
natives of Provincetown assured me that they could walk in the middle
of the road without trouble even in slippers, for they had learned how
to put their feet down and lift them up without taking in any sand. One
man said that he should be surprised if he found half a dozen grains of
sand in his pumps at night, and stated, moreover, that the young ladies
had a dexterous way of emptying their shoes at each step, which it
would take a stranger a long time to learn. The tires of the
stage-wheels were about five inches wide; and the wagon-tires generally
on the Cape are an inch or two wider, as the sand is an inch or two
deeper than elsewhere. I saw a baby’s wagon with tires six inches wide
to keep it near the surface. The more tired the wheels, the less tired
the horses. Yet all the time that we were in Provincetown, which was
two days and nights, we saw only one horse and cart, and they were
conveying a coffin. They did not try such experiments there on common
occasions. The next summer I saw only the two-wheeled horse-cart which
conveyed me thirty rods into the harbor on my way to the steamer. Yet
we read that there were two horses and two yoke of oxen here in 1791,
and we were told that there were several more when we were there,
beside the stage team. In Barber’s Historical Collections, it is said,
“So rarely are wheel-carriages seen in the place that they are a matter
of some curiosity to the younger part of the community. A lad who
understood navigating the ocean much better than land travel, on seeing
a man driving a wagon in the street, expressed his surprise at his
being able to drive so straight without the assistance of a rudder.”
There was no rattle of carts, and there would have been no rattle if
there had been any carts. Some saddle-horses that passed the hotel in
the evening merely made the sand fly with a rustling sound like a
writer sanding his paper copiously, but there was no sound of their
tread. No doubt there are more horses and carts there at present, A
sleigh is never seen, or at least is a great novelty on the Cape, the
snow being either absorbed by the sand or blown into drifts.

Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the Cape generally do not complain of
their “soil,” but will tell you that it is good enough for them to dry
their fish on.

Notwithstanding all this sand, we counted three meeting-houses, and
four school-houses nearly as large, on this street, though some had a
tight board fence about them to preserve the plot within level and
hard. Similar fences, even within a foot of many of the houses, gave
the town a less cheerful and hospitable appearance than it would
otherwise have had. They told us that, on the whole, the sand had made
no progress for the last ten years, the cows being no longer permitted
to go at large, and every means being taken to stop the sandy tide.

In 1727 Provincetown was “invested with peculiar privileges.” for its
encouragement. Once or twice it was nearly abandoned; but now lots on
the street fetch a high price, though titles to them were first
obtained by possession and improvement, and they are still transferred
by quitclaim deeds merely, the township being the property of the
State. But though lots were so valuable on the street, you might in
many places throw a stone over them to where a man could still obtain
land, or sand, by squatting on or improving it.

[Illustration: Provincetown—A bit of the village from the wharf]

Stones are very rare on the Cape. I saw a very few small stones used
for pavements and for bank walls, in one or two places in my walk, but
they are so scarce that, as I was informed, vessels have been forbidden
to take them from the beach for ballast, and therefore their crews used
to land at night and steal them. I did not hear of a rod of regular
stone wall below Orleans. Yet I saw one man underpinning a new house in
Eastham with some “rocks,” as he called them, which he said a neighbor
had collected with great pains in the course of years, and finally made
over to him. This I thought was a gift worthy of being recorded,—equal
to a transfer of California “rocks,” almost. Another man who was
assisting him, and who seemed to be a close observer of nature, hinted
to me the locality of a rock in that neighborhood which was “forty-two
paces in circumference and fifteen feet high,” for he saw that I was a
stranger, and, probably, would not carry it off. Yet I suspect that the
locality of the few large rocks on the forearm of the Cape is well
known to the inhabitants generally. I even met with one man who had got
a smattering of mineralogy, but where he picked it up I could not
guess. I thought that he would meet with some interesting geological
nuts for him to crack, if he should ever visit the mainland, Cohasset,
or Marblehead for instance.

The well stones at the Highland Light were brought from Hingham, but
the wells and cellars of the Cape are generally built of brick, which
also are imported. The cellars, as well as the wells, are made in a
circular form, to prevent the sand from pressing in the wall. The
former are only from nine to twelve feet in diameter, and are said to
be very cheap, since a single tier of brick will suffice for a cellar
of even larger dimensions. Of course, if you live in the sand, you will
not require a large cellar to hold your roots. In Provincetown, when
formerly they suffered the sand to drive under their houses,
obliterating all rudiments of a cellar, they did not raise a vegetable
to put into one. One farmer in Wellfleet, who raised fifty bushels of
potatoes, showed me his cellar under a corner of his house, not more
than nine feet in diameter, looking like a cistern: but he had another
of the same size under his barn.

You need dig only a few feet almost anywhere near the shore of the Cape
to find fresh water. But that which we tasted was invariably poor.
though the inhabitants called it good, as if they were comparing it
with salt water. In the account of Truro, it is said. “Wells dug near
the shore are dry at low water, or rather at what is called young
flood, but are replenished with the flowing of the tide,”—- the salt
water, which is lowest in the sand, apparently forcing the fresh up.
When you express your surprise at the greenness of a Provincetown
garden on the beach, in a dry season, they will sometimes tell you that
the tide forces the moisture up to them. It is an interesting fact that
low sand-bars in the midst of the ocean, perhaps even those which are
laid bare only at low tide, are reservoirs of fresh water at which the
thirsty mariner can supply himself. They appear, like huge sponges, to
hold the rain and dew which fall on them, and which, by capillary
attraction, are prevented from mingling with the surrounding brine.

The Harbor of Provincetown—which, as well as the greater part of the
Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from our perch—is
deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is
never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in
sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “The storms
which prevail on the American coast generally come from the east; and
there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles.”
J. D. Graham, who has made a very minute and thorough survey of this
harbor and the adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of
water, excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from
all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors
on our coast.” It is _the_ harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of
Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years at
least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith’s map of
New England, dated 1614. it bears the name of Milford Haven, and
Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles,
changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not
always power to change a name for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said,
Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of
codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”

Many an early voyager was unexpectedly caught by this hook, and found
himself embayed. On successive maps, Cape Cod appears sprinkled over
with French, Dutch, and English names, as it made part of New France,
New Holland, and New England. On one map Provincetown Harbor is called
“Fuic (bownet?) Bay,” Barnstable Bay “Staten Bay,” and the sea north of
it “Mare del Noort,” or the North Sea. On another, the extremity of the
Cape is called “Staten Hoeck,” or the States Hook. On another, by
Young, this has Noord Zee, Staten hoeck or Hit hoeck, but the copy at
Cambridge has no date; the whole Cape is called “Niew Hollant,” (after
Hudson); and on another still, the shore between Race Point and Wood
End appears to be called “Bevechier.” In Champlain’s admirable Map of
New France, including the oldest recognizable map of what is now the
New England coast with which I am acquainted, Cape Cod is called C.
Blan (i.e. Cape White), from the color of its sands, and Massachusetts
Bay is Baye Blanche. It was visited by De Monts and Champlain in 1605,
and the next year was further explored by Poitrincourt and Champlain.
The latter has given a particular account of these explorations in his
“Voyages,” together with separate charts and soundings of two of its
harbors,—_Malle Barre_, the Bad Bar (Nauset Harbor?), a name now
applied to what the French called _Cap Baturier_; and _Port Fortune_,
apparently Chatham Harbor. Both these names are copied on the map of
“Novi Belgii,” in Ogilvy’s America. He also describes minutely the
manners and customs of the savages, and represents by a plate the
savages surprising the French and killing five or six of them. The
French afterward killed some of the natives, and wished, by way of
revenge, to carry off some and make them grind in their hand-mill at
Port Royal.

It is remarkable that there is not in English any adequate or correct
account of the French exploration of what is now the coast of New
England, between 1604 and 1608, though it is conceded that they then
made the first permanent European settlement on the continent of North
America north of St. Augustine. If the lions had been the painters it
would have been otherwise. This omission is probably to be accounted
for partly by the fact that the _early edition_ of Champlain’s
“Voyages” had not been consulted for this purpose. This contains by far
the most particular, and, I think, the most interesting chapter of what
we may call the Ante-Pilgrim history of New England, extending to one
hundred and sixty pages quarto; but appears to be unknown equally to
the historian and the orator on Plymouth Rock. Bancroft does not
mention Champlain at all among the authorities for De Monts’s
expedition, nor does he say that he ever visited the coast of New
England. Though he bore the title of pilot to De Monts, he was, in
_another sense_, the leading spirit, as well as the historian of the
expedition. Holmes, Hildreth, and Barry, and apparently all our
historians who mention Champlain, refer to the edition of 1632, in
which all the separate charts of our harbors, etc., and about one-half
the narrative, are omitted; for the author explored so many lands
afterward that he could afford to forget a part of what he had done.
Hildreth, speaking of De Monts’s expedition, says that “he looked into
the Penobscot [in 1605], which Pring had discovered two years before,”
saying nothing about Champlain’s extensive exploration of it for De
Monts in 1604 (Holmes says 1608, and refers to Purchas); also that he
followed in the track of Pring along the coast “to Cape Cod, which he
called Malabarre.” (Haliburton had made the same statement before him
in 1829. He called it Cap Blanc, and Malle Barre (the Bad Bar) was the
name given to a harbor on the east side of the Cape). Pring says
nothing about a river there. Belknap says that Weymouth discovered it
in 1605. Sir F. Gorges, says, in his narration (Maine Hist. Coll., Vol.
II., p. 19), 1658, that Pring in 1606 “made a perfect discovery of all
the rivers and harbors.” This is the most I can find. Bancroft makes
Champlain to have dis-covered more western rivers in Maine, not naming
the Penobscot; he, however, must have been the discoverer of distances
on this river (see Belknap, p. 147). Pring was absent from England only
about six months, and sailed by this part of Cape Cod (Malabarre)
be-cause it yielded no sassafras, while the French, who probably had
not heard of Pring, were patiently for years exploring the coast in
search of a place of settlement, sounding and surveying its harbors.

John Smith’s map, published in 1616, from observations in 1614-15, is
by many regarded as the oldest map of New England. It is the first that
was made after this country was called New England, for he so called
it; but in Champlain’s “Voyages,” edition 1613 (and Lescarbot, in 1612,
quotes a still earlier account of his voyage), there is a map of it
made when it was known to Christendom as New France, called _Carte
Géographique de la Nouvelle Franse faictte par le Sieur de Champlain
Saint Tongois Cappitaine ordinaire pour le roi en la Marine,—faict l’en
1612_, from his observations between 1604 and 1607; a map extending
from Labrador to Cape Cod and westward _to the Great Lakes_, and
crowded with information, geographical, ethnographical, zoölogical, and
botanical. He even gives the variation of the compass as observed by
himself at that date on many parts of the coast. This, taken together
with the many _separate charts_ of harbors and their soundings on a
large scale, which this volume contains,—among the rest. _Qui ni be
quy_ (Kennebec), _Chouacoit R._ (Saco R.), _Le Beau port, Port St.
Louis_ (near Cape Ann), and others on our coast,—but _which are not in
the edition of 1632_, makes this a completer map of the New England and
adjacent northern coast than was made for half a century afterward,
almost, we might be allowed to say, till another Frenchman, Des Barres,
made another for us, which only our late Coast Survey has superseded.
Most of the maps of this coast made for a long time after betray their
indebtedness to Champlain. He was a skilful navigator, a man of
science, and geographer to the King of France. He crossed the Atlantic
about twenty times, and made nothing of it; often in a small vessel in
which few would dare to go to sea today; and on one occasion making the
voyage from Tadoussac to St. Malo in eighteen days. He was in this
neighborhood, that is, between Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and Cape Cod,
observing the land and its inhabitants, and making a map of the coast,
from May, 1604, to September, 1607, _or about three and a half years_,
and he has described minutely his method of surveying harbors. By his
own account, a part of his map was engraved in 1604 (?). When
Pont-Gravé and others returned to France in 1606, he remained at Port
Royal with Poitrincourt, “in order,” says he, “by the aid of God, to
finish the chart of the coasts which I had begun”; and again in his
volume, printed before John Smith visited this part of America, he
says: “It seems to me that I have done my duty as far as I could, if I
have not forgotten to put in my said chart whatever I saw, and give a
particular knowledge to the public of what had never been described nor
discovered so particularly as I have done it, although some other may
have heretofore written of it; but it was a very small affair in
comparison with what we have discovered within the last ten years.”

It is not generally remembered, if known, by the descendants of the
Pilgrims, that when their forefathers were spending their first
memorable winter in the New World, they had for neighbors a colony of
French no further off than Port Royal (Annapolis, Nova Scotia), three
hundred miles distant (Prince seems to make it about five hundred
miles); where, in spite of many vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen
years. They built a grist-mill there as early as 1606; also made bricks
and turpentine on a stream, Williamson says, in 1606. De Monts, who was
a Protestant, brought his minister with him, who came to blows with the
Catholic priest on the subject of religion. Though these founders of
Acadie endured no less than the Pilgrims, and about the same proportion
of them—thirty-five out of seventy-nine (Williamson’s Maine says
thirty-six out of seventy)—died the first winter at St. Croix, 1604-5,
sixteen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever celebrated
their enterprise (Williamson’s History of Maine does considerably),
while the trials which their successors and descendants endured at the
hands of the English have furnished a theme for both the historian and
poet. (See Bancroft’s History and Longfellow’s Evangeline.) The remains
at their fort at St. Croix were discovered at the end of the last
century, and helped decide where the true St. Croix, our boundary, was.

The very gravestones of those Frenchmen are probably older than the
oldest English monument in New England north of the Elizabeth Islands,
or perhaps anywhere in New England, for if there are any traces of
Gosnold’s storehouse left, his strong works are gone. Bancroft says,
advisedly, in 1834, “It requires a believing eye to discern the ruins
of the fort”; and that there were no ruins of a fort in 1837. Dr.
Charles T. Jackson tells me that, in the course of a geological survey
in 1827, he discovered a gravestone, a slab of trap rock, on Goat
Island, opposite Annapolis (Port Royal), in Nova Scotia, bearing a
Masonic coat-of-arms and the date 1606, which is fourteen years earlier
than the landing of the Pilgrims. This was left in the possession of
Judge Haliburton, of Nova Scotia.

There were Jesuit priests in what has since been called New England,
converting the savages at Mount Desert, then St. Savior, in
1613,—having come over to Port Royal in 1611, though they were almost
immediately interrupted by the English, years before the Pilgrims came
hither to enjoy their own religion. This according to Champlain.
Charlevoix says the same; and after coming from France in 1611, went
west from Port Royal along the coast as far as the Kennebec in 1612,
and was often carried from Port Royal to Mount Desert.

Indeed, the Englishman’s history of _New_ England commences only when
it ceases to be _New_ France. Though Cabot was the first to discover
the continent of North America, Champlain, in the edition of his
“Voyages” printed in 1632, after the English had for a season got
possession of Quebec and Port Royal, complains with no little justice:
“The common consent of all Europe is to represent New France as
extending at least to the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth degrees of
latitude, as appears by the maps of the world printed in Spain, Italy,
Holland, Flanders, Germany, and England, until they possessed
themselves of the coasts of New France, where are Acadie, the Etchemins
(Maine and New Brunswick), the Almouchicois (Massachusetts?), and the
Great River St. Lawrence, where they have imposed, according to their
fancy, such names as New England, Scotland, and others; but it is not
easy to efface the memory of a thing which is known to all
Christendom.”

That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador, gave
the English no just title to New England, or to the United States,
generally, any more than to Patagonia. His careful biographer (Biddle)
is not certain in what voyage he ran down the coast of the United
States as is reported, and no one tells us what he saw. Miller, in the
New York Hist. Coll., Vol. I., p. 28, says he does not appear to have
landed anywhere. Contrast with this Verrazzani’s tarrying fifteen days
at one place on the New England coast, and making frequent excursions
into the interior thence. It chances that the latter’s letter to
Francis I., in 1524, contains “the earliest original account extant of
the Atlantic coast of the United States”; and even from that time the
northern part of it began to be called _La Terra Francese_, or French
Land. A part of it was called New Holland before it was called New
England. The English were very back-ward to explore and settle the
continent which they had stumbled upon. The French preceded them both
in their attempts to colonize the continent of North America (Carolina
and Florida, 1562-4), and in their first permanent settlement (Port
Royal, 1605); and the right of possession, naturally enough, was the
one which England mainly respected and recognized in the case of Spain,
of Portugal, and also of France, from the time of Henry VII.

The explorations of the French gave to the world the first valuable
maps of these coasts. Denys of Honfleur made a map of the Gulf of St.
Lawrence in 1506. No sooner had Cartier explored the St. Lawrence, in
1535, than there began to be published by his countrymen remarkably
accurate charts of that river as far up as Montreal. It is almost all
of the continent north of Florida that you recognize on charts for more
than a generation afterward,—though Verrazzani’s rude plot (made under
French auspices) was regarded by Hackluyt, more than fifty years after
his voyage (in 1524), as the most accurate representation of our coast.
The French trail is distinct. They went measuring and sounding, and
when they got home had something to show for their voyages and
explorations. There was no danger of their charts being lost, as
Cabot’s have been.

The most distinguished navigators of that day were Italians, or of
Italian descent, and Portuguese. The French and Spaniards, though less
advanced in the science of navigation than the former, possessed more
imagination and spirit of adventure than the English, and were better
fitted to be the explorers of a new continent even as late as 1751.

This spirit it was which so early carried the French to the Great Lakes
and the Mississippi on the north, and the Spaniard to the same river on
the south. It was long before our frontiers reached their settlements
in the west, and a _voyageur_ or _coureur de bois_ is still our
conductor there. Prairie is a French word, as Sierra is a Spanish one.
Augustine in Florida, and Santa Fé in New Mexico [1582], both built by
the Spaniards, are considered the oldest towns in the United States.
Within the memory of the oldest man, the Anglo-Americans were confined
between the Appalachian Mountains and the sea, “a space not two hundred
miles broad,” while the Mississippi was by treaty the eastern boundary
of New France. (See the pamphlet on settling the Ohio, London, 1763,
bound up with the travels of Sir John Bartram.) So far as inland
discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that
of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise
of traders. Cabot spoke like an Englishman, as he was, if he said, as
one reports, in reference to the discovery of the American Continent,
when he found it running toward the north, that it was a great
disappointment to him, being in his way to India; but we would rather
add to than detract from the fame of so great a discoverer.

Samuel Penhallow, in his history (Boston, 1726), p. 51, speaking of
“Port Royal and Nova Scotia,” says of the last that its “first seizure
was by Sir Sebastian Cobbet for the crown of Great Britain, in the
reign of King Henry VII.; but lay dormant till the year 1621,” when Sir
William Alexander got a patent of it, and possessed it some years; and
afterward Sir David Kirk was proprietor of it, but erelong, “to the
surprise of all thinking men, it was given up unto the French.”

Even as late as 1633 we find Winthrop, the first Governor of the
Massachusetts Colony, who was not the most likely to be misinformed,
who, moreover, has the _fame_, at least, of having discovered Wachusett
Mountain (discerned it forty miles inland), talking about the “Great
Lake” and the “hideous swamps about it,” near which the Connecticut and
the “Potomack” took their rise; and among the memorable events of the
year 1642 he chronicles Darby Field, an Irishman’s expedition to the
“White hill,” from whose top he saw eastward what he “judged to be the
Gulf of Canada,” and westward what he “judged to be the great lake
which Canada River comes out of,” and where he found much “Muscovy
glass,” and “could rive out pieces of forty feet long and seven or
eight broad.” While the very inhabitants of New England were thus
fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a _terra
incognita_ to them,—or rather many years before the earliest date
referred to,—Champlain, the _first Governor of Canada_, not to mention
the inland discoveries of Cartier,[1] Roberval, and others, of the
preceding century, and his own earlier voyage, had already gone to war
against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great
Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.

In Champlain’s “Voyages,” printed in 1613, there is a plate
representing a fight in which he aided the Canada Indians against the
Iroquois, near the south end of Lake Champlain, in July, 1609, eleven
years before the settlement of Plymouth. Bancroft says he joined the
Algonquins in an expedition against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, in
the northwest of New York. This is that “Great Lake,” which the
English, hearing some rumor of from the French, long after, locate in
an “Imaginary Province called Laconia, and spent several years about
1630 in the vain attempt to discover.” (Sir Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine
Hist. Coll., Vol. II., p. 68.) Thomas Morton has a chapter on this
“Great Lake.” In the edition of Champlain’s map dated 1632, the Falls
of Niagara appear; and in a great lake northwest of _Mer Douce_ (Lake
Huron) there is an island represented, over which is written, “_Isle ou
il y a une mine de cuivre_,”—“Island where there is a mine of copper.”
This will do for an offset to our Governor’s “Muscovy Glass.” Of all
these adventures and discoveries we have a minute and faithful account,
giving facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all scientific
and Frenchman-like, with scarcely one fable or traveller’s story.

Probably Cape Cod was visited by Europeans long before the seventeenth
century. It may be that Cabot himself beheld it. Verrazzani, in 1524,
according to his own account, spent fifteen days on our coast, in
latitude 41° 40 minutes (some suppose in the harbor of Newport), and
often went five or six leagues into the interior there, and he says
that he sailed thence at once one hundred and fifty leagues
northeasterly, _always in sight of the coast_. There is a chart in
Hackluyt’s “Divers Voyages,” made according to Verrazzani’s plot, which
last is praised for its accuracy by Hackluyt, but I cannot distinguish
Cape Cod on it, unless it is the “C. Arenas,” which is in the right
latitude, though ten degrees west of “Claudia,” which is thought to be
Block Island.

The “Biographic Universelle” informs us that “An ancient manuscript
chart drawn in 1529 by Diego Ribeiro, a Spanish cosmographer, has
preserved the memory of the voyage of Gomez [a Portuguese sent out by
Charles the Fifth]. One reads in it under (_au dessous_) the place
occupied by the States of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island,
_Terre d’Etienne Gomez, qu’il découvrit en_ 1525 (Land of Etienne
Gomez, which he discovered in 1525).” This chart, with a memoir, was
published at Weimar in the last century.

Jean Alphonse, Roberval’s pilot in Canada in 1642, one of the most
skilful navigators of his time, and who has given remarkably minute and
accurate direction for sailing up the St. Lawrence, showing that he
knows what he is talking about, says in his “_Routier_” (it is in
Hackluyt), “I have been at a bay as far as the forty-second degree,
between Norimbegue [the Penobscot?] and Florida, but I have not
explored the bottom of it, and I do not know whether it passes from one
land to the other,” _i.e._ to Asia. (“ J’ai été à une Baye jusques par
les 42e degres entre la Norimbegue et la Floride; mais je n’en ai pas
cherché le fond, et ne sçais pas si elle passe d’une terre à l’autre.”)
This may refer to Massachusetts Bay, if not possibly to the western
inclination of the coast a little farther south. When he says, “I have
no doubt that the Norimbegue enters into the river of Canada,” he is
perhaps so interpreting some account which the Indians had given
respecting the route from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic by the St.
John, or Penobscot, or possibly even the Hudson River.

We hear rumors of this country of “Norumbega” and its great city from
many quarters. In a discourse by a great French sea-captain in
Ramusio’s third volume (1556-65), this is said to be the name given to
the land by its inhabitants, and Verrazzani is called the discoverer of
it; another in 1607 makes the natives call it, or the river, Aguncia.
It is represented as an island on an accompanying chart. It is
frequently spoken of by old writers as a country of indefinite extent,
between Canada and Florida, and it appears as a large island with Cape
Breton at its eastern extremity, on the map made according to
Verrazzani’s plot in Hackluyt’s “Divers Voyages.” These maps and rumors
may have been the origin of the notion, common among the early
settlers, that New England was an island. The country and city of
Norumbega appear about where Maine now is on a map in Ortelius
(“Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,” Antwerp, 1570), and the “R. Grande” is
drawn where the Penobscot or St. John might be.

In 1604, Champlain being sent by the Sieur de Monts to explore the
coast of Norumbegue, sailed up the Penobscot twenty-two or twenty-three
leagues from “Isle Haute,” or till he was stopped by the falls. He
says: “I think that this river is that which many pilots and historians
call Norumbegue, and which the greater part have described as great and
spacious, with numerous islands; and its entrance in the forty-third or
forty-third and one half or, according to others, the forty-fourth
degree of latitude, more or less.” He is convinced that “the greater
part” of those who speak of a great city there have never seen it, but
repeat a mere rumor, but he thinks that some have seen the mouth of the
river since it answers to their description.

Under date of 1607 Champlain writes: “Three or four leagues north of
the Cap de Poitrincourt [near the head of the Bay of Fundy in Nova
Scotia] we found a cross, which was very old, covered with moss and
almost all decayed, which was an evident sign that there had formerly
been Christians there.”

Also the following passage from Lescarbot will show how much the
neighboring coasts were frequented by Europeans in the sixteenth
century. Speaking of his return from Port Royal to France in 1607, he
says: “At last, within four leagues of Campseau [the Gut of Canso], we
arrived at a harbor [in Nova Scotia], where a worthy old gentleman from
St. John de Lus, named Captain Savale, was fishing, who received us
with the utmost courtesy. And as this harbor, which is small, but very
good, has no name, I have given it on my geographical chart the name of
Savalet. [It is on Champlain’s map also.] This worthy man told us that
this voyage was the forty-second which he had made to those parts, and
yet the Newfoundlanders [_Terre neuviers_] make only one a year. He was
wonderfully content with his fishery, and informed us that he made
daily fifty crowns’ worth of cod, and that his voyage would be worth
ten thousand francs. He had sixteen men in his employ; and his vessel
was of eighty tons, which could carry a hundred thousand dry cod.”
(Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 1612.) They dried their fish on the
rocks on shore.

The “Isola della Réna” (Sable Island?) appears on the chart of “Nuova
Francia” and Norumbega, accompanying the “Discourse” above referred to
in Ramusio’s third volume, edition 1556-65. Champlain speaks of there
being at the Isle of Sable, in 1604, “grass pastured by oxen (_bœufs_)
and cows which the Portuguese carried there more than sixty years ago,”
_i.e._ sixty years before 1613; in a later edition he says, which came
out of a Spanish vessel which was lost in endeavoring to settle on the
Isle of Sable; and he states that De la Roche’s men, who were left on
this island seven years from 1598, lived on the flesh of these cattle
which they found “_en quantie)_,” and built houses out of the wrecks of
vessels which came to the island (“perhaps Gilbert’s”), there being no
wood or stone. Lescarbot says that they lived “on fish and the milk of
cows left there about eighty years before by Baron de Leri and Saint
Just.” Charlevoix says they ate up the cattle and then lived on fish.
Haliburton speaks of cattle left there as a rumor. De Leri and Saint
Just had suggested plans of colonization on the Isle of Sable as early
as 1515 (1508?) according to Bancroft, referring to Charlevoix. These
are but a few of the instances which I might quote.

Cape Cod is commonly said to have been discovered in 1602. We will
consider at length under what circumstances, and with what observation
and expectations, the first Englishmen whom history clearly discerns
approached the coast of New England. According to the accounts of
Archer and Brereton (both of whom accompanied Gosnold), on the 26th of
March, 1602, old style. Captain Bartholomew Gosnold set sail from
Falmouth, England, for the North part of Virginia, in a small bark
called the _Concord_, they being in all, says one account, “thirty-two
persons, whereof eight mariners and sailors, twelve purposing upon the
discovery to return with the ship for England, the rest remain there
for population.” This is regarded as “the first attempt of the English
to make a settlement within the limits of New England.” Pursuing a new
and a shorter course than the usual one by the Canaries, “the 14th of
April following” they had sight of Saint Mary’s, an island of the
Azores. As their sailors were few and “none of the best” (I use their
own phrases), and they were “going upon an unknown coast,” they were
not “overbold to stand in with the shore but in open weather”; so they
made their first discovery of land with the lead. The 23d of April the
ocean appeared yellow, but on taking up some of the water in a bucket,
“it altered not either in color or taste from the sea azure.” The 7th
of May they saw divers birds whose names they knew, and many others in
their “English tongue of no name.” The 8th of May “the water changed to
a yellowish green, where at seventy fathoms” they “had ground.” The
9th, they had upon their lead “many glittering stones,”—“which might
promise some mineral matter in the bottom.” The 10th, they were over a
bank which they thought to be near the western end of St. John’s
Island, and saw schools of fish. The 12th, they say, “continually
passed fleeting by us sea-oare, which seemed to have their movable
course towards the northeast.” On the 13th, they observed “great beds
of weeds, much wood, and divers things else floating by,” and “had
smelling of the shore much as from the southern Cape and Andalusia in
Spain.” On Friday, the 14th, early in the morning they descried land on
the north, in the latitude of forty-three degrees, apparently some part
of the coast of Maine. Williamson (History of Maine) says it certainly
could not have been south of the central Isle of Shoals. Belknap
inclines to think it the south side of Cape Ann. Standing fair along by
the shore, about twelve o’clock the same day, they came to anchor and
were visited by eight savages, who came off to them “in a Biscay
shallop, with sail and oars,”—“an iron grapple, and a kettle of
copper.” These they at first mistook for “Christians distressed.” One
of them was “apparelled with a waistcoat and breeches of black serge,
made after our sea-fashion, hoes and shoes on his feet; all the rest
(saving one that had a pair of breeches of blue cloth) were naked.”
They appeared to have had dealings with “some Basques of St. John de
Luz, and to understand much more than we,” say the English, “for want
of language, could comprehend.” But they soon “set sail westward,
leaving them and their coast.” (This was a remarkable discovery for
discoverers.)

“The 15th day,” writes Gabriel Archer, “we had again sight of the land,
which made ahead, being as we thought an island, by reason of a large
sound that appeared westward between it and the main, for coming to the
west end thereof, we did perceive a large opening, we called it Shoal
Hope. Near this cape we came to anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we
took great store of cod-fish, for which we altered the name and called
it Cape Cod. Here we saw skulls of her-ring, mackerel, and other small
fish, in great abundance. This is a low sandy shoal, but without
danger; also we came to anchor again in sixteen fathoms, fair by the
land in the latitude of forty-two degrees. This Cape is well near a
mile broad, and lieth northeast by east. The captain went here ashore,
and found the ground to be full of peas, strawberries, whortleberries,
etc., as then unripe, the sand also by the shore somewhat deep; the
firewood there by us taken in was of cypress, birch, witch-hazel, and
beach. A young Indian came here to the captain, armed with his bow and
arrows, and had certain plates of copper hanging at his ears; he showed
a willingness to help us in our occasions.”

“The 16th we trended the coast southerly, which was all champaign and
full of grass, but the islands somewhat woody.”

Or, according to the account of John Brereton, “riding here,” that is,
where they first communicated with the natives, “in no very good
harbor, and withal doubting the weather, about three of the clock the
same day in the afternoon we weighed, and standing southerly off into
sea the rest of that day and the night following, with a fresh gale of
wind, in the morning we found ourselves embayed with a mighty headland;
but coming to an anchor about nine of the clock the same day, within a
league of the shore, we hoisted out the one half of our shallop, and
Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, myself and three others, went ashore,
being a white sandy and very bold shore; and marching all that
afternoon with our muskets on our necks, on the highest hills which we
saw (the weather very hot), at length we perceived this headland to be
parcel of the main, and sundry islands lying almost round about it; so
returning towards evening to our shallop (for by that time the other
part was brought ashore and set together), we espied an Indian, a young
man of proper stature, and of a pleasing countenance, and after some
familiarity with him, we left him at the sea side, and returned to our
ship, where in five or six hours’ absence we had pestered our ship so
with codfish, that we threw numbers of them overboard again; and surely
I am persuaded that in the months of March, April, and May, there is
upon this coast better fishing, and in as great plenty, as in
Newfoundland; for the skulls of mackerel, herrings, cod, and other
fish, that we daily saw as we went and came from the shore, were
wonderful,” etc.

“From this place we sailed round about this headland, almost all the
points of the compass, the shore very bold; but as no coast is free
from dangers, so I am persuaded this is as free as any. The land
somewhat low, full of goodly woods, but in some places plain.”

It is not quite clear on which side of the Cape they landed. If it was
inside, as would appear from Brereton’s words, “From this place we
sailed round about this headland almost all the points of the compass,”
it must have been on the western shore either of Truro or Wellfleet. To
one sailing south into Barnstable Bay along the Cape, the only “white,
sandy, and very bold shore” that appears is in these towns, though the
bank is not so high there as on the eastern side. At a distance of four
or five miles the sandy cliffs there look like a long fort of yellow
sandstone, they are so level and regular, especially in Wellfleet,—the
fort of the land defending itself against the encroachments of the
Ocean. They are streaked here and there with a reddish sand as if
painted. Farther south the shore is more flat, and less _obviously_ and
abruptly sandy, and a little tinge of green here and there in the
marshes appears to the sailor like a rare and precious emerald. But in
the Journal of Pring’s Voyage the next year (and Salterne, who was with
Pring, had accompanied Gosnold) it is said, “Departing hence [_i.e._
from Savage Rocks] we bore unto that great gulf which Captain Gosnold
overshot the year before.”[2]

So they sailed round the Cape, calling the southeasterly extremity
“Point Cave,” till they came to an island which they named Martha’s
Vineyard (now called No Man’s Land), and another on which they dwelt
awhile, which they named Elizabeth’s Island, in honor of the Queen, one
of the group since so called, now known by its Indian name Cuttyhunk.
There they built a small storehouse, the first house built by the
English in New England, whose cellar could recently still be seen, made
partly of stones taken from the beach. Bancroft says (edition of 1837),
the ruins of the fort can no longer be discerned. They who were to have
remained becoming discontented, all together set sail for England with
a load of sassafras and other commodities, on the 18th of June
following.

The next year came Martin Pring, looking for sassafras, and thereafter
they began to come thick and fast, until long after sassafras had lost
its reputation.

These are the oldest acounts which we have of Cape Cod, unless,
perchance. Cape Cod is, as some suppose, the same with that
“Kial-ar-nes” or Keel-Cape, on which, according to old Icelandic
manuscripts, Thorwald, son of Eric the Red, after sailing many days
southwest from Greenland, broke his keel in the year 1004; and where,
according to another, in some respects less trustworthy manuscript,
Thor-finn Karlsefue (“that is, one who promises or is destined to be an
able or great man”; he is said to have had a son born in New. England,
from whom Thorwaldsen the sculptor was descended), sailing past, in the
year 1007, with his wife Gudrida, Snorre Thorbrandson, Biarne
Grinolfson, and Thorhall Garnlason, distinguished Norsemen, in three
ships containing “one hundred and sixty men and all sorts of live
stock” (probably the first Norway rats among the rest), having the land
“on the right side” of them, “roved ashore,” and found “_ör-æfi_
(trackless deserts),” and “_Strand-ir láng-ar ok sand-ar_ (long narrow
beaches and sand-hills),” and “called the shores _Furdustrand-ir_
(Wonder-Strands), because the sailing by them seemed long.”

According to the Icelandic manuscripts, _Thorwald_ was the first,
then,—unless possibly one Biarne Heriulfson (_i.e._ son of Heriulf) who
had been seized with a great desire to travel, sailing from Iceland to
Greenland in the year 986 to join his father who had migrated thither,
for he had resolved, says the manuscript, “to spend the following
winter, like all the preceding ones, with his father,”—being driven far
to the southwest by a storm, when it cleared up saw the low land of
Cape Cod looming faintly in the distance; but this not answering to the
description of Greenland, he put his vessel about, and, sailing
northward along the coast, at length reached Greenland and his father.
At any rate, he may put forth a strong claim to be regarded as the
discoverer of the American continent.

These Northmen were a hardy race, whose younger sons inherited the
ocean, and traversed it without chart or compass, and they are said to
have been “the first who learned the art of sailing on a wind.”
Moreover, they had a habit of casting their door-posts overboard and
settling wherever they went ashore. But as Biarne, and Thorwald, and
Thorfinn have not mentioned the latitude and longitude distinctly
enough, though we have great respect for them as skilful and
adventurous navigators, we must for the present remain in doubt as to
what capes they did see. We think that they were considerably further
north.

If time and space permitted, I could present the claims of other
several worthy persons. Lescarbot, in 1609, asserts that the French
sailors had been accustomed to frequent the Newfoundland Banks from
time immemorial, “for the codfish with which they feed almost all
Europe and supply all sea-going vessels,” and accordingly “the language
of the nearest lands is half Basque”; and he quotes Postel, a learned
but extravagant French author, born in 1510, only six years after the
Basques, Bretons, and Normans are said to have discovered the Grand
Bank and adjacent islands, as saying, in his _Charte Géographique_,
which we have not seen: “Terra haec ob lucrosissimam piscationis
utilitatem summa litterarum memoria a Gallis adiri solita, et ante
mille sexcentos annos frequentari solita est; sed eo quod sit urbibus
inculta et vasta, spreta est.” “This land, on account of its very
lucrative fishery, was accustomed to be visited by the Gauls from the
very dawn of history, and more than sixteen hundred years ago was
accustomed to be frequented; but because it was unadorned with cities,
and waste, it was despised.”

It is the old story. Bob Smith discovered the mine, but I discovered it
to the world. And now Bob Smith is putting in his claim.

But let us not laugh at Postel and his visions. He was perhaps better
posted up than we; and if he does seem to draw the long bow, it may be
because he had a long way to shoot,—quite across the Atlantic, If
America was found and lost again once, as most of us believe, then why
not twice? especially as there were likely to be so few records of an
earlier discovery. Consider what stuff history is made of,—that for the
most part it is merely a story agreed on by posterity. Who will tell us
even how many Russians were engaged in the battle of the Chernaya, the
other day? Yet no doubt, Mr. Scriblerus, the historian, will fix on a
definite number for the schoolboys to commit to their excellent
memories. What, then, of the number of Persians at Salamis? The
historian whom I read knew as much about the position of the parties
and their tactics in the last-mentioned affair, as they who describe a
recent battle in an article for the press now-a-days, before the
particulars have arrived. I believe that, if I were to live the life of
mankind over again myself (which I would not be hired to do), with the
Universal History in my hands, I should not be able to tell what was
what.

Earlier than the date Postel refers to, at any rate. Cape Cod lay in
utter darkness to the civilized world, though even then the sun rose
from eastward out of the sea every day, and, rolling over the Cape,
went down westward into the Bay. It was even then Cape and Bay,—ay, the
Cape of _Codfish_, and the Bay of the _Massachusetts_, perchance.

Quite recently, on the 11th of November, 1620, old style, as is well
known, the Pilgrims in the _Mayflower_ came to anchor in Cape Cod
harbor. They had loosed from Plymouth, England, the 6th of September,
and, in the words of “Mourts’ Relation,” “after many difficulties in
boisterous storms, at length, by God’s providence, upon the 9th of
November, we espied land, which we deemed to be Cape Cod, and so
afterward it proved. Upon the 11th of November we came to anchor in the
bay, which is a good harbor and pleasant bay, circled round except in
the entrance, which is about four miles over from land to land,
compassed about to the very sea with oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras,
and other sweet wood. It is a harbor wherein a thousand sail of ships
may safely ride. There we relieved ourselves with wood and water, and
refreshed our people, while our shallop was fitted to coast the bay, to
search for an habitation.” There we put up at Fuller’s Hotel, passing
by the Pilgrim House as too high for us (we learned afterward that we
need not have been so particular), and we refreshed ourselves with
hashed fish and beans, beside taking in a supply of liquids (which were
not intoxicating), while our legs were refitted to coast the back-side.
Further say the Pilgrims: “We could not come near the shore by three
quarters of an English mile, because of shallow water; which was a
great prejudice to us; for our people going on shore were forced to
wade a bow-shot or two in going aland, which caused many to get colds
and coughs; for it was many times freezing cold weather.” They
afterwards say: “It brought much weakness amongst us”; and no doubt it
led to the death of some at Plymouth.

The harbor of Provincetown is very shallow near the shore, especially
about the head, where the Pilgrims landed. When I left this place the
next summer, the steamer could not get up to the wharf, but we were
carried out to a large boat in a cart as much as thirty rods in shallow
water, while a troop of little boys kept us company, wading around, and
thence we pulled to the steamer by a rope. The harbor being thus
shallow and sandy about the shore, coasters are accustomed to run in
here to paint their vessels, which are left high and dry when the tide
goes down.

It chanced that the Sunday morning that we were there, I had joined a
party of men who were smoking and lolling over a pile of boards on one
of the wharves (_nihil humanum a me, etc_.), when our landlord, who was
a sort of tithing-man, went off to stop some sailors who were engaged
in painting their vessel. Our party was recruited from time to time by
other citizens, who came rubbing their eyes as if they had just got out
of bed; and one old man remarked to me that it was the custom there to
lie abed very late on Sunday, it being a day of rest. I remarked that,
as I thought, they might as well let the men paint, for all us. It was
not noisy work, and would not disturb our devotions. But a young man in
the company, taking his pipe out of his mouth, said that it was a plain
contradiction of the law of God, which he quoted, and if they did not
have some such regulation, vessels would run in there to tar, and rig,
and paint, and they would have no Sabbath at all. This was a good
argument enough, if he had not put it in the name of religion. The next
summer, as I sat on a hill there one sultry Sunday afternoon the
meeting-house windows being open, my meditations were interrupted by
the noise of a preacher who shouted like a boatswain, profaning the
quiet atmosphere, and who, I fancied, must have taken off his coat. Few
things could have been more disgusting or disheartening. I wished the
tithing-man would stop him.

[Illustration: The day of rest]

The Pilgrims say: “There was the greatest store of fowl that ever we
saw.”

We saw no fowl there, except gulls of various kinds; but the greatest
store of them that ever we saw was on a flat but slightly covered with
water on the east side of the harbor, and we observed a man who had
landed there from a boat creeping along the shore in order to get a
shot at them, but they all rose and flew away in a great scattering
flock, too soon for him, having apparently got their dinners, though he
did not get his.

It is remarkable that the Pilgrims (or their reporter) describe this
part of the Cape, not only as well wooded, but as having a deep and
excellent soil, and hardly mention the word _sand_. Now what strikes
the voyager is the barrenness and desolation of the land. _They_ found
“the ground or earth sand-hills, much like the downs in Holland, but
much better the crust of the earth, a spit’s depth, excellent black
earth.” _We_ found that the earth had lost its crust,—if, in-deed, it
ever had any,—and that there was no soil to speak of. We did not see
enough black earth in Provincetown to fill a flower-pot, unless in the
swamps. They found it “all wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper,
birch, holly, vines, some ash, walnut; the wood for the most part open
and without underwood, fit either to go or ride in.” We saw scarcely
anything high enough to be called a tree, except a little low wood at
the east end of the town, and the few ornamental trees in its
yards,—only a few small specimens of some of the above kinds on the
sand-hills in the rear; but it was all thick shrubbery, without any
large wood above it, very unfit either to go or ride in. The greater
part of the land was a perfect desert of yellow sand, rippled like
waves by the wind, in which only a little Beach-grass grew here and
there. They say that, just after passing the head of East Harbor Creek,
the boughs and bushes “tore” their “very armor in pieces” (the same
thing happened to such armor as we wore, when out of curiosity we took
to the bushes); or they came to deep valleys, “full of brush,
wood-gaile, and long grass,” and “found springs of fresh water.”

For the most part we saw neither bough nor bush, not so much as a shrub
to tear our clothes against if we would, and a sheep would lose none of
its fleece, even if it found herbage enough to make fleece grow there.
We saw rather beach and poverty-grass, and merely sorrel enough to
color the surface. I suppose, then, by Woodgaile they mean the Bay
berry.

All accounts agree in affirming that this part of the Cape was
_comparatively_ well wooded a century ago. But notwithstanding the
great changes which have taken place in these respects, I cannot but
think that we must make some allowance for the greenness of the
Pilgrims in these matters, which caused them to see green. We do not
believe that the trees were large or the soil was deep here. Their
account may be true particularly, but it is generally false. They saw
literally, as well as figuratively, but one side of the Cape. They
naturally exaggerated the fairness and attractiveness of the land, for
they were glad to get to any land at all after that anxious voyage.
Everything appeared to them of the color of the rose, and had the scent
of juniper and sassafras. Very different is the general and off-hand
account given by Captain John Smith, who was on this coast six years
earlier, and speaks like an old traveller, voyager, and soldier, who
had seen too much of the world to exaggerate, or even to dwell long, on
a part of it. In his “Description of New England,” printed in 1616,
after speaking of Accomack, since called Plymouth, he says: “Cape Cod
is the next presents itself, which is only a headland of high hills of
sand, overgrown with shrubby pines, _hurts_ [i.e. whorts, or
whortleberries], and such trash, but an excellent harbor for all
weathers. This Cape is made by the main sea on the one side, and a
great bay on the other, in form of a sickle.” Champlain had already
written, “Which we named _Cap Blanc_ (Cape White), because they were
sands and downs (_sables et dunes_) which appeared thus.”

When the Pilgrims get to Plymouth their reporter says again, “The land
for the crust of the earth is a spit’s depth,”—that would seem to be
their recipe for an earth’s crust,—“excellent black mould and fat in
some places.” However, according to Bradford himself, whom some
consider the author of part of “Mourt’s Relation,” they who came over
in the _Fortune_ the next year were somewhat daunted when “they came
into the harbor of Cape Cod, and there saw nothing but a naked and
barren place.” They soon found out their mistake with respect to the
goodness of Plymouth soil. Yet when at length, some years later, when
they were fully satisfied of the poorness of the place which they had
chosen, “the greater part,” says Bradford, “consented to a removal to a
place called Nausett,” they agreed to remove all together to Nauset,
now Eastham, which was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire; and
some of the most respectable of the inhabitants of Plymouth did
actually remove thither accordingly.

It must be confessed that the Pilgrims possessed but few of the
qualities of the modern pioneer. They were not the ancestors of the
American backwoodsmen. They did not go at once into the woods with
their axes. They were a family and church, and were more anxious to
keep together, though it were on the sand, than to explore and colonize
a New World. When the above-mentioned company removed to Eastham, the
church at Plymouth was left, to use Bradford’s expression, “like an
ancient mother grown old, and forsaken of her children.” Though they
landed on Clark’s Island in Plymouth harbor, the 9th of December (O.
S.), and the 16th all hands came to Plymouth, and the 18th they rambled
about the mainland, and the 19th decided to settle there, it was the
8th of January before Francis Billington went with one of the master’s
mates to look at the magnificent pond or lake now called “Billington
Sea,” about two miles distant, which he had discovered from the top of
a tree, and mistook for a great sea. And the 7th of March “Master
Carver with five others went to the great ponds which seem to be
excellent fishing,” both which points are within the compass of an
ordinary afternoon’s ramble,—however wild the country. It is true they
were busy at first about their building, and were hindered in that by
much foul weather; but a party of emigrants to California or Oregon,
with no less work on their hands,—and more hostile Indians,—would do as
much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would
have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as
far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had
climbed his tree. Or contrast them only with the French searching for
copper about the Bay of Fundy in 1603, tracing up small streams with
Indian guides. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims were pioneers and the
ancestors of pioneers, in a far grander enterprise.

By this time we saw the little steamer _Naushon_ entering the harbor,
and heard the sound of her whistle, and came down from the hills to
meet her at the wharf. So we took leave of Cape Cod and its
inhabitants. We liked the manners of the last, what little we saw of
them, very much. They were particularly downright and good-humored. The
old people appeared remarkably well preserved, as if by the saltness of
the atmosphere, and after having once mistaken, we could never be
certain whether we were talking to a coeval of our grandparents, or to
one of our own age. They are said to be more purely the descendants of
the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the State. We
were told that “sometimes, when the court comes together at Barnstable,
they have not a single criminal to try, and the jail is shut up.” It
was “to let” when we were there. Until quite recently there was no
regular lawyer below Orleans. Who then will complain of a few regular
man-eating sharks along the back-side?

One of the ministers of Truro, when I asked what the fishermen did in
the winter, answered that they did nothing but go a-visiting, sit about
and tell stories,—though they worked hard in summer. Yet it is not a
long vacation they get. I am sorry that I have not been there in the
winter to hear their yarns. Almost every Cape man is Captain of some
craft or other,—every man at least who is at the head of his own
affairs, though it is not every one that is, for some heads have the
force of _Alpha privative_, negativing all the efforts which Nature
would fain make through them. The greater number of men are merely
corporals. It is worth the while to talk with one whom his neighbors
address as Captain, though his craft may have long been sunk, and he
may be holding by his teeth to the shattered mast of a pipe alone, and
only gets half-seas-over in a figurative sense, now. He is pretty sure
to vindicate his right to the title at last,—can tell one or two good
stories at least.

For the most part we saw only the back-side of the towns, but our story
is true as far as it goes. We might have made more of the Bay side, but
we were inclined to open our eyes widest at the Atlantic. We did not
care to see those features of the Cape in which it is inferior or
merely equal to the mainland, but only those in which it is peculiar or
superior. We cannot say how its towns look in front to one who goes to
meet them; we went to see the ocean behind them. They were merely the
raft on which we stood, and we took notice of the barnacles which
adhered to it, and some carvings upon it.

Before we left the wharf we made the acquaintance of a passenger whom
we had seen at the hotel. When we asked him which way he came to
Provincetown, he answered that he was cast ashore at Wood End, Saturday
night, in the same storm in which the _St. John_ was wrecked. He had
been at work as a carpenter in Maine, and took passage for Boston in a
schooner laden with lumber. When the storm came up, they endeavored to
get into Provincetown harbor. “It was dark and misty,” said he, “and as
we were steering for Long Point Light we suddenly saw the land near
us,—for our compass was out of order,—varied several degrees [a mariner
always casts the blame on his compass],—but there being a mist on
shore, we thought it was farther off than it was, and so held on, and
we immediately struck on the bar. Says the Captain, ‘We are all lost.’
Says I to the Captain, ‘Now don’t let her strike again this way; head
her right on.’ The Captain thought a moment, and then headed her on.
The sea washed completely over us, and wellnigh took the breath out of
my body. I held on to the running rigging, but I have learned to hold
on to the standing rigging the next time.” “Well, were there any
drowned?” I asked. “No; we all got safe to a house at Wood End, at
midnight, wet to our skins, and half frozen to death.” He had
apparently spent the time since playing checkers at the hotel, and was
congratulating himself on having beaten a tall fellow-boarder at that
game. “The vessel is to be sold at auction to-day,” he added. (We had
heard the sound of the crier’s bell which advertised it.) “The Captain
is rather down about it, but I tell him to cheer up and he will soon
get another vessel.”

At that moment the Captain called to him from the wharf. He looked like
a man just from the country, with a cap made of a woodchuck’s skin, and
now that I had heard a part of his history, he appeared singularly
destitute,—a Captain without any vessel, only a great-coat! and that
perhaps a borrowed one! Not even a dog followed him; only his title
stuck to him. I also saw one of the crew. They all had caps of the same
pattern, and wore a subdued look, in addition to their naturally
aquiline features, as if a breaker—a “comber”—had washed over them. As
we passed Wood End, we noticed the pile of lumber on the shore which
had made the cargo of their vessel.

About Long Point in the summer you commonly see them catching lobsters
for the New York market, from small boats just off the shore, or
rather, the lobsters catch themselves, for they cling to the netting on
which the bait is placed of their own accord, and thus are drawn up.
They sell them fresh for two cents apiece. Man needs to know but little
more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps. The mackerel
fleet had been getting to sea, one after another, ever since midnight,
and as we were leaving the Cape we passed near to many of them under
sail, and got a nearer view than we had had;—half a dozen red-shirted
men and boys, leaning over the rail to look at us, the skipper shouting
back the number of barrels he had caught, in answer to our inquiry. All
sailors pause to watch a steamer, and shout in welcome or derision. In
one a large Newfoundland dog put his paws on the rail and stood up as
high as any of them, and looked as wise. But the skipper, who did not
wish to be seen no better employed than a dog, rapped him on the nose
and sent him below. Such is human justice! I thought I could hear him
making an effective appeal down there from human to divine justice. He
must have had much the cleanest breast of the two.

[Illustration: A Provincetown fishing-vessel]

Still, many a mile behind us across the Bay, we saw the white sails of
the mackerel fishers hovering round Cape Cod, and when they were all
hull-down, and the low extremity of the Cape was also down, their white
sails still appeared on both sides of it, around where it had sunk,
like a city on the ocean, proclaiming the rare qualities of Cape Cod
Harbor. But before the extremity of the Cape had completely sunk, it
appeared like a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, and later
still a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above. Its name
suggests a homely truth, but it would be more poetic if it described
the impression which it makes on the beholder. Some capes have
peculiarly suggestive names. There is Cape Wrath, the northwest point
of Scotland, for instance; what a good name for a cape lying far away
dark over the water under a lowering sky!

Mild as it was on shore this morning, the wind was cold and piercing on
the water. Though it be the hottest day in July on land, and the voyage
is to last but four hours, take your thickest clothes with you, for you
are about to float over melted icebergs. When I left Boston in the
steamboat on the 25th of June the next year, it was a quite warm day on
shore. The passengers were dressed in their thinnest clothes, and at
first sat under their umbrellas, but when we were fairly out on the
Bay, such as had only their coats were suffering with the cold, and
sought the shelter of the pilot’s house and the warmth of the chimney.
But when we approached the harbor of Provincetown, I was surprised to
perceive what an influence that low and narrow strip of sand, only a
mile or two in width, had over the temperature of the air for many
miles around. We penetrated into a sultry atmosphere where our thin
coats were once more in fashion, and found the inhabitants sweltering.

Leaving far on one side Manomet Point in Plymouth and the Scituate
shore, after being out of sight of land for an hour or two, for it was
rather hazy, we neared the Cohasset Rocks again at Minot’s Ledge, and
saw the great Tupelo-tree on the edge of Scituate, which lifts its
dome, like an umbelliferous plant, high over the surrounding forest,
and is conspicuous for many miles over land and water. Here was the new
iron light-house, then unfinished, in the shape of an egg-shell painted
red, and placed high on iron pillars, like the ovum of a sea monster
floating on the waves,—destined to be phosphorescent. As we passed it
at half-tide we saw the spray tossed up nearly to the shell. A man was
to live in that egg-shell day and night, a mile from the shore. When I
passed it the next summer it was finished and two men lived in it, and
a light-house keeper said that they told him that in a recent gale it
had rocked so as to shake the plates off the table. Think of making
your bed thus in the crest of a breaker! To have the waves, like a pack
of hungry wolves, eying you always, night and day, and from time to
time making a spring at you, almost sure to have you at last. And not
one of all those voyagers can come to your relief,—but when your light
goes out, it will be a sign that the light of your life has gone out
also. What a place to compose a work on breakers! This light-house was
the cynosure of all eyes. Every passenger watched it for half an hour
at least; yet a colored cook belonging to the boat, whom I had seen
come out of his quarters several times to empty his dishes over the
side with a flourish, chancing to come out just as we were abreast of
this light, and not more than forty rods from it, and were all gazing
at it, as he drew back his arm, caught sight of it, and with surprise
exclaimed, “What’s that?” He had been employed on this boat for a year,
and passed this light every weekday, but as he had never chanced to
empty his dishes just at that point, had never seen it before. To look
at lights was the pilot’s business; he minded the kitchen fire. It
suggested how little some who voyaged round the world could manage to
see. You would almost as easily believe that there are men who never
yet chanced to come out at the right time to see the sun. What avails
it though a light be placed on the top of a hill, if you spend all your
life directly under the hill? It might as well be under a bushel. This
light-house, as is well known, was swept away in a storm in April,
1851, and the two men in it, and the next morning not a vestige of it
was to be seen from the shore.

A Hull man told me that he helped set up a white-oak pole on Minot’s
Ledge some years before. It was fifteen inches in diameter, forty-one
feet high, sunk four feet in the rock, and was secured by four
guys,—but it stood only one year. Stone piled up cob-fashion near the
same place stood eight years.

When I crossed the Bay in the _Melrose_ in July, we hugged the Scituate
shore as long as possible, in order to take advantage of the wind. Far
out on the Bay (off this shore) we scared up a brood of young ducks,
probably black ones, bred hereabouts, which the packet had frequently
disturbed in her trips. A townsman, who was making the voyage for the
first time, walked slowly round into the rear of the helmsman, when we
were in the middle of the Bay, and looking out over the sea, before he
sat down there, remarked with as much originality as was possible for
one who used a borrowed expression, “This is a great country.” He had
been a timber merchant, and I afterwards saw him taking the diameter of
the mainmast with his stick, and estimating its height. I returned from
the same excursion in the _Olata_, a very handsome and swift-sailing
yacht, which left Provincetown at the same time with two other packets,
the _Melrose_ and _Frolic_. At first there was scarcely a breath of air
stirring, and we loitered about Long Point for an hour in company,—with
our heads over the rail watching the great sand-circles and the fishes
at the bottom in calm water fifteen feet deep. But after clearing the
Cape we rigged a flying-jib, and, as the Captain had prophesied, soon
showed our consorts our heels. There was a steamer six or eight miles
northward, near the Cape, towing a large ship toward Boston. Its smoke
stretched perfectly horizontal several miles over the sea, and by a
sudden change in its direction, warned us of a change in the wind
before we felt it. The steamer appeared very far from the ship, and
some young men who had frequently used the Captain’s glass, but did not
suspect that the vessels were connected, expressed surprise that they
kept about the same distance apart for so many hours. At which the
Captain dryly remarked, that probably they would never get any nearer
together. As long as the wind held we kept pace with the steamer, but
at length it died away almost entirely, and the flying-jib did all the
work. When we passed the light-boat at Minot’s Ledge, the _Melrose_ and
_Frolic_ were just visible ten miles astern.

Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling
with forts like chestnuts-burs, or _echinidæ_, yet the police will not
let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring-match on one of them,
as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing
attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony
knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.

The Bermudas are said to have been discovered by a Spanish ship of that
name which was wrecked on them, “which till then,” says Sir John Smith,
“for six thousand years had been nameless.” The English did not stumble
upon them in their first voyages to Virginia; and the first Englishman
who was ever there was wrecked on them in 1593. Smith says, “No place
known hath better walls nor a broader ditch.” Yet at the very first
planting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the first Governor,
the same year, “built and laid the foundation of eight or nine forts.”
To be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship’s company that
should be next shipwrecked on to them. It would have been more sensible
to have built as many “Charity-houses.” These are the vexed
Bermoothees.

Our great sails caught all the air there was, and our low and narrow
hull caused the least possible friction. Coming up the harbor against
the stream we swept by everything. Some young men returning from a
fishing excursion came to the side of their smack, while we were thus
steadily drawing by them, and, bowing, observed, with the best possible
grace, “We give it up.” Yet sometimes we were nearly at a standstill.
The sailors watched (two) objects on the shore to ascertain whether we
advanced or receded. In the harbor it was like the evening of a
holiday. The Eastern steamboat passed us with music and a cheer, as if
they were going to a ball, when they might be going to—Davy’s locker.

I heard a boy telling the story of Nix’s mate to some girls as we
passed that spot. That was the name of a sailor hung there, he
said.—“If I am guilty, this island will remain; but if I am innocent it
will be washed away,” and now it is all washed away!

Next (?) came the fort on George’s Island. These are bungling
contrivances: not our _fortes_ but our _foibles_. Wolfe sailed by the
strongest fort in North America in the dark, and took it.

I admired the skill with which the vessel was at last brought to her
place in the dock, near the end of Long Wharf. It was candle-light, and
my eyes could not distinguish the wharves jutting out towards us, but
it appeared like an even line of shore densely crowded with shipping.
You could not have guessed within a quarter of a mile of Long Wharf.
Nevertheless, we were to be blown to a crevice amid them,—steering
right into the maze. Down goes the mainsail, and only the jib draws us
along. Now we are within four rods of the shipping, having already
dodged several outsiders; but it is still only a maze of spars, and
rigging, and hulls,—not a crack can be seen. Down goes the jib, but
still we advance. The Captain stands aft with one hand on the tiller,
and the other holding his night-glass,—his son stands on the bowsprit
straining his eyes,—the passengers feel their hearts halfway to their
mouths, expecting a crash. “Do you see any room there?” asks the
Captain, quietly. He must make up his mind in five seconds, else he
will carry away that vessel’s bowsprit, or lose his own. “Yes, sir,
here is a place for us”; and in three minutes more we are fast to the
wharf in a little gap between two bigger vessels.

And now we were in Boston. Whoever has been down to the end of Long
Wharf, and walked through Quincy Market, has seen Boston.

Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans, and the rest,
are the names of wharves projecting into the sea (surrounded by the
shops and dwellings of the merchants), good places to take in and to
discharge a cargo (to land the products of other climes and load the
exports of our own). I see a great many barrels and fig-drums,—piles of
wood for umbrella-sticks,—blocks of granite and ice,—great heaps of
goods, and the means of packing and conveying them,—much wrapping-paper
and twine,—many crates and hogsheads and trucks,—and that is Boston.
The more barrels, the more Boston. The museums and scientific societies
and libraries are accidental. They gather around the sands to save
carting. The wharf-rats and customhouse officers, and broken-down
poets, seeking a fortune amid the barrels. Their better or worse
lyceums, and preachings, and doctorings, these, too, are accidental,
and the malls of commons are always small potatoes. When I go to
Boston, I naturally go straight through the city (taking the Market in
my way), down to the end of Long Wharf, and look off, for I have no
cousins in the back alleys,—and there I see a great many countrymen in
their shirt-sleeves from Maine, and Pennsylvania, and all along shore
and in shore, and some foreigners beside, loading and unloading and
steering their teams about, as at a country fair.

When we reached Boston that October, I had a gill of Provincetown sand
in my shoes, and at Concord there was still enough left to sand my
pages for many a day; and I seemed to hear the sea roar, as if I lived
in a shell, for a week afterward.

The places which I have described may seem strange and remote to my
townsmen,—indeed, from Boston to Provincetown is twice as far as from
England to France; yet step into the cars, and in six hours you may
stand on those four planks, and see the Cape which Gosnold is said to
have discovered, and which I have so poorly described. If you had
started when I first advised you, you might have seen our tracks in the
sand, still fresh, and reaching all the way from the Nauset Lights to
Race Point, some thirty miles,—for at every step we made an impression
on the Cape, though we were not aware of it, and though our account may
have made no impression on your minds. But what is our account? In it
there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth.

We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in
midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand,
amid the beach-grass and the bayberries, their companion a cow, their
wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach-plums, and their music the
surf and the peep of the beach-bird.

We went to see the Ocean, and that is probably the best place of all
our coast to go to. If you go by water, you may experience what it is
to leave and to approach these shores; you may see the Stormy Petrel by
the way, θαλασσοδρόμα, running over the sea, and if the weather is but
a little thick, may lose sight of the land in mid-passage. I do not
know where there is another beach in the Atlantic States, attached to
the mainland, so long, and at the same time so straight, and completely
uninterrupted by creeks or coves or fresh-water rivers or marshes; for
though there may be clear places on the map, they would probably be
found by the foot traveller to be intersected by creeks and marshes;
certainly there is none where there is a double way, such as I have
described, a beach and a bank, which at the same time shows you the
land and the sea, and part of the time two seas. The Great South Beach
of Long Island, which I have since visited, is longer still without an
inlet, but it is literally a mere sand-bar, exposed, several miles from
the Island, and not the edge of a continent wasting before the assaults
of the Ocean. Though wild and desolate, as it wants the bold bank, it
possesses but half the grandeur of Cape Cod in my eyes, nor is the
imagination contented with its southern aspect. The only other beaches
of great length on our Atlantic coast, which I have heard sailors speak
of, are those of Barnegat on the Jersey shore, and Currituck between
Virginia and North Carolina; but these, like the last, are low and
narrow sandbars, lying off the coast, and separated from the mainland
by lagoons. Besides, as you go farther south, the tides are feebler,
and cease to add variety and grandeur to the shore. On the Pacific side
of our country also no doubt there is good walking to be found; a
recent writer and dweller there tells us that “the coast from Cape
Disappointment (or the Columbia River) to Cape Flattery (at the Strait
of Juan de Fuca) is nearly north and south, and can be travelled almost
its entire length on a beautiful sand-beach,” with the exception of two
bays, four or five rivers, and a few points jutting into the sea. The
common shell-fish found there seem to be often of corresponding types,
if not identical species, with those of Cape Cod. The beach which I
have described, however, is not hard enough for carriages, but must be
explored on foot. When one carriage has passed along, a following one
sinks deeper still in its rut. It has at present no name any more than
fame. That portion south of Nauset Harbor is commonly called Chatham
Beach. The part in Eastham is called Nauset Beach, and off Wellfleet
and Truro the Back-side, or sometimes, perhaps, Cape Cod Beach. I think
that part which extends without interruption from Nauset Harbor to Race
Point should be called Cape Cod Beach, and do so speak of it.

One of the most attractive points for visitors is in the northeast part
of Wellfleet, where accommodations (I mean for men and women of
tolerable health and habits) could probably be had within half a mile
of the sea-shore. It best combines the country and the seaside. Though
the Ocean is out of sight, its faintest murmur is audible, and you have
only to climb a hill to find yourself on its brink. It is but a step
from the glassy surface of the Herring Ponds to the big Atlantic Pond
where the waves never cease to break. Or perhaps the Highland Light in
Truro may compete with this locality, for there, there is a more
uninterrupted view of the Ocean and the Bay, and in the summer there is
always some air stirring on the edge of the bank there, so that the
inhabitants know not what hot weather is. As for the view, the keeper
of the light, with one or more of his family, walks out to the edge of
the bank after every meal to look off, just as if they had not lived
there all their days. In short, it will wear well. And what picture
will you substitute for that, upon your walls? But ladies cannot get
down the bank there at present without the aid of a block and tackle.

Most persons visit the sea-side in warm weather, when fogs are
frequent, and the atmosphere is wont to be thick, and the charm of the
sea is to some extent lost. But I suspect that the fall is the best
season, for then the atmosphere is more transparent, and it is a
greater pleasure to look out over the sea. The clear and bracing air,
and the storms of autumn and winter even, are necessary in order that
we may get the impression which the sea is calculated to make. In
October, when the weather is not intolerably cold, and the landscape
wears its autumnal tints, such as, methinks, only a Cape Cod landscape
ever wears, especially if you have a storm during your stay,—that I am
convinced is the best time to visit this shore. In autumn, even in
August, the thoughtful days begin, and we can walk anywhere with
profit. Beside, an outward cold and dreariness, which make it necessary
to seek shelter at night, lend a spirit of adventure to a walk.

The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those
New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side. At present it is
wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be
agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular
railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search
of,—if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do
at Newport,—I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here.
But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. Such
beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may
almost say, by the sea shifting its sands. Lynn and Nantasket! this
bare and bended arm it is that makes the bay in which they lie so
snugly. What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs,
the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time
to visit it; a light-house or a fisherman’s hut the true hotel. A man
may stand there and put all America behind him.

 [1] It is remarkable that the first, if not the only, part of New
 England which Cartier saw was Vermont (he also saw the mountains of
 New York), from Montreal Mountain, in 1535, sixty-seven years before
 Gosnold saw Cape Cod. _If seeing is discovering_,—and that is _all_
 that it is proved that Cabot knew of the coast of the United
 States,—then Cartier (to omit Verrazani and Gomez) was the discoverer
 of New England rather than Gosnold, who is commonly so styled.


 [2] “Savage Rock,” which some have supposed to be, from the name, the
 _Salvages_, a ledge about two miles off Rockland, Cape Ann, was
 probably the _Nubble_, a large, high rock near the shore, on the east
 side of York Harbor, Maine. The first land made by Gosnold is presumed
 by experienced navigators to be Cape Elizabeth, on the same coast.
 (See Babson’s History of Gloucester, Massachusetts.)


The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.





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