A Trip Around Cape Cod m^ iCket '^^^H^^M' South Shore and ^ ^^^^"^llymouth i. PERRY '<'>^ ' t y y^A^A : CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 3 1924 087 134 312 DATE DUE ._S££Z SJ^i^AL |«# llilkkteM! a...^aiio JffIT 4m^ ■^jj^yu!^. MWrMtfP''!^'^'' :'.''''.^H ■■»*"■ 1 •'^ CArUOBO PRINTCDINU.B.A. y2. 'M Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924087134312 Yours truly, E. G. PERRT. A Trip Around Cape Cod Nantucket Marthas Vineyard, South Shore, and Historical Plymouth By E?^G. perry a Cape Cod Boy THIRD EDITION PRICE $3.50 . "••;.:^/^^' ( Copies can be obtained of E. G. Perry, 50 State Street, Boston, or at residence, ^r^ ■ '> Monument Beach, Mass. ^^kV^^^ 't Copyrighted May Jist, i8g8 t '^ •; \^ ' '/ J \'' , ' ," e ; F 1 o CHAS. S. BINNER CO. Printers 157 Pearl Street, Boston s \j ^ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. T^ . . PAGE Frontispiece, Photograph of the Author . . 2 List of Illustrations 5-7 Motto 8 Fore Words g Poem: " I Love Cape Cod " . 12 Chapter I, A Trip Around Cape Cod 13 Buzzards Bay 15 Crow's Nest, Residence of Joseph Jefferson 17 Summer Residence of Col. Charles H. Taylor 23 Gray Gables .... . . 25 Bournedale and Sagamore ... 27 Old Crowell House 32 Residence of Hon. Isaac N. Keith, 33 Old Swift Tavern and Old Freeman Place, Sagamore 34 Sandwich 35 Old Tupper House, Sandwich . . 36 Unitarian Church, Sandwich . . 42 Dr. E. S. Talbot, Dentist ... 43 Quaker Meeting House .... 46 Paul Wing Estate and Old Wing School 47 West Barnstable 49 The Great Marshes, West Barns- table S° Sandy Neck Light 51 Church at West Barnstable ; the site of the Parsonage of Jonathan Russell 56 Parsonage of Oakes Shaw ... 57 James Otis 58 Residence of Daniel P. Bearsely, on the site of the birthplace of James Otis 60 Rev. Enoch Pratt first Parish House and Communion Service used in first Church in New England . 61 Sacrament Rock upon which the old church celebrated their first com- munion near the grave of Governor Hinckley 62 Panelling in the old Wing estate, 182 years old 65 PAGE Barnstable 66 Residence of Thomas C. Day . . 68 Barnstable Inn, Mrs. G. W. Bangs, Propr. . 69 Barnstable Court House . . .70 Sturgis House, Barnstable ... 71 Residence of the late Major Phinney 72 William Bacon estate .... 74 Yarmouth 75 Residence of Dr. Gorham Bacon . 76 Old Lovell House 77 Old Hallett House and Old Mill . 78 Entrance to the Hon. John Simpkin's estate . 80 Catholic Church, Yarmouthport . 82 Thatcher House, built 1680 . . 85 Chapter II 86 Dennis 87 The Nobscussett and cottages, Den- nis 88 Main Street, Dennis .... 89 Tobey Farms 90 Residence of Hon. Luther Hall . 91 East Dennis Public Library and Old Salt Works 92 Brewster 96 Town Hall, Brewster, and Baker's Pond 100 Summer Residence of Hon. Roland Nickerson, East Brewster . . 103 Orleans 106 Old Mill, Orleans 107 A. T. Newcomb's Store .... 108 Residence of A. T. Newcomb . . 109 Residence of Sparrow Higgins . . 115 Residence of Oliver Doane . . . 116 Residence of Dr. Samuel Davis . 118 Street View, Eastham . . . . 119 Residence of O. H. Davenport . 120 Eastham 121 Location of Gov. Prince's House . 127 Residence of Capt. Edward Penni- man . . 129 Residence of Seth Knowles, on site of the Samuel Treat estate . . 131 Old Mill, Eastham 132 Universalist Church 133 Oldest Church in Eastham . Summer Residence of F. C. Hatch Residence of Mrs. Julia Knowles, Salt Pond and Old Indian Camp Ground . . . . Nausett Three Lights . Nausett Life Saving Station Ode to a Lilac Tree . . . i South Wellfleet . . . Baker Chapter III, Wellfleet Billingsgate Light . Church at Wellfleet . . View at Wellfleet . . . Truro Residence of Capt. L. B. Wellfleet .... View of Hills, Truro . Church, South Truro Residence of Isaiah Snow First M. E. Church, Truro Church, North Truro . View along Shore, Truro Highland Light and Cliff Wrecked on Cape Cod, near High land Light Highland Life Saving Station . Breakers on the Shores of Cape Cod Race Point Light .... Race Point Life Saving Station Crazy Jane's Story PAGE 136 138 139 42-43 I4S 146 148 150 152 iSS 156 160 161 162 163 167 168 169 170 171 174 181 182 183 Chapter IV, Provincetown Wood End Life Saving Station View at Provincetown Ship Jason, wrecked on Cape Cod Cahoon's Hollow Life Saving Sta- tion . Peekhill Bar Life Saving Station First Landing Place of our Fore- fathers at Provincetown, Nov. 1 1, 1620, with cut of "Mayflower " Returning from Provincetown via Orleans to Chatham, and South Shore .... . . . Residence of Hon. John Kendrick, South Orleans Namequoit River, South Orleans Chatham .... Eldridge House, Chatham Ocean House, Chatham, Capt. W H. Berry, Prop. Eldridge Library Dill House, Chatham . 185 186 187 191 193 195 199 206 207 208 209 210 212 213 214 Residence of the late Marcellus El- dridge 215 Oldest House in Chatham . . . 216 Hawes House, Chatham . . . . 217 Harbor View, Chatham . . . 218 Interior View in Residence of H. Fisher Eldridge 219 Residence of H. Fisher Eldridge . 220 Life Saving Station, Chatham . . 221 South Chatham, Residence of the late Levi Eldridge 224 Harwich 225 View of Harwichport 227 Residence of Valentine Doane, Jr., Harwichport 228 Library Block, Harwich .... 229 Congregational Church, Harwich . 232 The Late Obed Brooks estate . 233 American House 234 The Poor Whites .... . 235 Residence of Caleb Chase . . 238-240 Residence of Erastus Chase . . 239 Hotel Belmont 241-242 Old Veteran of the Rebellion . 243 Sitting-room in a Cape Cod Home 244 Residence of Capt. J. G. Parke . . 245 Residence of Capt. H. C. Berry . 246 One of Cape Cod's Prominent Sea Captains . . 247 One of Cape Cod's Prominent Phy- sicians 253 Residence of Dr. D. R. Ginn . . 254 Dennisport 255 Historical Letter 260 South Dennis School, and Street View 261 Congregational Church, South Den- nis . 262 Residence of Dr. Kelley, West Dennis ... .... 266 Residence of Mrs. Obed Baker . . 267 Street View, West Dennis . . . 268 Residence of Capt. Arthur L. Nick- erson ... . . . 270 Residence of Capt. Peter H. Cro- well . . 272 South Yarmouth .... 274 A Cape Cod 225 acre Farm . . 276 Old Salt Works, South Yarmouth 277 Oldest House in South Yarmouth 278 We.st Yarmouth 279 Oldest Mill on Cape Cod . . 280 Residence of Joshua F. Crowell . 281 The First Landing of the Pilgrims 284 Soule 31 Residence of H. A. Abell Residence of Simeon Lewis Ocean View House . . Yarmouth Camp Ground . Hyannis Cap Cod Residence of Hon. Rufus A State Normal School, Hyannis Residence of Lindsey Oliver Street View, Hyannis Hyannis Light . . Hyannisport Craigville . . Hotel Craigville Centerville . . . Residence of Hon. Aaron Crosby, Representative of First Cape Dist, Osterville . . . . East Bay Lodge Hotel Cotochesett, Mrs. T.H. Ames, Prop PAGE 283-285 288 290 291 292 303 304 306 -312 314 315 316 318 320 321 323 325 327 329 Marston's Mills 332 Residence of Dr. J. H. Higgins Residence of old Judge Marston . Cottages connected with Santuit . Santuit House, James Webb, Owner Hotel Pines, Cotuit Highlands . Residence of Jas. E. Rockwell 342 Water View of Cotuit, from Resi- dence of James E. Rockwell . . 346 Eagle Pond, Cotuit . . . 348 Wakeby Lake 351 334 335 337 338 339 ■343 Chapter VI, Mashpee Mashpee Boy Waquoit . . Old Mill at East Falmouth Teaticket ■ 3S4 ■ 356 3S8 359 ■ 360 Residence of Commodore E. P. Boggs ... . . . . 361 Falmouth . 363 Residence ex-Secretary Richard Olney . . . . 370 Ouissett 372 Buzzards Bay .... -373 Woods Hole 376 Chapter VII, Nantucket Island . View at Nantucket ... Old Fireplace . .... Old Mill, Nantucket, built in 1746 Old Coffin House . . Sea-Cliff House, Nantucket . Harbor View Interior of Museum ... Oldest House in Siasconsett Street View in Siasconsett . Ocean View House in Siasconsett Chapter VIII, Martha's Vineyard View at Cottage City Metropolitan Hotel .... Pawnee House, Cottage City Chapter IX, Edgartown Residence of Sol. Smith Russell Street Views in Edgartown . Vineyard Haven ... Residence of Hon. W. L. Swift, Representative .... Mansion House Residence of Capt. Gilbert Smith Tashmoo Lake Crocker Avenue and Church Street Poem : " Martha's Vineyard " . Summer Residence of George W Eldridge Returning from Gay Head through Falmouth, east side of Buzzards Bay Old Mill, West Falmouth . . . Chapoquoit Island North Falmouth Megansett, North Falmouth . Cataumet .... . . The Jachin Cottage ... Summer Residence of the late H Ditmars ... . . Wing's Neck Light Monument Beach . . . . Tobey Island .... Norcross House .... Homestead of the Author Summer Residence of John Parker son, Esq Residence of Arthur Hunnewell Poem : - Bourne Village " . Cape Cod Memories PAGE 398 399 401 404 406 407 411 414 415 416 417 421 422 427 431 432 D. 434 436 437 439 440 444 448 452 453 455 458 465 471 477 481 482 -483 Library of Bourne 487 Oldest Houses on the Cape . . 489-490 End of Itinerary of Cape Cod . . 493 Tables of Villages and Inhabitants of the Cape 495 The South Shore ... ■ 496 378 Hingham . . . . 497 379 Nantasket . . . • 499 382 Cohasett ... 501 383 Scituate . . ... 504 387 Poem : " Old Oaken Bucket " ■ 505 389 Brant Rock .... • 507 390 Marshfield . . . 508 392 Ancient Town of Duxbury . . 510 394 Kingston . ... • 511 396 Plymouth Rock, and Souvenirs 514-528 MOTTO. THE Cape man may get beyond, but he never gets over, the Cape. It colors him all his life, the root and fibre of him. Make him a merchant at Manila or Calcutta, a whaler at the North Pole, a mate in Australian waters, a millionaire on Fifth Avenue, a farmer in Minnesota, and the Cape sticks to him still. He will feel, in odd hours, to his Hfe's end, the creek tide on which he floated as a boy, the hunger of the salt marsh when he went haying in August time, the cold splash of the sea spray at the harbor's mouth, the spring of the boat over the sandy bar when he came home from fishing, with the wind rising shore-ward out of the grey night-clouds at sea, the blast of the wet north- easter in the September morning, when under the dripping branches he picked up the windfall of golden and crimson apples ; the big-flaked snow of the December night when he beaued his first sweetheart home from singing school, and he will see, only in dreams, perhaps, the trailing arbutus among its grey mosses on the thin edge of a spring snow-bank ; the spring bubbhng out of its white sands at the hill foot near tide-water ; the fat Pilgrim roses under his mother's window, with a clump of Aaron's rod or lilac for background ; the yellow dawn of an October morning across his misty moors, and the fog of the chill pond among the pine trees ; and, beyond all, the blue sea within its head- lands, on which go the white-winged ships to that great, far-off world, which the boy has only heard of, but the grown man knows so well. FOREWORDS. IT is the intention of this book to describe this Cape as it exists in time and space, putting into it such things as concern man, who is taught by history and observation of nature many things of himself. There are three provinces, at least, on the globe, whose people are enthusiastically attached to their birth- place, viz., Switzerland, Iceland, and Cape Cod. They are all lands, odd, strange, and in measure weird, austere, and full of gigantic nature-forces with which man must struggle in a Spartan temper, and life-long, to secure a living ; full of variety, abounding in a beauty and even comfort of its own, and im- pressing themselves on their people to form character ; and they in turn, by their life and achievements of generations, imparting a certain reverence and sanctity to the land itself. Here lie some of the reasons why this Cape, which has neither rich soil, the magnificent forests of the West, the luxuriant vegeta- tion of the South, attracts infallibly every artistic and poet mind, from the very start, and yet all are very slow to agree upon the reasons. To localize, then, the Cape in space. It is an off-shoot, "The Right Arm," men call it, of Massachusetts, thrust far out into the sea, lying about in the latitude of Madrid, 41° 3', and longitude 8° from Washington, these two lines intersecting each other in the town of Wellfleet. For convenience, and other reasons, this book divides the Cape into three parts, viz. : The West Cape, reaching from Buzzard's Bay to Dennis ; The Mid Cape, reaching from Dennis to Orleans ; the East Cape, from Orleans to Provincetown and Cape Race. It is a small province of fourteen towns and one plantation, comprising the one County of Barnstable, and about ninety miles long ; and as there is absolutely nothing regular about it (even to its sand-hills), it is of very irregular width, the widest part being the West Cape. Indeed, the whole geology of the Cape ought to have, as has often been said, an interrogation mark before it. Even Agassiz would venture only a few guesses about what lies below the upper strata. Two ranges of hills are traceable ; one running parallel with Buzzard's Bay, a few miles inland, from Plymouth Woods to Woods Hole ; and the other and larger, the backbone of the West Cape, running about midway through the forest until it loses itself in the lower land of the Mid Cape, if perchance some future geologist does not connect this range with the hills of Wellfieet and the Truros. And small, rounded sporadic hills are everywhere. For " the Ice King" and "the Frost King," the icebergs have been everywhere at work. First with their ice-drifts and icebergs, covering over all the land, and under action of storm and wave ploughing up or digging into or grinding to powder everything which came in its way. They dumped gigantic loads of boulders on the hill-ridges, as in Bourne and Woods Hole, and flung, open-handed, the like over the lowlands, as at Brewster. No ledge has as yet been found on the Cape, and yet rocks, especially from the north, are found in piles like " The Devil's Den " in Pocasset woods. Of course there is some sand on the Cape, yet from end to end, at least from Bourne to Truro Bluffs, the clay is visible in spots above the surface ; and the engineers report, from their borings, that, marshes included, the Cape is underlaid with a strata of hard blue clay, and the same is found at the edges of marshes and bogs. The icebergs are proba- bly responsible for most of the round, deep, fresh-water ponds, mostly inland, where they grounded and ground and melted, leaving only their mark of a pond. But since the ice age, the sea has done most of the tillage and mechanical work of this Cape land, assisted only by its sisters of the winds, in their most angry and unfeminine moods, until in memorable storms it has changed the very face of the landscape, as we shall see in our travels. This sea about us never gives over work nor takes a holiday. It digs out sand, carts sand, beats sand into smaller dust for its sisters to fling far inland to mix itself with the more stalwart clay and loam below. The sea is master here — a tyrant, even — and no people better than ours, who have gone down to the sea in ships so often in so many generations, understand the subtle saying of Lord Bacon, "We conquer nature only as we obey her." The Cape man has a profound respect for the power and mastery of the sea. He shows it by watching its hints and humors, and in all his sails and ropes and tackle conforming exactly to what he supposes to be her demands. A careless Cape boatman dies young by the sea, or goes West, as out of place here. The sea forces him to know a boat. And yet the sea, in its own way, is gracious. It is an exquisite and patient artist, and paints carefully, from the bloom on a Cape girl's cheek to a deeper red to the wild roses at our roadsides, as visitors tell us. The sea, too, tones our flowers and flowerage, and is to us what the Alpine heights, snows are to the flowers of Switzerland — it purifies and spiritualizes them. Men long ago have noted that wild flowers are less gross and earthly than well-fed garden flowers, which lack the purity and grace which come from struggle and suffer- ing. The sea tends to make vestals of our wild flowers. It has a special right to do this, because it first brought most of them, as seeds, in the lap of its cur- rents, from the Bay of Fundy, or from our south coast as far as Norfolk, Va. ; attested by the singular fact that the flora of the South shore and the flora of the North, divided as they are by the Central Hill ridge, have less likeness to each other than they have to the flora of the distant lands from whence they first came in the carriage of the sea. And yet, let any man look at a map of the Cape and the islands imme- diately south of it, and he will see that these are merely the ruins of an ancient continent, still larger, thus broken and scattered by the sea. And no map can show all the work done by the seas, for much of it is under water. Nauset Island, at Eastham, seen by Gosnold in 1602, has long since disappeared, and the mouth of Eastham harbor has moved a mile south in fifty years. Georges Banks, some three hundred miles away, is probably a part of that same conti- nent, and the Atlantic side of the Cape, along shore, is fretted with sunken islands. Nine miles off Chatham Light, in thirty feet of water, lies a ledge with tree stumps, above which one hundred and twenty-five years ago there was a fair island covered with cedar trees, where the Nantucketers came to cut fence-railing. So much was necessary to make ready to travel over the land where our Itinerary will lead us. For the rest, this book intends to be honest, and, so far as it has ability, to be historically accurate. It will stand or fall by this test. It will not hesitate to take its bread from any reliable source already provided, and it will espe- cially desire to take up the fragments which remain, that nothing be lost out of the romantic and picturesque story of Cape Cod. (M) " I LOVE Cape Cod." Its men are true, Its maidens none so fair, And happier homes no clime e'er knew Than the homes of its sailors are. If fields are barren and cliffs are bleak, The sea is their prairie soil ; Rich harvests aye, on its breast they seek, And the waves repay their toil. Courteous are they, for a native grace. Which art may ne'er command. Is found in the glow of a sunburnt face, And the grasp of a toil-worn hand. Wander as widely as e'er I may. Ordained by fate to roam, Yon gian't arm which shields the Bay, Is still my heart's true home. I will anchor yet, beneath its lea, When the storms of life are o'er. And the friends of my youth shall rejoice with me, That I cross the deep no more. (^ f\ 5rip f\roiiT)d (?ape <5od. CHAPTER I. QINCE either as travellers or inhabitants of the Cape we shall at once find ourselves surrounded by the houses and the activities of the present population above ground, it is well to furnish for the background, a his- torical perspective of the inhabitants which were here before. The first of these were, of course, the wolves and deer. The deer still remain, but the wolves were at one time so many and troublesome, that the proposal to build a high palisade across from Massachusetts to Buzzards Bay was only blocked by the second thought, that such a fence would keep in as many wolves as it would keep out. The last wolf killed on the Cape was in Sandwich woods about 1837. So far as wild beasts went it was about the same in Old England as in the New. After or with them came the Indians, their kin in wildness and almost a part of the wild itself. As we shall meet many traces of them in our travels, it may be well to say just here something of them in general. The Cape Indians were very much like the rest — they built their, wigwams near running water and their food supplies of shellfish, in a sunny exposure sheltered by the hills from the north winds ; showed some skill and more industry in their cuHnary utensils and war arms, and our fields are rich in their arrow and spear heads, sized to kill a sparrow, a deer or a blackfish. They were treated, as all our Indians of that date, with exact justice by the common law. This is proved by the Colonial laws still on our statute-books which treat them as wajxls of the State. King Philip's war, which undertook to ex- terminate the whites, was based on what may be called a mutual mistake of the two races, buying and selling land, the Indian selling greatly less, and the white man, according to his English ideas, buying much more with his deed. But the Cape Indians, with their several thousand war- riors, thanks to the missionaries, never sent a man to the war, even at times when a few hundred more Indians with Philip would have turned the scales against the whites. That the white often drove a hard bargain with the red man and then wronged him out of part of the price may go without saying, and as the more vulgar instances of low-bred traders show ; but it is not true that our forefathers made other than just laws for their red brethren, nor is it true that the red man has disappeared from our soil because of the white man's mistreatment. The reasons for that calamity will be found in those facts in " Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle," which narrate what follows, the mix- ing of the inferior and superior races around the globe. Yet the homely story told of a Cape Indian will throw light upon one phase of the inter- course of the white race and the red. The Indian was very thirsty and had no money. He went to the tavern-keeper in his neighborhood. "I have no money, but I have just shot a deer up the turnpike, which is lying under the big oak at the cross-roads. Give me some rum and take the deer." The bargain was struck and the man was drunk, and the white man started for the big oak tree at the cross-roads, but there was no deer there, and the landlord came back a sadder if not wiser man, full of thoughts that savored more of strength than of righteousness, to find his Indian gone. When he next laid eyes upon him he went at him for the fraud. "Ugh!" said the red man, "You find de cross-roads as I told you? " "Yes." "Ugh, you find de big oak tree as I told you?" "Yes." " And you no find deer there? " " No not a deer — nor a hide nor hair of one. " " Ugh, ' ' says Indian in a meditative mood, ' ' Two truths to one lie, better than white man does," and off he goes to his wigwam ; and the tavern keeper bemoaned his lost rum, and worst of all that the red man had got the better of a Yankee. 14 At the close of the Great Indian War, the refugees from King Philip's army scattered themselves about Buzzards Bay, and Captain Church was sent to hunt them up. The white folks that first settled the Cape were called Pilgrims, and from them most of our old families derive themselves, and of them the world will not cease talking for some time to come. They were English, chiefly from the eastern shires and Kent, saturated with the principles of that mysterious movement called the EngHsh Reformation — each individual an epitome of the principles of the Declaration of Independence walking about on two legs, and sturdy, industrious workers under their ancient sun. There were white men here before them, chiefly off the ships of dis- covery like those of Smith and Gosnold, and ever since the Cape has been sprinkled over from age to age with men who attained in ship or ship- wreck, to our sandy but friendly shores, or men of divers nations lured here by our cod or whale fisheries. From these men come chiefly those Cape names which are neither English nor Pilgrim. BUZZARD'S BAY. Our new population of summer visitors we shall meet everywhere. The county road runs round the Cape on both North and South shores, as shown on the map, and our journey will start at Buzzards Bay and follow along the North shore. But we should take with us the truth that he is not the greatest traveller who has been over the most miles, but he who has seen the most in the miles he has been over, be they few or many. If in spots we travel slow, it will be because there is so much to see, but we shall, at least, point a finger at things which lie far to the left and right of us, knowing beforehand that we are sure to omit many things that might profit. So at our starting-point we find ourselves surrounded by scores of stately villas, with men and women more stately, owners of them — houses which are prophets, every one, of what is coming to the whole Cape ; for the most hopeful sign in our summer visitors is not the number but the 15 quality of them. Somehow the Cape appeals to the highest in man or woman, and so brings us that class as fellow-citizens. For instance, here is the mansion of Joseph Jefferson, among its tall pines at Buttermilk Bay, the north end of the greater Bay below, one of our oldest and ablest actors, with a manhood greater and more gracious than his art, with a whole colony of his children and kin about him — grounds spacious and well kept and a house as artistically and elaborately furnished as few houses in town or country are. Old Wind Mill at Joseph Jefferson's i6 m Pi a n OS tsi 3 a 13 & 09 pq « Barn of Joseph Jefferson, Buzzards Bay On the driveway to the Residence of Edwin A. Taft. 20 n 3 a 13 « 3 3 pq a CO V 3 H B 3 3 pq IS H 6 a a s 3 to To escape from our "embarrassment of riches" in new villas, let us look across the Bay, south to Gray Gables, ex-President Cleve- land's summer home. It stands solitary and almost isolated in forty acres of land, and very open to the sea on all sides. Neither the man nor the house, both simple and so to say homespun in all things, need any eulogy from us, and the man himself must be left to final history, whose pen, in the long run, never allows itself to be jarred from its just inscrip- Gray Gables, Buzzards Bay, Residence of ex-President Grover Cleveland tion by those passions which surround the man while living in a high office. Nor is it below the dignity of history to remark that no lady more gentle, gracious, kind or popular ever abode here, than Mrs. Cleve- land. From this vagabondage of our eyes across the river, we return to ride east along a rather narrow and in parts wooded valley, with the Mano- met river running down amidst from the Great Herring Pond, some three 25 miles northeast — a valley ending before us, and barred at right angles by broken but rounded sand-hills covered by forests, which John Ruskin would call "The Gates of the Hills." This river on our right divides the great Plymouth woods from the woods of the Cape, very much as the German river Neckar divides the great forests of the Schwarzwald and the Odenwald at Heidelberg. Just after we start, across the river, is the site of the old Pilgrim trading fort, built somewhere about 1624 to help our forefathers turn an honest penny by trading furs and tobacco for the rum and linen of their Dutch neighbors of New York. Up this river sailed Isaac de Resieres, chief merchant of New York, with his Dutchmen, in all the pride and pomp of both peace and war, trumpets calling, powder burning, and all the blazonry of high-colored garments, flashing steel corselets and long swords ; and here was trade carried on for years. About 1757 sailed up this river in open boats, seventy men, women and children from the far South, — passes from Southern governors all right, — fragments of those poor French refugees from Canada, whom lyongfellow tells us of in his " Evangeline, ' ' endeavoring to reach Massachusetts Bay and home once more. They offered the country people high prices to cart their boats across the peninsula immediately before us, but they were stopped by the State authorities and kept somewhere on these banks dur- ing July and August, and the bills for their support and the items of their feed are now in the State House at Boston. Then the party was broken up and families scattered among' the colonists in a sort of cruel slavery to the English and Protestant families, as was done elsewhere in all the Colonies, and their letters are full of pathetic complaints over their wrongs. Some one may some day tell us how far our ' ' poor whites ' ' sprung from this stock. 26 BOURNEDALE AND SAGAMORE. We are now passing through land once belonging easily to the first man of this whole Cape, Richard Bourne, chief missionary to the Cape Indians, whom we shall meet again. It is also the route of the Cape Cod ship-canal, first proposed near two hundred and fifty years ago. Just be- fore reaching Bournedale we cross the old Megansett line — the old Indian war-path between the Plymouth Indians and their brethren at Falmouth and islands beyond, a narrow path, worn down a foot or so into the soil, but running as straight and with as due reference to the irregularities of sur- face as any modern engineer could order it ; obscured here and there by the farmers building their wood-roads across and by the washings of the rains of five centuries, but yet discernible for many miles, though over- grown with trees and with side paths down to where the springs were, Herring River, near Walter G. Beal Estate, Bournedale 27 o a a to O H a a 3 o PQ » O A Day's Outing at the Upper Herring Pond, Bournedale -^4,, / ..^i.'r;/ Residence of W. A. Nye, Bournedale 31 M. E. Church, Sagamore Old Crowell House, Sagamore worn by the red waj-farers seeking water in the hot summer days — a well- known line still in use to mark the boundaries of the wood-lots in that vicinity. Indeed, Bournedale, which lies just beyond us, nestled among the hills, is in the heart of the Indian country, and with the Herring River tribe still extant and having its tribal rights against the whites, are still here and have for their monument " Meeting- House Hill," the ancient Indian burying ground, even before the coming of the whites, — the Chris- tian Indians buried in rows, the others scattered round where Judge Samuel Sewell of Boston built a meeting-house for the red man before 1688, in the English style — a better one than any on the Cape. And so we drive to Sagamore along the line of the proposed canal and into a thrifty, well-kept village, as most Cape villages are. On the site of the residence of the Hon. Mr. Keith once stood a Pilgrim meeting-house, sprung from some obscure wrangle of the vSandwich parish. This parish had one pastor about 1725, Rev. Mr. Gushing, and no more, the parish it- self dying early. Just bej-ond, on our road, is the famous Swift tavern, from Webster's time to Cleveland's: a favorite inn of Sir Izaak Walton's followers, because the streams or creeks hereabouts always abounded in m Residence of Hon. Isaac N. Keith, Sagamore The Freeman Place at Sagamore Old Swift Tavern, Sagamore 34 large-sized trout. Beyond this we reach the Freeman house and the Sandwich line. Freeman was the head founder of Sandwich, and his own grave lies still beyond, covered by a huge boulder which his stalwart chil" dren dragged there with ox-teams. It may save time and let in some light into some Cape families, to say that, from the start, a Freeman, a Hinkley or a Prince without uncommon brains, has been as rare as a white crow. SANDWICH. We are now where we are in sight of the north sea, or Massachusetts Bay, across Scussett marshes on our left, where the Cape curves into the continent which stretches far north in the white cliffs of Plymouth woods, and sand-faced toward the sea, the back patches of the forest, with the purple haze and shimmer of the summer days in sharp contrast with these sands, at the foot of which on the sea-beach of old the white folks travelled from Plymouth hitherward and back, taking only to upland when they reached the curve or angle of the Cape, near which the Sagamore church now stands, and so on to the hill range south and east until this Freeman place is reached. And here the new county road keeps straight on and diverges from the old road on the left, which follows round the marsh, and where many of the first settlers were. And just here a few things in general may be said about the Cape roads. The Cape man is one of the most independent men on earth, and this independence shows itself in the roads he builds and his graveyards. For there are more private burj'ing grounds here than almost anywhere else considering the sparse population. But all the same he wills to lay out his roads wisely — that is, in the shortest line and the lowest grades. This he has tried at least to do, and in some places, as at Scorton hill, he has laid his main or county road, in three routes, in three different generations. There are few public roads across the Cape, through the forest, and these for the villages hidden there, but the roads of the farmers to their lots are innumerable. At the start the white man's road followed some Indian trail, and as in travel the Indian dreaded swamps and low land more than mosquitos, he betook himself to the first hill ridges on the south and avoided the morass. The primitive forest was then so large and free of underbrush that footmen and horse- men could travel on without difficulty. Some of the oldest houses stand 35 Old Tupper House, Sandwich Town Hall, Sandwich 36 Episcopal Church, Sandwich Pond View near Sandwich Card and Tag Co. Water View, Sandwich, showing Orthodox Church Lower Shawnee Lake, Sandwich, Mass. 38 on these old roads, long gone out of date, and this is the reason why that, in parts at least, on the West Cape our first roads go all round Robin Hood's barn, rather than at it, and waste so much of the travellers' time in going in so many half-circles. This is why the new county road just here breaks away from the old Pilgrim road which we shall follow. The Tupper house, on this road, is no doubt one of the oldest on the Cape, and for three generations was the home of that famous missionary family to the Indians, whose name it bears. The kitchen and chambers of that house should be seen by every antiquariaii. The sea is still on our left, its deep waters and shore currents flowing sturdily and without cease, west and north — the sea to-day of its usual blue and the white-winged, restless gulls in flocks at every harbor's mouth from here to Cape Race. Only one thing shall we now gather out of this sea — a whale — a distressed, disconsolate, shipwrecked whale or blackfish cast up by the sea, ashore. By English law, under which the Pilgrims lived, all such fish, so caught, belonged from time immemorial to the king. Right Whale 39 But the first thing the Pilgrims did was to appropriate every such fish to his own use, which looks very much like treason — a dangerous pastime to engage in in those days. This he did either because the whale would glut his lean purse, or because he thought every white man on the Cape was a king in these parts. Then he concluded by his own sovereign law to give every such whale to the parson as a perquisite ; certainly not to eat him, for cornmeal was better and in supply enough, nor that his wife might re- joice in a load of whalebone, for she and her likes had generally but one "best dress" to her name, and she didn't like the smell nor the taint of whale-oil about her house ; but this perquisite was perhaps given from some dim consciousness in the giver, that this parson, bred at Cambridge or Oxford, and spending his solitary life in the wild for his Lord, was the truest king after all in those parts, and that the crown of thorns would sometime be changed for one never to grow dim, whose brilliancy, like diamonds, should be from the tear-drops he had shed on earth over a starved dinner every day when there was no money in the parish treasury, or a whole life starved by the lack of those civilized associates, so grateful to cultured men, and that he who gave was only the prophet to foretell Street View, Sandwich, looking north from Post Of&ce 40 the future kingship of his parson — with a whale. Anyhow, we know and hear to this day how some of the parsons crowed and crooned about it when they wrote about that whale with happy pens : "They had indeed sucked of the fatness of the sea." It is hoped at any rate, that " the better half" of the parson got the better half of the fish. As we enter the village of Sandwich, on our left, reaching east as a part of the beach, are seen the rolling hills and pasture lands of Town Neck. These were originally a part of ' ' the common lands ' ' of the town. "The common lands" were these: after any town had been assigned to certain men or proprietors, as the citizens were called, each man had a certain part assigned him for his homestead or farm, accord- ing as his dignity or dollars had gone into the venture ; and after that was done, there was still more land left. This land belonged to all the citizens, according to their first investment. If other men came and were accepted by the- town and land assigned them, they also shared with the first comers, according to the same rule, in these common lands. This Town Neck was a part of these common lands left over, and the present proprietors use it for the common pasturage of their own cattle, one of the few instances of the holding of real estate in the Old Colony in this fashion to this present. Sandwich, the oldest town on the Cape, full of dignity and industry and checkered fortunes, and a worthy sample of our West Cape towns, has made so much of history in its past of two hundred and fifty years that it frightens away every sensible scribe from attempting the story, though in telling it one would but repeat the story of many another Cape town. Alert, busy, thrifty, resolutely clinging to its own opinions when once formed and ready even to recklessness to back them up with its last dollar and its last gun ; paying in butter or Indian corn when there was no silver in town to pay with ; open-handed for the public weal when the Mother Land oppressed us, yet ih the same hour ordering its committee to examine and report exactly what it owed, that if it ran in debt, it shoiild instantly prepare to pay the same ; living through all the wars, frorn King Philip's to our latest war with Spain ; living through all the strifes, religious, political, social, economic, and holding its own place in them all — the life of a town like this cannot be written, for if you write it, it will involve the history of a country. It has always loved learning, as 41 its old Academy and care of its scliools show ; and virtue, as its churches show : and in some spots, especially about its mill-pond, has built its houses three times over, as in the Belcher and Wester places, for instance ; but we will escape eastward to the country which reaches Scorton Hill, west side, the forest on our right, a mile awaj^ the sea at equal distance on our left. Yet even in the country we are liable to stumble over historical spots and events which demand the attention of the curious. For this stretch of country now immediately under review may be called both the Quaker Land and the Mystical Land. A mile away, up among the hills, is Chris- topher's Hollow, named after Christopher Ludlow, a Quaker preacher who gathered from round about the faithful in this solitary spot under the forest trees, in the dark days of their pilgrimage, when if a Quaker meet- ing was held in any man's house, he was fined forty shillings, and every hearer forty shillings, though not a word was said in the Quaker silence of such occasions. They were fined every time they did not go to the Unitarian Church, Sandwich 42 w H CO The Wester and Belcher Places, Sandwich High School, Sandwich 44 Sabbath meeting established by law, for every time they did go to a meet- ing of their own. Their fines in three years amounted at least to one thousand pounds, and of this, one man, William Allen, paid eighty-seven pounds. The persecution was the bitterest in Sandwich of any Cape town, not because Sandwich people were more cruel than the others, but because the town was nearest Plymouth, backed by the Massachusetts Bay, who pushed the persecution and overlooked it. By the Old Colony law any man entertaining a Quaker under his roof, though but for a quarter of an hour, was fined five pounds (the wages of a working man for a year), and if any one saw a Quaker loose hereabouts and did not report him without de- lay to the next constable, though six miles away, he was fined as heavily as the court saw fit. Flogging and imprisonment on bread and water were too frequent punishments to attract attention. It is no wonder then that from time immemorial the Quakers have lived on the hill ridges and out- skirts of the town, chiefly as farmers, and no family of staunch Quakers has ever lived in the village. Of course all such persecution is wrong, and it is not sufficient to say that " they all did it," because that is only saying that they all did wrong ; but it may be said in fairness to our Cape ancestry that they were never cruel, never liked this handling of the Quakers, and did as little persecution as any province in Massachusetts. And as we travel some two miles east towards their meeting-house, we may say for this people, as they have shown themselves on the Cape for two centuries and a half, that they have been among our best citizens, cultured, given to learning, harmless, thrifty and humane. But their first reception here was more than a trifle rough and warm. We approach their meeting-house by a curve of the old county road, at Spring Hill, to our left, on which still stands one of the old " houses of refuge ' ' or block- house, where the pale-faces might flee for safety in case of the redskins making their attack. There is such another domestic fortress on the " Henry Wing " farm at Scorton. Both, we think, were originally Quaker houses. We are now in the Mystical I,and, rightly so called, because in the confusion of land and water, in the wanderings of its creeks among its uplands and its vagrant streams making to all points of the compass, nature seems to have been of more than usual chaotic mind and a temper which throws all regularity to the winds. For this the creeks from Sand- 45 !'. Quaker Meeting House, Spring Hill Alvin Wing Farm, East Sandwich 46 The Paul Wing Estate, East Sandwich Old Wing School, Spring Hill 47 wich and from Scorton harbors, running parallel with the beach outside, until they almost meet head on, are mainly responsible, and the hill ranges on our right have thrown ridges and slight plateaux of upland far into the marshes in the most perplexing confusion, as vide Ploughed Neck. Sailors shipwrecked here, especially at night, find it very hard to get any- where, and generally stick to the beach. Besides, these same hill-ridges on our right, are always breaking out into ponds and streams lying in narrow glens in the shadow of pine-trees, beside the water oozing under ground from the great solitary ponds, that lie by themselves farther in- land. Indeed, this province, far more than many others here, seems to have an abundance of water at hand. The general look of the land here is level and well suited to agriculture, and most of the few inhabitants for nigh three hundred years have been farmers ; but when this part of the Cape has met its fate in its occupation sure to come, the land of villas and market-gardens, this spot is to be graced by summer villas with fountains and the thrifty and busy homes of market gardeners. For this Cape at present stands only on the threshold of its possibilities. Here is now a province which has changed less in looks and ways than almost any other on the Cape. It is a Pilgrim landscape gone to sleep, like the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, only this land sleeps in the sunshine and not in a mountain cave, and has to-day some of our brightest and most progressive citizens. When therefore we ride here, the Sandwich hills behind and Scorton Hill before us, with all the mj^stery of the sea on one side and the secretive hill-ridges with their stores of springs on the other, we feel shut off from the noisy and busy world which we have left behind us — alone, solitary, our minds uncloaked of custom and the frivolities of nothings we call fashion, and we can for a moment listen to our own heart- beats with no looker-on, a sense of something wiser, tenderer, more last- ing and worthier comes strong upon us, and we breathe long breaths up- ward, — shall we call them aspirations ? breaths which tell us of that Best in all. Is this the stress of Nature thus laid upon us? Stanley, the traveller, tells us how in parts, Africa is always calling down the white man with its cHmate and tropic fullness of material gifts, to its own re- pose ^and laziness. Here is the temperate zone adorned with its other forces, of sea, hill-ranges, frost, and struggle and toning us up in market- place, academy, quarter-deck or battle. And does not this thought solve the riddle of the strong influence of the Cape landscape upon sensitive minds inspecting it ? No man will inspect this Cape with due profit who, when he speaks of nature, does not bow reverently before its Author. WEST BARNSTABLE We are now at the head of Great Marshes, so called, probably the most extensive marshes on the Atlantic coast ; on our left, Scorton Neck, where a tribe of Indians once had their wigwams, and where, as living witnesses can testify, many houses had their movable ladders, over which on an Indian alarm the house inmates clambered from the first to the second story, drawing the ladder after them for security. It was always noted for its thrifty and rich farmers, mostly Quakers, for there was always good soil here and pasturage for cattle. In the war of 1812, the British often landed to seize these cattle, and when news was brought one Sunday to the worshippers in the West Barnstable meeting-house, the Pilgrim worship was much disturbed by men, in a great hurry, leaping over the square pews, whose doors they were too much in earnest to stop and open, to seek the enemy, and the women and children were left be- hind in alarm. It is very likely, though not written down, that those services, if so checked, proceeded in the usual order to their conclusion, British or no British, according to the Pilgrim wont of keeping to its point or its text. The best historical illustration of this trait of the New England character, in all generations, is that motion made by a Connecti- cut legislator when some would adjourn the House on what is known as "The Great Dark Day," when, as most thought, the Day of Judgment was come (the dark arose, likely, from the smoke of large fires in the Maine woods) , that lights be brought in and the House proceed to busi- ness, on the ground that, if God should come, in any way He pleased. He should find them at their post of duty, doing it, which was the best spot for any man to meet him, if any man or God should come. By this neck of fertile land the long stretch of Barnstable Beach called Sandy Neck connects itself with the continent. On our right is Scorton Hill, with our road at the north side, the youngest of the three by which the white man passed or passes east of this hill. But on this hill there has been for three hundred years now, one grave always spared by the plough- 49 Looking across the Marshes On the Marshes at Barnstable j^ Sandy Neck Light, Barnstable On the Marshes, Barnstable 51 man, with two rough stones for memorial, which has a lesson for more than Cape folks. When Capt. Mathew Fuller died at Scorton, in 1678, his Scotch servant, Robert, was falsely accused of having stolen his mas- ter's jewelry. Though innocent, the charge so wrought on him that he finally died of grief and starvation. On his burial day there was a sav- age snow-storm, and the tired men bearing him to the churchyard, some two miles further east, halted and buried him on the northeast side of this hill — the grave of a man of honor and self-respect. The grave has long been solitar}^, and in measure his example too. Nowadays, when a man steals a bank or railroad, or indeed his fellow-citizen's rights, he seldom thinks of going to his grave. He goes abroad with a fat letter of credit in his pocket, and dies in a green old age in utter comfort and peace with all mankind. This Cape is intensely patriotic and for the flag ; but it lacks and must have a monument to all its sailors and soldiers (there is a crowd of them) fallen in all her wars, viz., the Indian, French, Spanish, the Revo- lution, the War of 1812, our Civil War, and our late war with Spain, — at least seven wars in which Cape life was spent and lost, to be found again in a nation's ennobled life. The whole Cape should undertake it and pay for it. The best place for it, considering the contour of the Cape, is some- where on this hill, where the travelers may see it as they pass up and down the Cape, and the lofty pedestal of this hill would give it promi- nence on sea and land. The only other spot, though lacking the gran- deur and scope of the first, is at Buzzards Bay^ the neck of the Cape, where trains both from the South and the North shore will come in. In writing of an old and strange land like this, the most perplexing thing for the writer is to rightly apportion his space between the human and historical and the material and scientific, or between Man and Na- ture. But with these " Great Marshes " under our eyes, and knowing well that within the curve of the wooded hill-ranges, far to the south on our right, lies the precinct or parish of West Barnstable, in the old days, at least, the richest farming community on the Cape, we must say a word at least, in general, of the future farming in this province. Strangers will be surprised to hear that this Cape, so associated in their minds with sand, is destined to be a great gardening province. Holland, by the economists, is said to be the richest country, according to the number of 52 its people, in Europe, with its agriculture seldom outmatched, and yet most of her land was originally like these " Great Marshes," only worse, and much farther below the sea-level than the land here. First of all, they had to shut out the sea with dykes, then to pump the water flowing from streams and rains into the sea ; and then to use the common methods of the Dutch farmers in raising crops. Here (and the same is true of most Cape marshes) , the beach is our great natural dyke built for us by the Almighty. It is only to build an additional dyke, some seven miles further east, where the marsh is narrowed by the uplands, to turn all this low land into fresh meadow, capable of raising fresh hay enough for all the horses in the State. So far this has never been attempted because it will not pay. It would simply break the hay market and disturb distribu- tion ; but when the West and the in-country consume mostly their own hay crops, and the increase in value of land forbids such cheap crops as grass, the country will look to the Cape for supply. And there is salt marsh enough on the Cape, when properly reclaimed and handled, to feed the cattle on all the hills of the East. They who look now see only " the great marshes." But if one looks into the future far enough, he sees on this vast stretch of marsh land, now occupied only by solitude and salt hay ricks on staddles, villages with church-spires rising there- on, crowds of children going to well-built school-houses ; and hears the chime of church bells and the merry laugh of well-fed children, mingling with the roar of the surf and the sweep of winds off the bay. West Barnstable has a strong soil of loam and clay, and its farmers, when corn was one dollar a bushel, were a thrifty race, which scattered wide its seed corn in spring. Their prosperity dried up when the full- ness of the western prairies poured its grain at cheap rates in compe- tition, and to the advantage of both parties, the foreign grain being paid for in Cape fish. This is true in all parts of the Cape, which has only followed the laws of nature in its development. The whole of this clay land has only three brief brooks, owing to the nature of the strata here. The ancient graveyard lies near the depot and the center of the village (if it ever had one) , and is a sandy lot, not much given to any crop but gravestones, and chosen partly for that reason by the thrifty neighbors. It was in this yard that the last of the most famous name and family in 53 these parts ordered by will his grave dug sixteen feet deep, that ordinary earthly forces might never disturb his ashes. The grave-digger got six feet- down, when the sandy soil caving in forbade further progress, and the sleeper as yet has shown no signs of being disturbed. As he was in life a man of humor, he may now laugh at this failure in his case ; and he was certainly the man who, provoked by his nephews wearing their full beards against his advice, left them at his demise only all his razors. It was in this same graveyard that the family of Capt. John Percival, "Mad Jack," as he was called (always behind his back), was buried. "Mad Jack " was an old-time sea captain, famous for his " cut-out jobs " in our early wars with England, and is perhaps the most unique and picturesque personage in the history of our early American navy : a rough man with a soft heart ; hard-handed, but always high-hearted, whose memory was long preserved among our naval men, and withal a wag. When they waked him up one night, coming down in a gale of wind in a Barnstable packet, with the sad sentiment, " Captain, we are all afraid we shall be launched into eternity before morning," his cheerful reply was, "Well, I've ten friends in the other world where I have one in this," and turned over to sleep soundly till morning. It is not known that he is buried here, but it is known that he had his own cofSn built and kept in his house for many years ; but the grim monster keeping away unreasonably long, and he himself a thrifty man, he had his cofiSn filled with flower-pots, and raised flowers for his dining-table for many years. It used to be told, in marine circles up and down this Cape (but the story shall die and not be repeated here), with what ritual and ceremony he buried his own father, whom he did not like, at sea ; but it may be told how this same fearless and iron man, in this same graveyard, at the funeral of his mother, whom he devoutly loved, stood with uncovered head and tears in his eyes, to thank his neighbors and kinsfolk for their kindness to the woman gone. A sharp turn across the track, southward, and a half mile or so brings us to "The Great Marshes," or "West Precinct" meeting-house that stands on the old county road which ran south of Scorton Hill and kept the hill-ridge almost to Barnstable town. Here centered roads from the South Shore as far east as Hyannis and west as Cotuit, not to mention the wood villages of the great western arc of the forest which hides so many ponds, as far west as Snake Pond. It was evidently once the centre of 54 large Sunday gatherings and the reunion of families of married sons and daughters, separated all the rest of the week, and the parents in the old home. And while not sketched here, there is no more sweet and pathetic picture on the Cape in all her years than such a meeting of worshippers between the services, waiting under the trees or the shadj^ side of the meeting-house to eat their dinners and enjoy each others kindred society. Like most such spots, this one has probably seen three meeting-houses built or re-built. The first meeting-houses from Boston to Provincetown were mere barns and have nearly all disappeared. The next in turn were after the Sandwich plan, as seen in Freeman's History of Cape Cod. Some- time after 1830 this house was changed into the Cape style then in fashion, and in the late 1840 was again reformed, a third of its length cut off and all its antiquities and most of its dignities concealed or mutilated. It was improved into commonplace, and all the pathos of its personal associations sacrificed to the convenience or comfort of the worshipper, then in trust merely for the generations to come. There was then no more dignified house of worship on the Cape or hardly in the States than this. Yet even the present house will bear looking at more than once, for it represents the oldest independent society in the world, founded in London in 1606, and drifted about until it reached here, as has been proved when denied. The house of the first minister in this building (Rev. John Russell) is a little way down the road to the depot, and the house of another pastor, Rev. Oakes Shaw, father of the late distinguished chief justice, is still standing about a mile east and down the old county road. As late as 1840, a slave of this same Parson Shaw was still alive, called Bash (probably Bathsheba) and amused herself with singing the rather heathen strain, " When I die I'm going home Guinny " and dancing lustily on two lame legs to the music of her own weird chant. The first parson at Truro, at his decease, owned half a dozen such servants, and cases are known where slaves were willed to be sold and the money used to buy Bibles for the heirs of the testator. Standing here before Parson Shaw's parsonage, facing due north and, we see across the lowland and swamps the newer or second built count}^ road, about a quarter of a mile east of the station where we turned to go to the church, and beyond this road the broad marshes with the white hills of Sandy Neck, with their black patches of stunted oaks and pine far be- 55 Church at West Barnstable 4 ' irL. . -^ ^ The Late Dr. Savage's Residence, Barnstable 64 Panelling in Parlor of the Old Doane Estate, 182 years old, at Barnstable Episcopal Chapel, Barnstable 65 have broken open the doors or stopped it themselves. But the King's Court stopped, and there was no more of it in Barnstable County from that day to this. This may seem to some a rash and even foolhardy enterprise. But it should be remembered of what stock they were, and that scarce half a mile west of this same court-house there are remains by this roadside — part of that Sacrament Rock under the lee of which their Pilgrim ances- tors had halted in the crisp spring air to celebrate that Holy Supper of Him they were trying to follow, even across the very sands of this Cape, then a wild. BARNSTABLE. In time, Barnstable town, meaning to exclude by the phrase all the other villages within its town limits, has its own peculiar history and idiosyncracies. Almost from its incorporation in 1637, the third in order on the Cape, it has been the shire town of the County, and the courts have gathered here their officials, the professional and political men of note, with visits of suitors from all over the Cape, so that its society and culture have been always remarked. Its sons have been in number and quality among the foremost in cities to win fame and fortune. It stood with the sister towns on the side of liberty and did its part in all our wars, and like them had men of different minds among its citizens. It has always been the center of county politics. It is a question often asked, though idle, whether the Puritans who came here intended independence of England from the start. It is always hard to prove intentions, but it is historically plain that the men who settled this State were born, Uved, and died rebels. It was in their blood, their religion and their civilization. They rebelled against two churches and one king, and would have rebelled against a dozen more of each kind, had their own personality been hindered sufficiently in church or state. They were by intent the most radical 'Protestants in the world, and it is likely to be shown some day that our forefathers on the Cape, under circumstances favoring it, were among the freest of the free both in thought and life. They took boldly and without words the undoubted right of the king for their own, as in the coining of their own money as far back as the times of the Pine-Tree shilling. 66 street View, Barnstable, showing Episcopal Church I I Mrs. Deborah Hall and Mrs. Mehitable Smith, Twin Sisters Photo taken 931! Birthday, at Home, Barnstable n a n o IS These lands were discovered and settled by some one, and must have therefore belonged to some one, certainly not to any other European power but Great Britain, from whom our people accepted defence and pro- tection time and again. Yet to show the absurd extent to which they gainsaid the British crown and its rights, they put laws on their statute- books by which it was a crime to entertain on their soil that church of which the British king was head, and made it an offence to celebrate that Christmas Day when that king and his court were honoring it with the most solemn pomp and ceremonies. Barnstable Court House 70 a a CIS ez < a S <«g •lt*r#i. Estate of William Bacon, Barnstable 74 YARMOUTH. We start for Yarmouth, but are stopped short by the eastern hill- ridge that holds Barnstable's ancient church and graveyard, and halt at the square at its foot. Here and at Sandwich, and indeed elsewhere on the Cape there are others like, and it is merely suggested here, that they very much resemble the market-places of the English country towns from which, so many of the settlers came; and among a people who always demanded three conveniences and near together, viz. , ' ' The Mill, the Market and the Meeting-House, " this was not the old market-place of the town. From here to Yarmouth we drive between a continuous row of houses, the old ones mostly on the north side of the road, the sea visible and nearer in the distance. These houses express the comfort and architecture of the old Cape, and to a much more limited extent the enterprise and tastes of the new. The old-fashioned Cape remains here and to a marked degree. In early days, in the new towns, laws were passed that the whites should build together and in neighborhoods, to assist each other in case of sudden attack from Indians, and the houses on the north side, facing south, as set by the compass, would have their front rooms exposed to the sunshine, as was generally desired and practiced. This partly accounts for the location of these and other like houses, on the Cape. The towns that we are now passing between are in many ways alike in their history, culture and general handling of Cape affairs, and mostly what was said of the social life of Barnstable town, may be said of the town we now approach. The general drift and history of one Cape town, may be taken as a fair record of all the others ; they differ only in details, and these details are often glimpses deep into the life and fortunes of our forefathers. So the old meeting-house at Yarmouth stood four miles east of Barnstable court-house, and sixty-nine miles from Boston. It must have had a tall spire pointing the way to Heaven, and the thrifty seamen put it to another use, viz. , as a landmark to direct them safely into the two harbors hereabouts. And these same sailors had other troubles to bear than head winds or sand-bars or rocks under them, namely, the Pilgrim laws over them, which fined many a man sailing on the Sabbath on his way to market to sell his fish, or who hoisted 75 II £1 Xg;j - "— Z^kT-' 1 3 S 3 \ ^ Lovell House, Yarmouth Port, Mass., Built in i6 / / ^rndda^S*^. ' '^'-r'^^^- '^m-—wr^ Old Salt Works, East Dennis. 92 sons, one born on the passage. When this was written in 1831, from this pair there were living 345 in Dennis, 133 in Chatham, and in other places 396. This shows how a few may become a great nation. It is common to say " as full of lies as an epitaph," . and it puts us who have examined several pronounced ones, alleging all virtue to those who lie beneath, on remembering that these same men and women while alive were tremen- dously lied against, and that, so far as they are concerned, if any fulsome epitaph were all lies the sleepers would be the sufferers, as more lied against than lied for, and if any lies are harmless, tombstone ones are. Of course, all lies which will eat through anything harder than chain cable or ten-inch iron plate are to be shunned as the deadliest leprosy against society and country. Our forefathers were legally exact and prompt in deciding town or private bounds, and yet set up such perishable marks that nothing but the good sense of their posterity saved nearly every landholder from the vexa- tions of many lawsuits. To make matters worse, nearly all records were burnt in the fire at Barnstable Court House just before 1830; and yet we are told that not a single suit arose from that confusion. To show this phase of Cape business, we shall make two extracts from these boundary records, and the first is between Provincetown and Truro in 1714 : "Be- ginning near the easterly end of a cliff near the Cape harbor, called by the Indians and by the English Cormorant Hill, at the jawbone of a whale set in the ground by the side of a red oak stump and thence run- ning by marked range-trees nearly on a north and west line, about half a point more westerly, to a marked pine tree standing bj^ a reedy pond called by Indians ; and from thence by marked range-trees to a high hill, the back side near the North Sea, with a red cedar post set in the said hill, and thence to run in the same line to the sea ; and running back on the contrary line to the harbor." The hills are there, and the sea, but there are no Indians nor Englishmen to call anything, nor no trees, marked or otherwise; even the compass has changed several points in two hundred years ; and where is the jawbone of a whale "and the red oak stump " but under the sand, forever drifting here, or in the air wherein they have evaporated. Yet if, for villas or any other purpose, this land, so described, should become valuable enough to sell by the foot, who would dare to buy or sell with any accuracy? 93 And here is a partial description of a boundary line between Yarmouth and Dennis in 1794, surveyed under town authority, and oversight of several important citizens of the two towns: "The line begins at three white oak trees, marked and standing at the S. W. corner of Edward Howes upper field," etc. (But suppose Edward, or some other Howe, in some generation, had bought another "upper field," and all the Howes were dead or removed?) There is mention made, of course, of marked trees which then were, but have not been for a hundred years and more ; of "a stake and stone standing on the S. side of the county road; to the falling away of a hill," of "forty-four rods into Pollen's Pond, and through the middle of said pond, and southerly through the middle of the main channel of Bass River into the South Sea," i. e., the sound on the south side. The line is still further denoted by the farms or houses of six men, some of whom were dead when this work was done ; and our remarks on the Truro survey will mostly apply to this. Other old Cape lines show not much better surveying. Nor should the testimony of a great man like Daniel Webster, as to the historic patriotism of Dennis folk and their neighbors, in a letter of 1 85 1 to some of the citizens of this town, be omitted from the general picture: "None were earlier to begin, none more cordially embraced, or more zealously struggled to maintain, the cause of the Revolution, than the people of Cape Cod. All the region about the birthplace of James Otis, and the other true-hearted patriots of these times, is to me a sort of classic ground. Remote from large cities, scattered along an extensive coast, there was yet, I think, in no part of our country, a more fervent devotion to the patriotic cause than was manifested by your ancestors." Dennis, like every seafaring town, if it has been fed by the sea, has also suffered bitterly from the sea in its fury, as in the gale of 1841, when twenty-six of its most promising young men, eighteen schoolfellows from a single neighborhood, perished at sea in the great misery. And some future scribe will tell how the perpetual anxiety for those at sea, the vicissitudes, of sudden joys and sorrows for those at home, — in short, the economy of this sea life, spent afloat and ashore, affects and sublimates the nervous system of whole communities into a strange endurance and a wonderful power of reaction from disaster. 94 Here was also the original home of salt manufactured from sea-water by sun evaporation, by a process first managed by Mr. Philip Sears, and others, in 1776. For, by wars and embargoes, these hardy men, being driven from earning their bread out of the sea, or on the sea, turned finally upon the sea itself, when it ventured near land, and stewed it with the sun which shines for all, but especially for all who know enough to use it, into gold and silver ; and the industry spread over all the Cape, as the elders who saw the low, flat, creeping salt-works, hooded with caps to keep out rain, remember. The Cape manufacturers had no particular advantage over their neighbors — sea water a little more free from fresh, and sand to hold a little longer the sun heat, and plenty of salt water close at hand. They wanted money, and they went for it ; reached out their brains and hands for it — and got it. But the pluck of that work has never been duly recognized. Before the peace of 1783, salt was eight dollars a bushel ; and just before the war of 181 2, seven dollars. Dennis led in the business, followed close by Brewster, Barnstable, and Chatham. The salt springs of Syracuse and the West could undersell our salt, and eat up our profits, and our salt-works rotted down. This book, fairly judging what they have been and are, has the most unbounded faith in the still greater shall-be of the common people, out of whose ranks nearly all reformers and prophets have come, and that great Shining One who, for eighteen centuries, has been changing the world's darkness into the marvelous light of Christian civilization. As the un- mistakable logic of His word and Ufe, it follows, even in this age, that all right to honor, or even mention in history, is character. But here shall be given glimpses of one life, that of Richard Sears, the pilgrim, which ended in this town in 1676, after eighty-five years of wandering and vicissitude, where the interests shall center in the family and social rela- tionships of the deceased, and that, too, under guidance of Burke's "Vicissitudes of Families." He had among his ancestry, before 1400 A. D., an Adam Sears or Sayer, Lord of the Manor of Hougham, near the mouth of the Medway, a gentleman of fair estate and high character. One son was returned to Parliament from Sandwich, County of Kent, in the reign of Henry VI, and another created a Banneret for gallantry at Stoke, while still another, John, was possessed in Colchester, of wealth and land, was alderman of the city, and has a mural brass in St. Peter's 95 Church there, dying in 1509. His grandson, Richard, described as a man of florid face and sanguine temperament, grew up the elder brother, and heir to a large estate ; but he happened to have principles, and was not willing to sacrifice them and himself for estates, so in the rancour and cruelty of the persecutions under Henry VIII, he took the opposite side from his famity and relatives. This compelled him to leave prosper- ity and land for Holland. But meanwhile he had married Anne Boucher, of the ancient Knyvet family, some of whose ancestors had been Knights of the Garter, Earls, and Ann Plantaganet, granddaughter of King Edward III. Because Anne Boucher clung to her husband and religion in exile, she was disinherited, and her name expunged from the family records. She shared with him his sufferings, and watched over his death- bed at Amsterdam in 1540. This couple left only one child, John Boucher Sears, who was evidently of a more militant strain than the rest, for, instead of wrangling over religious opinions or miscarried estates, he sailed manj' voyages with his father-in-law, the famous admi- ral, John Hawkins. He, too, died in Holland, and left four sons. His eldest son and namesake married Maria Egmont, daughter of the famous Count Egmont, soldier, patriot and martyr, whom the Duke of Alva treacherously slew. Richard Sears was the elder of this man's two sons, and from Holland came to America with a large fortune and settled in Dennis. It may be added to the romantic and high-colored history of the Sears family, that, in a later generation, two sons, going over from the Cape to recover their ancestral lands in England, but appointed officers in the king's army, both fell fighting for the crown, against the pretender Charles Edward, in the fatal battle of Culloden. BREWSTER. The Sears never recovered their ancient estates in England, but they have built up here fortunes ample enough, by literature and merchandis- ing, to satisfy the most exacting ; and this screed has been made up of family history, that if any Cape man, looking over his sandy acres and the desolate sea, which neither he nor any man can own, is moved to hide the homeliness of his own estate from the pretence of a fashion which buys old shawls abroad, in order that their families may seem older than 96 the pork-kettle out of which their money came, he may remember that his own breed is rather old and choice, and that if these ancient pilgrims, like Richard Sears, wading through Dennis sands, to be free and to serve as their only Master did, had as close electrical connection with English folk as they have in blood relationship, they could set half England ring- ing to their touch, and the sound should be heard in manor, palace, and behind the brasses in pavement and wall of old churches, as well as in the cottages of Scrooby and the tenement houses of Eeyden. As we are driving along the county road, North shore to Brewster, we may reflect that towns, like persons, though they bear a family like- ness, have each their own special physiognomy, which at least directs the tax-collector and the creditor where to go for his dues. Moreover, the features of every man are chiselled by his life, external and internal, for parts of which the individual is responsible and parts not. The town to which we are going has a very marked physiognomy, according to all who have looked into the matter. This town was named after William Brewster, one of the " Mayflower" immoitals. It was incorporated as a part of the town of Harwich, which in 1694 became a town, and now remained the south precinct alone ; and of Harwich we shall see on our return. Until the division, the general history of the two towns is one. It may be as well to explain, just here, the word precinct, which must be so often used in our Cape history. It comes from the two Latin words, pre and cingo, meaning to encircle, and a precinct is a territory, set off, bounded, enclosed, encircled into political entity : into something known to law, and while more a legal than an ecclesiastical term, is somehow used oftenest in our history with regard to churches, and very properly, among a people where the state existed for the church. It is a town with many rocks, and, in the northern parts, with strong soil, with no adequate harbor, near the bend of the Cape, but partly for reasons already given, has few events in its separate history to distinguish it from its neighbors, or to merit special mention. It could never rightly be called a fishing town, though fishermen have always been in it ; nor a coasting town, though coasters have been owned and sailed from there, and sometimes three fourths of its male population were spending their life upon the sea ; nor, like most of its sister towns, never was or could be a manufacturing center, except in salt ; but it was a town of seamen given 97 to the longer and better voyages to distant parts, with minds enlarged and purses filled through intercourse with foreign people. It is said that in 1803, in proportion to population, there were more masters and mates of vessels from this town than from any other. Besides, these old cap- tains, in foreign voyages, were obliged by necessity to be first-rate busi- ness men, as well as seamen, and were the very men to build up a noble town in a broad-minded fashion, and rule it to broad-minded conclusions in its town meetings. In one important committee, chosen to consult in a crisis with neighboring towns, eight out of the ten members were sea- captains. And were it not for the danger of adding to the vanity of the vain sex, we should quote what one traveler here, years ago, said of the old men of the class just described : " There scarce seems to be an indi- vidual of seventy and upwards who is not a fine study for a painter. I never saw so many handsome old men in any country in the world, — the stern, manly Pilgrim type, confirmed and perpetuated by a life of peril and hardy exercise, while visits to foreign parts have kept the physiog- nomy liberal and open." It is very surprising that this writer, and on the ground, says nothing like it of the old women of the Cape ; either because there are no old women anywhere, or at any time, or because it was left to be inferred that all the mothers of such men were like in looks, or that it was a mere waste of time to say that, when the omnipresent and omnipotent sea paints such colors into woman's cheeks, and the salt, chaste air was so life-giving to human lungs, any Cape Cod woman, except the most abject and sordid, could be anything else than beautiful. Yet Henry Thoreau, for whose genius and book, "Cape Cod," this book has a very profound respect, pays a very back handed compliment to this same portion of our fellow countrymen. But he was merely describing an exceptional class, and the exception only proves the rule. The great man of early days, of this town, was Parson Stone, who tended the flock faithfully forty-seven years, and, with Parsons Dunster and Simpkins, could show one hundred and thirty-one years of pas- toral work. These all died deeply lamented, but their works lived after them. Parson Simpkins was very learned, and students in theology were taught by him. Parson Stone married Reliance Hinckley, daughter of the governor, who was so named because she was born on the day of the great Narragansett Swamp fight, in token of the reliance of that house- hold that the good God would spare their husband and father, who was away with the army. The embargo which preceded our war with Great Britain in 1812 probably drove this town as near into rebellion against our government as any Cape town ever reached. The embargo drove all commerce and for- eign trade from the ocean (and our people were generally living by these), and the effect on them was very like what it would be if all the farmers of the West were forbidden, for an indefinite period, to cultivate their lands. How could farmers or sailors live ? For our side, and as things turned out, the embargo was a national necessity, but the coast towns paid a fearful price to the nation's welfare. Therefore, in January, 1809, a sol- emn town meeting was held ; opened, as all such were, by prayer from their pastor, Simpkins, and strong resolutions and a petition addressed to the lyCgislature, asking it to intercede or interfere with the general gov- ernment. The hand of a strong and skilled writer is seen in the docu- ment, as the following extracts will show : " Your memorialists are ready, with their lives and fortunes, to encounter the hazards and expenses of warfare when duty requires. They are ready to bear in common with their fellow citizens any justifiable measures which may be adopted to prevent an appeal to arms, but the restrictions now put upon commerce are conceived to be beyond all proportion burdensome to your memorial- ists, and almost singles them out as victims for destruction. The aban- donment of the ocean is to them as oppressive and distressing as it would be to the farmer to be prohibited the use of his lands. Whilst the mouth of labor is forbidden to eat, the language of complaint is natural. When our children cry for bread, and we have none to give, the feelings of nature will not be controlled.' ' The memorial ends with a high-spirited declaration that they had rather meet an enemy with arms in their hands, than to try to starve them at the risk of being starved themselves. The law was not changed for the appeal and the town had to wait for peace to end its misery. But before the peace came they were confronted by a peculiar disas- ter, viz., an exaction of $4000 from the town, by a British man-of-war in the bay, backed by the threat to burn down the town if not speedily paid. Then the Brewster people bestirred themselves. Except for their own arms the whole lower Cape was defenceless. A town meeting was at 99 Town Hall, Brewster Baker's^Pond, Brewster lOO once called on Sunday in the meeting-house, so urgent was the matter, and parson Simpkins prayed over the solemn assembly. Reports were heard, committees appointed and instructed what to do and report at six o'clock that evening at an adjourned meeting. These committees re- ported at that time, that they had ordered the captain of artillery, and that " Brewster can make no dependence upon any of our neighbors for assistance in our alarming and distressed situation." The town heard the report, ordered the money, and paid it in due time and got a receipt. How far all such demands and threats are allowed by the rules of war, let the men of war decide. But the memory of some British ships and cap- tains on this coast, has left a strong antipathy in most of the Cape gen- erations since. But to return to the physiognomy of the town as it has long been — academic, dignified and urbane, with a sense of repose and grace, based on ample means and self-reliance. It goes dangerously near a comparison to say that these things distinguish it from its neighbors who have all their virtues in degree, and perhaps truer to say that Brewster is a town that centralizes and accentuates these virtues to a marked degree. At any rate this town has about it the stamp and color of a sea-captains' town, where the captains had sailed far and often. Perhaps they carried more barrels of reading matter on these long voyages than some, or their learned clergy like Stone and Simpkins early set the note of culture high and in refinement. Governor Hinckley's daughter Reliance, the parson's wife, and other women of marked character, assisted to tame their wilder- ness of forests and men to a better civilization. Who knows ? Brewster has for long presented a curious problem to men skilled in social and political economy, which this book notes without solving the intricate and subtle- questions involved. Brewster always puts us seeing over the sea a square-rigged ship, first class, all sails set, running free before the wind ; and if one in the old days, especially if she were a woman, was allowed to rummage the rooms and cup- boards of such a house, she would be both amused and delighted with the stores of old china, foreign curiosities, brilliant silk coverlets and quaint armor brought home ; and, if she were not confirmed in her Christian habits, would be sorely tempted to covet the Canton crape shawls, and carry away the slightly tarnished but heavy India silk robes which the hardy seaman had brought home so long ago to his spouse, who had waited so often and so demurely for the sight of his returning sails. The captain and his spouse lie side by side in the churchyard some time now, and cannot wait upon our curiosity ; and the old house is owned by strangers, who per- haps neither know nor prize the many and singular things which belong to it. And here, too, we have introduced newer or certainly more costly houses of a very different style of architecture, to a degree prophetic of the villa architecture of the Cape in the future — the very handsome villas of our summer visitors, generally of Cape stock, who have made their money abroad. Now there is such a thing as " philosophy of houses " as there is of old clothes, as in " Sartor Resartus," or of hats or any other thing made holy by their association with man in his long day of life, so full of comedy and tragedy. For instance, in an agricultural com- munity free from intruders, the size of the houses will depend on the richness and number of the acres out of whose surplus these houses are built. If a stranger builds here, his style is sure to vary from the prevalent type, and its size and richness will depend very much on the success of the mill or packing-house or ship out of which the money came. Besides, every man who orders his own house, builds infalliblj^ his own character into it — intellect, exertion, ethics, all. It must be confessed that our new villas show much energy, power, and even taste, in finish and con- veniences. Very often they are trophies of a man's victory in the battle of life. But some things no new house can ever have. It cannot have the life of past generations, nor its memories, always audible under its rafters to the sensitive ear which listens, nor the tableaus of man and maiden, wedding and funeral, which the clear eye can always see when it looks, nor hear the anthem, the wail, the paean, the litany which, after many generations, grow into tragic verse and melody, very in- structive to the thoughtful, such as no new house can possibly have. Therefore these builders of new houses, and their descendants will no doubt strive to live noble lives worthy of the houses and their costly and classic chambers. At any rate, no matter with what cost or style the new-comers build, let the old houses stand very much as they are ; if vacant, let the memories of noble men and women cling to them still ; or, if occupied, let the dwellers be reverent, and willing to emulate virtues S»ft>^»?awwew-xi Residence of Hon. Roland Nickerson, East Brewster Stable of Hon. Roland Nickerson, East Brewster ■which once inhabited them ; and let no man sneer at an old house any- more than they would at the Christ, forasmuch as His image, in the guise of his followers, dwelt so long in them. There are many old houses in our Cape towns. We cross the town line, still eastward, to enter the town of Orleans (named, probably, from some surviving gratitude to France for her help in the Revolution), broken off from old Eastham and made a township in 1797, and before that time her history is that of the mother town. Its fate was in general that of the towns already noticed, — hardship all round, brave struggles with men and animals and elements ; dangerous wars, and prosperity lost in them; patriotism and conscience strictly adhered to in church and state. Only in the war of 1812 she refused to pay ransom money to an English man-of-war, as Brewster did, and suf- fered no harm ; not that her people were braver than Brewster's folk, but because her sea-line to defend her was much shorter and her houses of value were much farther inland, and away from war-ships. Her merits are in the life-long heroic living of her common people, and that she kept her first parson, Jonathan Bascom, thirty-five years, until his death, and then greatly lamented him. October 29, 1727, at 10 p. m., an earthquake swept over the colonies, so grave that, according to the testimony of some prominent divines of that age, it happily proved reformatory of some loose livers in America, who became devout penitents ; and the same is true, probably, of some of our Cape people in Orleans, as well as other towns hereabouts. If this were so, several earthquakes might be serviceable in any age. It may serve to show the singular changes of the sand in the region we are now approaching, to state that in the December of 1626, a ship with a full cargo of emigrants from London to Virginia was shipwrecked on Nauset Beach in this town, and the romantic story of Indians and the governor of Plymouth Colony in connection with the shipwreck may be found on other pages. The ship was buried in the sand, but emerged to the light again in 1863, and many pieces of the ship were carried away by the people as relics. When the ship went down it was inside the harbor ; when found, it was outside the beach. In about two hundred years the beach had passed over the ship. In 1 8 ID a bass viol, not without sturdy protest from some of the con- 104 Summer Residence of Mr. Crosby, East Brewster gregation, was purchased for the meeting house. It was a very significant innovation. It may well show the vagaries of the human mind under strong excitement, to note how apt we are to throw away the good with the evil and the indifferent, as seen in the animosity which our Puritan ancestors had against all musical instruments in the house of the Lord of all melodies. The stately organ was identified with the worship of the old church in England, and therefore, against the example of lyUther, was broken in pieces by the reforming zeal backed by Cromwell's hammers, and was banished from the new worship. After trial and acquired knowl- edge of many other instruments, most of the parishes on the Cape came back to the use of the organ. But it took more than two hundred years to do so, and something had been lost. Here the Cape bends and turns sharply north ; and here begins also, in our triple division, the east Cape, which includes all the towns which reach the Atlantic Ocean as well as the Bay waters. 105 The Snow Library, Orleans Old Mill at Orleans 107 Residence of J. H. Sparrow, Orleans A. T. Newcomb's Store, Orleans loS « o • -'^^ Cove, Orleans w w H ^ r Street View, near Davenport's residence, Eastliam 119 s S ' EASTHAM. Eastham was from the start, owing to its corn, a very great favorite with the Plymouth people — their Egypt, and thither they early and often went to fill their sacks, never returning from its plenty empty. Indeed at a very early date, 1643, it was proposed to transfer the Plymouth Church and government here, and a committee visited the place to report on the outlook. Their report was unfavorable, probably ' ' Out of the frying pan into the fire" and the transfer was, luckily for the Colony, not made. Yet they sent some of their best men here ; Governor Pearce among them, whose old farm we shall see later on. Perhaps it was more truly a scion of old Plymouth than any other town on the Cape. Gov. Thomas Pearce and seven families, forty-nine souls in all, came in 1651. So early, and a frontier town, at first there was much uncertaint}' how far the town extended, and many taxpayers ignored the town's jurisdic- tion. But in 1646 the Old Colony Court ordered, "Nauset is granted to t ' be a township, and to have all the privileges of a township as other towns within the government have. ' ' Five years later, it was ordered by the same Court ' ' that the town of Nauset be henceforth called and known by the name of Eastham." In point of time, this was the foxirth Cape town incorporated. Its charter gave it sixteen miles in length and two and one-half in breadth. By its dismemberment into three new towns, — Chatham, Or- leans and Wellfleet — it is now reduced to six miles in length, and as to width, is just exactly as wide as the Atlantic Ocean allows and makes it. The outside at least of the old Eastham life, is as well shown from the town and church records as from any other source, brief as many are. The acerbity of our Pilgrim fathers against blackbirds and other feathered felons against their corn seems to increase as we get down the Cape, and the blackbirds too, if we may judge from the old records, for here is an Eastham vote that every man should not only kill every year twelve blackbirds or three crows but that no young man should marry unless he has filled his quota. Thus, in the inexorable Pilgrim justice, one poor miserable blackbird — one short of the tale, could hinder or root a whole wedding, bridegroom, parson, all, especially the bride, from the wedding flowers and feast. Four wolves were killed here in 1665, and bounties paid on their heads. This was an Indian land, and they were assembled once a year to hear the criminal law read to them, and so might not offend. " The day of small things" is seen in the town rate of 1659, which is not quite £1, and in the pay of the town officers, i. e. : assessors, £2 145. ; magis- trates, £1 ']s. ; pikes, £2 16s. ; record book, is. lod. This town raised and sent, in King Philip's war, eighteen men, when the whole colony was only to raise three hundred. The town Hfe must have had, also, its comic side, as little of it as we see in the records. For there is a magistrate's record that he fined one personal " for slandering and belying his neighbor," and another was fined the same sum for a "Jish story," to wit : "lying about a whale," which is, by the way, an animal. Stocks and pillories were provided by our Pilgrim fathers for all such persons as carefully as pulpits were for their betters. The man who stood outside the meeting-house in this town during divine service, stood, according to town law, very near the stocks. Here was a town full of Indians and Galvanism. The Indians melted away like wax, until, in 1802, there was only one hundred and five left in ancient Nauset. The center of the town life, and for years after him, was in that great missionary and pastor. Rev. Samuel Treat, settled here in 1672, and after serving the town for forty-five years, died in 1717, oh a salary of ^50 a year ; sufficient firewood brought to his door ; grants in fee simple ; six distinct tracts of land, including one island and a homestead of twenty acres, on which they obhgated themselves to build him " a suitable house " — in all between $350 and $400 income ; and as he received additional pay from the English Society to the Indians, he enjoyed a comfortable salary. He learned the Indian language, and spoke it. In 1693 he writes the Rev. Increase Mather : " I have from time to time imparted the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ to these Indians in their own language, and, I truly hope, not without success. They have four distinct assem- blies in as many villages belonging to our township, with four teachers of their own choice, who repair once a week to my house to be themselves further instructed pro modulo in the concernments proper for their service and station. There are, besides, four schoolmasters, who teach their youth to read and write in their own language. They have six magis- trates and three stated courts." Whether they or any of their kith ever understood the ' ' scheme of salvation ' ' as proffered them may well be questioned ; but these children of nature learned enough of Christianity to be good citizens and obey the ten commandments. The ' ' scheme ' ' has fallen into disgrace, but only long after the Indians had fallen into their graves. Mr. Treat visited them in their wigwams ; affable, social and helpful in this world's mat- ters, attended their solemn festivals, and was a Pilgrim father to them, as those noble Frenchmen north of us were to the French Indians along the great lakes. He had in the pulpit a voice like a hoarse northeast wind, and which the roar of the sea could not confound. But his words about the future fire were strong enough to keep any congregation warm, and throw some into a panic. But it is around Mr. Treat's ministry to the white people that memo- ries love to assemble. And as he was a sort of archdeacon in the East Cape (the title is very foreign to his own religion) , or overseer of churches in his neighborhood, it may be as well to say a few things of the Eastham meeting-house, to illustrate still further Pilgrim fashions of worship. The first meeting-house was twenty feet square, ' ' with a thatched roof, and posts in the sides of the building, for use should occasion require the use of muskets in defence." In 1681 it was ordered that the ranks of the mil- itary company shall be filled by all citizens capable of bearing arms (a sword or cutlass as well as a gun), and that each Sunday one part of the company go armed to public worship. None of these first meeting-houses , remain on the Cape. These houses were of no style in architecture, and merely consulted the means and convenience of the builders. The Puritan had thrown away the old church, and all styles and rites associated with it. There- fore, here Gothic is in abhorrence unto this day. New England has been searching round from 1630 to now for a style for its churches in harmony with the Puritan religion, and has found none, except in the reformed Dutch style as it prevailed at Leyden, as seen in the style of the Old South meeting-house in Boston, or in the Swiss style of reformers, like Zwingle and Calvin, as the new chapel at Andover Seminary shows. They dis- sented from the rest of Christendom, and were not unwilling to be its antipodes. The Pilgrim ruled strenuously all the circumstances of his house and 123 worship ; even the substance of his parson's sermon did not escape his rigid inquest, though he might be born neither philosopher nor theologian. He had conquered conclaves and courts abroad, and cut off one king's head. He had his own way, in his own land, his own worship, his own minister — with everybody, except with that class, that band of nonde- scripts, that omni-present, omni-eating, omni-talking, omni-devising and most rollicking company of monkeys at their tricks and drollery, to wit, — the small boys of the Cape." All the towns voted, again and again, anathemas and money against the dear young rascals, but it was no use. The ruling elders made a grave mistake in handling them. Instead of leaving them in the family pew to their mothers, they put them together in the gallery under the eye of the tithing man with his long stick, and the girls' pew was not far off. Together, with nothing to do, but to listen to a sermon an hour long, which they neither understood nor cared for if they had, and not Hercules himself, with his club, assisted by Apollo's persuasions could keep these "small boys" awake or silent, or quiet, much less the tithing man with his rather slender rod. ' ' The small boy ' ' has so far occupied his own niche in the world, and will, as the Pilgrim found to his cost. The Cape parsons and their families were of the Brahmin caste, gen- erally college men, married among the best, and were true men and women of light to the people among whom they dealt. The Cape par- sons had generally large families of sons and daughters, and Parson Treat was no exception. To him, as he passed along the roads, every girl or boy would courtesy, or wait with hats off, until he passed. He himself, if popular, and before the Quakers, would receive an ovation and rever- ence from the elders every time he went out on his parish calls, and on new grounds deeply founded on the Pilgrim attitude towards religion The influence of the parson's family, — especially its women — on the social life of the town can hardly be overstated, and has been in history overlooked. They were the oracles of fashion, and madam, the minister's wife, from her acquaintance abroad, heard early of any new fashion, modi- fied it, giving advice to her young friends about how to use it, and possibly one or more of the daughters would be among the first to try it. The same as to etiquette, morals and books. Many of the daughters who had educated themselves above the possible husbands hereabouts, and 124 even knew a little I^atin and Greek, died maids. One should suppose an ordinary fisherman would go to the parsonage for a wife ; not that he did not think himself good enough, but that the form and decorum there were not good enough for him, and compared poorly with the ease and hearty fellowship of his own kind, boys and girls, in the long kitchen on a winter's night in some yeoman's cottage. Yet life beat high in some hearts of these tall, demure, rosy, busy and silent daughters of the parson, who so often waited for their fate from abroad.. All the day, let us fancy, Mollie, the eldest, has been waiting for a knock at the door ; more busy and silent about the linen and china than usual. Her simplicity is a trifle tidier than usual, and she answers questions abruptly and in a key a trifle higher, as if in a reverie. A young man on horseback, all day has been riding down the long Cape road hitherward, It is even night, the supper table has been long set, and yet no supper eaten, and no word of explanation of the delay asked or given. The house glows in the yellow light of the open fires. And at last that knock. Nobody rushes to the door which opens at last with true modest gravity, and a young man in a huge grey over- coat comes in — into a house abundant in tallow candles and open wood fires and hard floors, innocent of carpets, as clean as the tablecloth itself. Parson Treat, disturbed a little in his library at the side of the house where he receives callers and does all sorts of town business, by the new arrival, will come out from his den and scanty books, and the ample sup- per, especially abundant in cake and preserves, will be eaten. Whether the demure Mollie has a fire in the best room, " to sit up " with her city lover (he is from the same college that her father was) , this book knows not ; but it does know that when she takes him across the fields by that narrow path in which but one can walk unless two walk very close, buried with daisies or patches of the large, blue Cape violets —when the great sea off shore is so very still and blue, and the small birds of all sorts hopping and singing in the woodlands of open oak and pine-trees in their light, cathedral green, and she, clad in well-starched muslin and a chip hat, with the roses on her cheeks beneath, is helped over that gray stone wall, where the stile should be, by him, while the woodchuck and her young brood look wistfully at both, there is no young queen that looks more stately and sweet than she, and that no city park or boulevard could give such a sendofi^ to such simple beauty. If she 125 takes her lover to the minister's pew, nearly all the town will make close guesses about her situation, especially the girls, for a month to come. As for him, this book knows, however the match may fare, that if he be a man he will remember and feel the soft sun-warmth of that Sunday, the blue of the violets and sea, the gray of that stone-wall, the vestal purity of the old fields through which he passed, and, above all, the glory of that demure, sweet, rosy Puritan Pilgrim face, which ought to trans- figure her to any man, until his life's end, which the book hopes may only end with her. We are now at the heart of the East Cape, the very land of sea and sand. Both of these have been with us from the start of our pilgrimage, but here both are accented against him, not in quality, but by magnitude and intensity, in man's struggle for the mastery of them in his attempt to exist here. He must partly live from the sea, by his fisheries and navi- gations, and he must live against the sea on land which would eat him out of house and home, or, worse still, accumulate and spread the sand over his acres by its ministering angels the winds, until they resemble a desert. He can only conquer Nature, as I^ord Bacon says, by obeying her in putting the laws of the land which he tills against the laws of the sea to which he has no title deed. And just here it may be as well to say, against any one's " Nay," that this book goes on the firm belief that the ancient oracle, " The sea is His, and He made it," is no mere phrase of rhetoric, but a stubborn fact, and derives faith in the future of the Cape, that " He who covered the land with the deep as with a garment and the waters stood above the mountains : but at His rebuke they fled ; at the voice of His thunder they hastened away, up by the mountains, down by the valleys, unto the place appointed for them, and has set a bound that they may not pass over, nor turn again to cover the earth " — is also of the mind and power to protect and fortify, through man and Nature, this East Cape against the sea. Goethe says somewhere that Nature is the garment of God, and so be it, if the garment itself is vital- ized and glorified forever by Him ; and the garments here are surely many- colored and magnificent. And then some people here are ashamed of so much sand, and others, from abroad, are indeed ignorant of its conditions here. A New York city woman, going with her Cape spouse for the first time to the Cape, 126 wanted to know if there were any birds on the Cape. This insinuation against the plenty of his native province so roused him that he anwered, with a half-fractious, half-angry lie, "No ; only crows, and they will sit in rows on the top of the chimney for hours waiting, half-starved, for somebody to throw the breakfast-crumbs out of the back door to them." We have a little too much sand in some places, perhaps, but none to be ashamed of anywhere. For as to family, sand is of the most ancient hierarchy of the rocks and older than the pyramids of Egypt. Yet on almost our first introduction to Eastham land, our road shall pass through Governor Prince's ancient farm of two hundred acres as Location of Governor Prince's House, Eastham 127 good soil as is anywhere found in the state. The farm is largely swale land, lying each side of a narrow sea-arm or bayou, and is well tilled to date. Here stood the famous pear tree, small "button pear," in ancient days scattered by scions all over the Cape. This tree itself is down, a tall maple standing in its place ; the apple trees are very tall and show their age, as do all the shade trees, pine, cedar, ash and elm here- abouts. The old governor's house is gone, but almost behind the new house which now stands, they found in digging for a barn cellar, the brick cellar — English brick — of the governor's house, some twenty rods from the county road. It was identified by kitchen utensils still there, broken china and glass of his own, and a number of his silver teaspoons, one of which was or is in the Plymouth Museum. The rest were given to relic hunters. The jagged shores of the Town Cove, mixed up with the green salt marshes and the low hills of Nauset sand beach, whiter and sandier than most, and with greener bush patches and the blue sea for background, must have furnished a most variegated view to the old gov- ernor at home, and must have compensated in part for the many political and church discomforts which met him abroad. Just across the ravine, east, on another neck of land, running into Town Cove, was the house and homestead of Parson Treat who had the same view as his neighbor. Prince. Turning sharp to the right, around the house of Capt. Edward Penniman, that Arctic whaleman's chief of his clan — himself a history, with his house full of Arctic bear robes, he him- self hunted down, arid a man whose record Cape historj' will not willingly let die, we arrive at Parson Treat's old house lot of twenty acres, with a new house on it, and a tradition to it that the land is so good now, partly because the parson in a long life, rarely tilled it or exhausted it with crops. It was bought from his son by the great-grandfather of the present occupant. Nor is it a fact lacking in pathos, that the Nauset Indians were in his lifetime fond of building their wigwams near the home of their great friend Samuel Treat, as the many shell heaps here roundabout still de- clare. A ride of half a mile between the customary sprinkling rows of shops and houses will bring us to the roads across Nauset Plains to its three famous lights. We therefore turn sharp to the right, and east accordingly. I 28 But this half mile ride shows us that Eastham farmers are busy and successful raising asparagus or " sparrergrass," or " grass " for short, as some call it, and shows the possibilities of Cape gardening already referred to ; and the good-natured sailor ashore tying up his bundles of what he calls "grass," has given us also a valuable lesson of how words are formed or misformed by the common people. Syllables, or a letter slip off a word, especially if there are hard consonants in it, because their articulat- ing machine is too weak to conquer it, or they cut a word short because they are in a hurry as our friend bunching asparagus was. We are now on Nauset Plain ; on our right, low, red-colored sandhills, divided by a long, narrow inlet of salt water low down among the sand bluffs, and far before us, on their sand ridge, Nauset light-houses, white, even under a gray sky — but neither wigwam nor Indian left, only shell heaps. It is hard travel for the horse in the deep gray sand, and he shall rest awhile, while we, from our sand ridge, and turned due north, look at this landscape. From here, and through Wellfleet and Truro, the dom- inant feature seems to be this: — a wide middle plain between, a low range of sand bluffs on either side keeping back the sea, — these ranges of sand bluffs sloping gently to the plain, and covered with pitch pine trees, mottled by broad patches of sea-sand which show like half-healed scars against their green, while the valley or plain between, often miles in width, is sprinkled over with young pine trees above the ancient corn fields, while rarely seen indeed, are old farm-houses of the early settlers still able to keep their heads and station above ground in spite of winds and sand, and that forever on-marching time which grows as it goes, and without a warning voice, destroys so ruthlessly all the works of man. It is not like a prairie, though reasonably level, nor like any other flat land or plain outside the Cape, and in minor features only resembles the sea bot- tom perpetually formed and reformed outside the hill ranges by the sea still covering and always at work, as any one may see through the water from the shore, or a boat when the sea is calm. The same little round hollows, scooped out by some water swirl, the same low, rounded hill tops, the same long, narrow sand ridges, with narrow and shallow valleys be- tween them, shaped by sea tides or currents on the land as under tlie sea to-day. Only the plain has its sparse grass and low pine trees and will not drown visitors as the sea will. A confusion, not of chaos, but of much 130 w CO « CO a CIS a i4 K 1 ^*i 4 « Old House, Eastham I Old Mill, Eastham Summer Residence S. P. Doane, Eastham J Universalist Church, Eastham 133 labor under fixed laws of a sea which never tires, and never remits its tyranny until its victim escapes into dry land — such is Nauset Plain. So through the ever-thickening sand and across wagon-paths which turn to all points of the compass, we reach the three lights of Nauset, among the sand-dunes, with the keeper's house in a shallow hollow in the rear. The government has now the wisdom of its experiences, for it for- merly put its lighthouses close to the sea-bluffs, and of brick, which they could not move ; but a few gales, and the sea in perpetual motion wasting the sand, soon drove houses and Washington wisdom back in defeat, and now they build farther inland, and of wood, so that if the sea eats through the sand-bluffs too near, they can move them back on rollers (iron ones, not sea ones). As yet we have not seen the Atlantic Ocean in all its pride and majesty. But we have heard it day after day in our journey — low- pitched, big-volumed, constant, unflinching, almost perpetual sound to us mortals. The thunder in mid-air is cousin to this voice of the sea on its shores ; only more abrupt and evanescent because the air is more ethe- real and less material than the waters. Thoreau in metaphor compares it to the bark of a watch-dog. It remind us of the voice from ' ' the clouded mount," announcing law, never violated with impunity, a vocal- ized meditation of the Infinite — a celestial reminder and warning of " the Oldest House in Eastham 134 two paths ' ' and the danger of mischoice. Even Holy "Writ, aware of the difficulty, contents itself with hints at its multiform shapes and aspects, as in that awful but magnificent description of its birth. No man can describe the sea. Homer tried it and failed, and from his time, all through the ages of the heathen, who feared it but did not love it, their epithets are chiefly such as befit a huge monster or leviathan which had no pity, and was busy in overwhelming and eating up. Christ and the mariner's compass changed all that, and now, at least among Christian folk, such as our seamen are, the sense that "the sea is His and He made it " carries with it the thought that His work cannot be the enemy of Him whose sons they are. A rugged, spare, more than middle-aged seaman, the captain of a life-saving station, who had seen much service, was asked lately if he could describe the sea. ' ' Do you mean the sea at any particular moment ? ' ' " No ; the sea in general, as a whole." "No-sir-ee," was the emphatic answer. "This 'ere sea is never twice no two minutes alike. It would take a very big book to do that." To turn the talk the inquirer asked, " Would you, at your age of life, put out in such a sea as this ? ' ' pointing at a rough sea, with a heavy wind blowing on shore, and the white, wrathful breakers gnawing in at the sand-bluffs below us. The man took a cool survej^ of the sea, and then, with the corners of his mouth drawn tight over the teeth, looking with his cold, gray eyes straight in his questioner's face, answered slowly, "Yes; I think I would, if it was my duty." The Atlantic Ocean has indeed a majestic voice, — it has been heard by many, and it still keeps on. But more wonderful still to us is the old plain-song out of Parson Treat's ancient meeting-house, miles west from the ocean, sung to rude music by the Pilgrim wanderers from home, three thousand miles away, seeking here liberty and the rights of man, which are also the rights of God : — " God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform ; He plants his footsteps in tlie sea, And rides upon the storm. 137 Salt Pond and Indian Camp Ground, Eastham ' Judge not the Lord by feeble sense. But trust Him for His grace ; Behind a frowning Providence He hides a smiling face." A stout bench has been somehow fastened by the lighthouse people into the verj' sand on the summit of one of the sand-hills, and looking down one hundred and fifty feet or so into and across the sea, which, as the wind is offshore to-day, is merely blue and babbling on its placid sands. But such an extent of view, though a long, black cloud rests on the horizon as far as one can see, north or south! Three thousand miles awa}', one's nearest neighbors offshore are in Spain. Society can never overrule us here, nor the inane gossip of idle men and women. The sand is clean, the sea-water limpid, and the winds wafting life to the lungs. But where are Nauset Island, the islands of Humphrey, Gilbert and Champlain, and, above all, the Norsemen? We kept vigil so long by the ocean that we came back, tired and 13S Rock, Eastham ■■'1 Nauset Three Lights, Eastham 139 hungry, to the light-keeper's house, and out of the wind. Only our driver — an old seaman, rather fat, and with a bald head — was very loth to move. " What's the matter with you, driver? " " Oh, I'm so happy here." "Why?" " Don't you see old salt water is here? " T could live here forever, that is, if Judy had ' grub ' enough." For he, too, was hungry. We found at the house only the keeper's daughter — a tall brunette with a sweet face and a ready tongue — and her big, black Newfoundland dog in charge. " Don't any of you gentlemen try to shake hands with me," she said. " Father, when he went hoeing over by the woods, told 'Nero' (the dog) to take care of me. Won't you, Nero?" And the dog wagged his tail and looked at the strangers. "He feels himself in charge to-daj^. Dast time father told him so he frightened the baker, Jim Stetson, when he tried to shake hands with me, a' most out of his wits, Nauset Life Saving Station, Eastham 14b catching him by the arm and holding on." (Jim was her beau, and the two were frightened, though she didn't tell us that.) Anything in the house and will you pay for it ? Plenty ; but we don't keep a boarding house." So by the help of our own big basket and her tea-kettle we had a good hot dinner in the kitchen, where a fine telephone was ready for the shore men and life boat's crew to send word in a stormy night if there was any shipwreck in these parts, and from here by way of Highland Light, if necessary, to the owners in Boston or New York. Only our driver had deserted his grub, which he usually did only late in his last illness, and we found him after our meal on the bench again, looking at the sea. But meanwhile the Maid of the Lighthouse showed us the parlor full of sound English literature and family photographs and such a profusion of lace curtains for her bay windows as might make even a city dame envious. We were more interested in the little holes in- the panes of the aforesaid windows, made, as she assured us, by the sand-grains dashed against them by the storm of November 27, 1898. Travelling back over a road already passed is like "a twice-told tale," a trifle monotonous, and the only variety came from a Westerner in the wagon who, about the middle of the plain, told us to our surprise that he was born here, and when a child had moved with his father to Peoria, 111. ; that this was his first return to the old home, once owned by Deacon D , and that he must get out and go across the plain and find it. Did the driver know where it was ? "Do you see them locust trees north there — them trees that looks kinder yaller against them pitch pines? There's old Deacon D 's farm. ' ' "Is there any house standing? " "No, hain't been since you and I were boys. But when you see locust trees, and balm gileads, and lilac trees and Aaron's rod about, there's been a house." So the Scribe and the Westerner started together, with the assur- ance that there was no stream or pond to stop us, across Nauset Plains to find that house, or rather place. And we found it as gray as our own black coats in this hot sand- tramp — trees and Aaron's rod and all — all but the house. Only the cellar hole was left, looking as most such places do — all its wall angles toned down by the crumbling soil, a few 141 bricks here and there from the old chimney ; catnip and burdock and thistles in the middle, and thin grass with a mullein stalk here and there — a clump of lilac bushes in front, i.e., towards the road, and the usual withering, white-branched apple trees, rich only in fresh sprouts on the old trunk, always a sure sign of decay, with the locust trees and balm-gilead trees rooted in the old cornfields — such indeed was the look of an old Pilgrim deserted homestead on Nauset Plains. The Westerner had left the Scribe to himself, and was found later on, in a sheltered nook back of where the house had stood, which he said "had been the old ladies' flower-garden," the old ladies being his aunts, his mother and his grandmother. The Pilgrim rosebush was still there, the Canterbury bells, the bouncing Betties, and box and thyme were still there in a choked and forsaken life. The Westerner was even wearing a buttonhole bouquet he had gathered out of the ancestral garden, but he said, ' ' I must get out of this. It floors me, it does me up ; it is too mel- ancholy. I couldn't stand much more of this." Before all this could be settled, we were home again ; but at the fisherman's house at night, the same Westerner brought us this poem, without saying he wrote it, but as the Scribe claims only his own, and as these verses cannot be popular because they are so very human, and are not so very mystical to meaning- lessness as many of this age require, we will lay them at the door of the fisherman who drove us across Nauset Plain. ODE TO A LILAC TREE. O lilac tree ! O lilac tree ! Dearest of all the trees to me ; Steadfastly rooted, while swift years flee, Gnarled and old as lilacs be ; Saintlier, truer than such as we, Vestal of Spring art thou, lilac tree. Standing beside the ancient door, Looking in on the vacant floor, Where the feet of children are heard no more, And the dead are gone forevermore ; Wearing your plumes as then you wore, You whisper me tender things of yore. 142 When I, looking through the window pane, Saw your darlc leaves wet in the cold spring rain ; Clutching after your purple plumes in vain, Wondering most, in my childish brain, How the flowers came by the window pane, And whence was dropping that slow, sleet rain. Looking up to the clouds so gray. Curiously pondering, as children may. In the flower-crowned month of beautiful May, How and by whom and in what queer way You, lilac tree in the rainy day Dared ever to look so gentle and gay. All have gone, O lilac tree ! All from the house, but you and me. And the murmur of waves from yonder sea, Borne with gray mists across green lea. Calls to ancients — you and me, Bidding us ponder the things that be. You, O lilac tree, stayed by the door, I went out from the nursery floor ; Out in the world's ways rough evermore ; Out where the dusty feet ever are sore. Bearing the burdens which brave men bore. Forgetting for prouder things, pure things of yore. But to-day I've come back, O pure-breathing tree, To make a confession 'twixt you and me, That since I stood by my mother's knee, Looking at you and yonder sea. Wondering such glorious things could be, I have never loved creatures more than ye. In this silent room, I make my vow. Where no children prattle, nor mothers bow. By your plumes in the rain-drops falling now. By those violets crowning the earth's green brow ; meek-browed lilac, O murmuring sea, 1 have never loved creatures more than ye ! Violets and pansies in spring winds nod To sunshine on greensward, the smile of God, 143 Flecking the path my dear ones trod, Asleep in their coldness under the sod — But you, O vestal lilac tree, Are dearest of all the trees to me. Dearest of all, for the legend told, By your sweet flowers fed from the dark, cold mould. Of a new life broken from death's clammy hold. Of the winter and frost from our hearts off rolled. Of pur love in the skies that ne'er grows cold, While our dear ones, the arms of the Great One enfold. O lilac tree ! O lilac tree ! Dearest of all the trees I see. All are gone but you and me. You are old — my swift years flee ; Where violets ne'er wither, I soon shall be. In the pure warm days of eternity. We found our seaman bunching his " sparrergrass " in his narrow shed, and had intended to move down the Cape soon after dinner to the next town ; but the sun had been keeping tally of the hours, and would soon sink in a red blaze behind the hills Of the bay, westward, and we would not travel in the darkness of his absence, but "turned in," "put up," "stopped over,'' as the phrases were here, with the fisherman. Some of us slept under the roof, which was rather hot, but we could see the stars from there. The next morning, on our road to Wellfleet, as we drove through the young pines and sand, we had ample time to hear fragments of its town story as it was long ago made public, and regretted that it requires so large a book to tell the domestic and home life of any people, even if not more than a centiiry long. 144 Church at South Wellfleet Gull Pond, Wellfleet Scene along Shore at Wellfleet Depot and Store, South Wellfleet CHAPTER III. WELLFLEET, This town was a part of Eastham, called Billingsgate for a long time (if indeed there be any long or short in time), until it was made a town in 1763 ; it is about eight miles long and two or three wide. Rev. Enoch Pratt, in his "History of Eastham," says there are fifteen fresh-water ponds in town, eleven of which are nearly in a direct line north and south. Its shores, especially on the bay or west side, where the chief village is, are indented with bays, forming shallow harbors, fit only for small craft, and its north headlands help its harbor- Hotel at Wellfleet, Holbrook House age. Its soil may be dismissed with the general remark that what the soil of this East Cape needs for profitable culture is three things, viz., water, manure, and brains. There is an acre of water under every acre of land here, and it must be raised for irrigation by windmills or steam ; the sea and the ravines furnish stores of compost, and it is safe to say that no race of men could have existed here so long as these people did without ample brains. Money will fol- low the brains. The Wellfleet people themselves, in a petition to the General Court for a remission of the Province tax in 1776, said they were " situated on the most barren soil of any part of the Province, and that all lands capable of being tilled would not support one fourth of the inhabitants." Its early history, like that of its sister towns, was a medley of bargains with Indians for land, checking marauders upon the shellfish and deer, gathering in and trying out blackfish and whales, and blackbirds and wolves with a price on their heads ; and, in general, they were a people who enjoyed the ancient promise that " they should suck of the abundance of the seas and of treasures hid in the sand." In the middle age of this town it bore the buffets and disasters of three wars, and substantially three embargoes, as it's neighbors did ; but like them, it found the men and money to go with the new flag, — the men because of the freedom which Congress asserted. The date of the subjoined letter will show what period it was, and the fact that it was tea which made the trouble. A British tea ship had been wrecked near here, and Mr. John Greenough, one of the most respected citizens and probably master of the grammar-school, not only helped the owners to ship their tea to Boston, but, worst of all, picked up or bought two chests which he used himself or sold to his neighbors. The town took the matter up ; so did the Committee of Safety in Boston. Mr. Greenough must have been a patriot of an " off color " or he would never have meddled with "the accursed thing" which tasted so grateful to the sex which had yielded to the serpent and still drank the Chinese nectar. But he was a Pilgrim, and stoutly defended himself, saying that the tea he bought had paid no tax to the British crown, and there- fore he showed no lack of patriotism in dealing in it. But the town said, " This tea is a tool to rivet chains on our necks by Great Britain — away with it. Is there not ' Labrador tea ' enough, and good enough for our women, in the woods ? Have they not on the Upper Cape harried a poor pedler who had a few •47 Billingsgate Light, Wellfleet Congregational Church, Wellfleet pounds in his pack until he promised to go and sell no tea again, and watched him until he went? And would any man, even the schoolmaster, dare to have tea in Wellfleet? " So the war was long, and toward the close of it this letter was written : " Whereas, I bought a quantity of tea and brought it in to this district last winter, I do acknowledge I was therein guilty of an error and am heartily sorry therefor ; and I declare I had no intention to injure the liberties of my country therein. And whereas the Committee of Correspondence for the district appre- hend that I have abused them, in a letter I sent them, I do declare I had no such intention, and wish to be reconciled to them again and to forget and for- give on both sides. John Greenough. Wellfleet, December 19th, 1774." The town was "reconciled" after a full inquiry, and Mr. Greenough lived and died respected ; but he never forgot this episode of the tea. In 1778 the British warship "Somerset" was shipwrecked near here, and her crew, in marching through, were fed by the citizens. Since the war of 181 2 her history has been that of peace, fish and prosperity. The same energy which chased whales to the Falkland Islands, chased fortunes here at home. It is surprising how many were captured here in commerce. Some persons object that so much is said in the town records about churches and their ministers. But the towns occupied the meeting-houses, and the meeting-house affairs occupied the towns as the centre of their whole public life. But it may be mentioned that this town seems to have treated its ministers prudently in the old days, and voted to buy a horse for one of them, on condi- tion that the price was not to exceed sixty dollars. In apparent confirmation of their good treatment, or of the salubrity of the Cape climate — perhaps of both — the longevity of its pastors bear witness: Rev. Isaiah Lewis (H. C, 1723) appears as the first settled minister in 1730, and after fifty-five years of service, died in 1786, at the age of eighty-four; Rev. Mr. Whitman served the town twenty-three years, and died at ninety-two ; Rev. Timothy Davis (H. C, 1804) came, and after twenty-two years' service, left in 1830. It is true (whatever fame is in it) that Thomas Holbrook served this town as selectman for twenty years. Its citizens have improved the oyster culture for at least a^hundred and fifty years or more, and claim, as against the rivalry of Truro and Province- 149 Church at Wellfleet Oyster House at Wellfleet town, to have originated the whale-fishing to the Falkland Islands and else- where, under the advice of some long-forgotten British admiral who had been in those parts. This old life on the East Cape should be represented in alle- gory by a man with a hoe in one hand and a hook or harpoon in the other ; and perhaps this town had more hooks and fewer hoes than its neighbors. At any rate, they kept on hooking and catching in order to exist. Where every- thing was moving — tide, sea, wind, the very sand under their houses — they must move, too, or be buried alive or blown away. Under such discipline they became stronger than the sea, tougher than a northeaster, craftier than the fish which swam in the sea. A man raised here is first of all a seaman, and next a landsman ; but he is never a countryman. He has sailed too far and to too many parts for that ; and from the sea he has grown quick, nervous, full of expedients in having his way either on a main deck or a main street, and is usually wonderfully well informed. He knows how "to hold fast" to the rope by clutches when the sea-wave is sweeping the decks ; and so he learns to hold fast to his aim in business, and the fortune which lies beyond it. He is a man to stick to his passion, his politics, his friendships, his religion — this Cape man with his terrible clutch. An honest story lately told us will illustrate this qual- ity once for all : A ship from Boston to Searsport, too heavily laden, took a heavy storm aft from port to port, and was in mid-ocean. To add to the mis- ery, she had sprung a leak, and the water was over the main deck. A lumber- port in the bows, some four feet square, though in harbor tight enough, had strained in the gale, opened and broken in, and the water was pouring in. The crew was worn out at the pumps ; but that leak must either be stopped or the ship must go down, the grain lost, and probably the whole crew. Then the Cape Captain, a man of middle age, ruddy and stout, and the head of a family at home, called his crew together and asked for some man to volunteer to go over the bows with him and stop that leak. Then a Cape boy, son of a sea- captain himself, and a neighbor of the captain when at home, stepped up and said he would go with the " old man." The boy was not married, but he, too, had his home and father's family ashore. Then the crew tied the two men, each with a stout rope, of which the crew held the other end, and over the two men went. As the ship was running before the wind, and cavorting like some gigantic horse, the trouble came, as all seamen know, not when the bows were lifted toward the skies, but when they took the plunge that followed into the 151 View at Wellfleet Wreck of Four-masted Schooner Daniel B. Fearing at Wellfleet 152 sea, when the men would be buried deep in the waters. No man, unless lashed, could live in that sea, or be saved, when once overboard, and no boat either, and the two men knew it before they went. The " old man " lost his foothold once, but his rope saved him. They had carried over with them a square piece of stout sail-cloth, and when the bows were up in air they nailed that canvas on, nail after nail, and then waited until they had dived through the sea again, until the' leak was stopped and they were pulled aboard. They had done only what a Cape Cod seaman should and could, and asked no thanks from -anybody. No man would say, when he saw the "old man" (he died long ago) carting ^home his winter wood from the hill ranges, behind a pokey nag, or the ,boy ■going demurely about on shore at carpentering, that they looked very much 'like heroes. But they were, all the same. And plenty of their like have always been here. Heretofore in this journey down the Cape our company had been as varied as our vehicles, but all had been of the same mind or no mind at all, as the way with us mortals is ; but when the Ark with its two horses drove up before the old inn where we were 'dining, and we were told that the next town (Truro) was sixteen miles long (it made no matter to any of us that it was only from one-half to three miles wide) , it was very like a mutiny that arose among what we may call the crew, infected as we were by the sea around us, only there was no captain on board or around the board to invoke obedience, except the Scribe, who had the convenient habit, especially if there were women in ques- tion, to let everybody have their own way ; he was a Pilgrim himself. So on somebody's motion — very likely a strong-minded woman's — which soon be- came everybody's, it was agreed that the crowd should go over by rail to Province- town and wait for the Scribe to join them at one of the most comfortable — it could not be called fashionable — hotels, he riding over in the Ark by himself, alone. Now the Ark was a curious conglomeration in wagon -building, that had first been used by some pedler as a dry-goods emporium, with a smatter- ing of current groceries intermingled, and several jugs hanging under the whiffle- tree — a very apartment-store on wheels — and had gone up and down the Cape, fifty years ago, tempting the matrons in caps and aprons, in every village, to cluster around its three back steps, on which the chapman might display his high-colored calicoes and cambrics. It had lately been fished out from the dust of a carpenter's shop at Eastham by the antiquarian of our party, who pre- 153 View at Wellfleet Wellfleet Light 154 served tender memories of it from his youth, and of his father's dooryard where it had stood over night and nothing had been stolen, for the thrifty shop- man used to sleep on the steps. It had been used to cart us over so far safely ; though the creak of its wheels was strident and a trifle ill-natured. It might have held everything and so be entitled to its name ; but Miss Browne, our most pronounced brunette, in gold spectacles and a free mind, had no right to raise the laugh against us by quoting from Holy Writ that the ark mentioned there contained all manner of creeping things ; beasts, clean and unclean, male and female, four-footed and two-footed ; and that our vehicle therefore was rightly named. Our ancient produced his Bible from his pocket, to verify the record, and there was much danger of precipitating our first theological wrangle : but it was no go. Her witticism also did her no good, for it caused several to re- member that her big-bowed glasses were not becoming, that she had spoiled several pairs of kid gloves, never taken off, even for dinner ; that she was over- nice about the polish of her very tight but natty shoes, and one woman had heard her say that, provided a woman was well gloved and shod, it- did not matter whether the soft, insinuating sand had to be shaken out of dress and hair every night or not. So over we all went to the Ark. And such a scramble and hurry and packings especially of shawls and overshoes, for the down-coming train. Our ancient was acually found under the Ark, with what looked very much like a demijohn that hung there ; and Miss Browne to the delight of several, had some trouble finding her tooth-brushes. TRURO. The Scribe being thus alone, and left rather to his own free will and the memories of the ark in which he was riding, was able to recall ancient Truro, in certain matters of its history, viz. : that purchases of certain lands were made from the Indians as early as 1696, when it was called Pamet; that white folks were here at an earlier date; that it had secured some privileges in 1705, under the name of Dangerfield, and became a full-fledged town in 1709, unde its present name ; that it fared very much as all the other Cape towns did in all the American wars already noted ; that its misery and poverty were then accentu- ated by its nearness to Provincetown harbor, which then furnished a home to the hostile fleets ; and that, when peace came, it rose rapidly to wealth again, so as 155 r J4 cs P3 O S B 3 M to outstrip some of its neighbors. It has always seemed to us that here abode men of oak, and that, for occult reasons, in general culture it resembles Brewster more than any other town. The business success of many of its sons abroad, and their gifts to the land in general, like the Collinses and Riches, seems phenomenal. It always insisted on having the best schools possible, and studied hard in them, and as good parsons as there were going. Its early history of its home life, at least, hovers about its parish meeting-house. No man knows when or where the first house was built ; but probably about the , year 1709, and on " The Hill" where, from that time until the present, some holy house has stood, and the ample graveyard has spread forth, in ancient grave- stones, its prayers and litanies to the sweet smile of God in His sunshine ; and neither fog nor fierce storm from its two seas disturb the rest of those who sleep. The town records say of the first house, in 17x0, that the town treasurer shall buy, as soon as convenient, a pulpit, an hour-glass for its pulpit, and a box to put it in, and charge the same to the town. The second meeting-house stood one hundred and twenty years, and was ordered built in 1720, forty feet lopg and thirty-five feet broad, with walls twenty feet high, and the town voted ^£350 for the expense. Its steeple is said to have been one of the most reliable and well-known landmarks for the mariners to sail by, and if the gospel preached inside was as honest, as we may suppose, then inside and outside truth was preached to the welfare of men, which is more than some men do. For some years several ministers preached in the old meeting-houses, but none settled permanently, until in 17 10, when an excellent parson came to them, in the person of Rev. John Avery (H. C, 1706), at a salary of ^60 and the usual grant of wood and land. In his pastorate of forty-four years he admitted three hundred and sixty-seven to the church, and died here in the odor of sanctity, 1754, aged sixty-nine. His faith never could have been turned to lead him, at that time, so far down the Cape, and his works were cer- tainly many and multiform. He was doctor, lawyer and minister to a large parish, and, to keep himself busy, he carried on a farm and a blacksmith's shop, where he wrought with his own hands. The clinkers and waste-iron of his shop have been found, of late years, at Tasmuit, on the west slope of the Clay Pounds, at Highland Heights, where his parsonage and some of the best land in town were. This town was, in general, very kind to him and his successors ; 157 for when the currency went down, his salary, by vote of the town, went up. Thus, in 1747, voted Parson Avery X^oo ; but, in 1 749, ^100 was really worth only $44, or 11 per cent of the sum. Parson Avery was a thrifty man, and left, at his demise, a good-sized fortune, and bequeathed several legacies to his hieirs. Next followed, in 1755, R^v. Caleb Upham (H. C, 1744), who married the daughter of a Portland pastor, and died in 1786, after a pastorate of thirty years, having baptized thirteen hundred and forty-four persons. He was with his parish through the war of the Revolution ; learned, patriotic and self-sacri- ficing, and on one occasion relinquished ;^5o of his salary for the poor. There is a hopeless line on his old headstone, erected by his son, " I have been, and that is all." Rev. Jule Damon was installed here in 1786, at a salary of ;£7S, use of the parsonage, fifteen cords of good oak wood, three cords of pine, and five tons of hay, delivered at his door annually, and ;£2 00 specie, not bank bills, by way of settlement, and the town paid forty Spanish dollars for entertaining the council which ordained him. He died in 1828, aged seventy-eight, and in the forty- third year of his ministry. It was Mr. Damon who prayed from his pulpit, because his fishermen parishioners were obliged to go exactly two opposite ways to the fishing-grounds, and he would not pray against either venture. The years its first three ministers served Truro were one hundred and eighteen, and thirty-nine hundred and seventy-five were baptized. Their years began in the reign of Queen Anne, and ended shortly before the coronation of Queen Victoria ; and in those years what was done, and what suffered by our hardy seamen ! After these parsons, strange Christians, though worthy, came in, and the old town relationship to its parsons ceased. Nor can anyone, especially the Scribe, tell, in short, the marvelous history of this town, made by its brave, hardy people, except by picking out bits, here and there, of its picturesque and romantic story. So, in Indian days, the town voted, in rectifying some mistake or wrong done the red man, " We are not willing that any Indian should suffer any wrong through our means or mistake." So when any whale came into the Bay on Sunday, among these men so keen with the harpoon, the Puritan con- science was strong enough to keep many men back from hunting the prey, and thus losing much money, though on any other day, any other meeting, or any 158 other business, sacred or secular, would have been broken up long before the swiftest runners could reach the shore, as witness the meeting which was broken up, though called to elect a new town parson, and adjourned to the next day, as the record says, " because there was a whale in the Bay." Nor is the state of mind of that money-grabber without its ludicrous side, who, very much afraid of losing his share of the whales, which came in summer but not in winter, and also afraid of sinning against the Lord's Sabbath, and who had his con- science often conquered by the neighboring and visible whale, while his unseen Lord was absent, who frankly declared to his fellow-Christians, " that there was no hope for him if he died during the fishing season, but in winter he was all right." Nor is it irrelevant to 'the story of the Cape, that when Charles 11, who was very fond of the fish, was very angry with the Colony for coining " Pine Tree Shillings" (a clear invasion of the rights of the British Crown), the Gen- eral Court of Massachusetts ordered, to be sent him, as a present, ten barrels of cranberries, two hogsheads of syrup, and three thousand pounds of codfish, to allay his wrath. Probably the berries, and certainly the fish, came from the Cape. The old life was picturesque and high-colored, and new fashions of modern times only came in to the county towns about 1800 a. d. About 1750, a young man's courting dress, at twenty, is described as " a full bottomed wig and cocked hat, scarlet coat and small clothes, white vest, ruffles, and silk stockings, shoes with buckles, and two watches." What iwo watches were for, it is difficult to say, except to be sure not to keep the lady up longer than Pilgrim decorum allowed. His sweetheart might wear red kid, high-heeled shoes, with peaked toes, so long that it was difficult to kneel in the house of prayer; fifteen-button kid gloves, silk or satin dresses, gold beads, hoops, peaked stomachers, modesty-bits or riding-habits, waistcoats trimmed with silver, perruques and cocked hats. The dress has altered since, but we fancy the way of making love remains about the same. A silk dress was an heirloom, more prized than a paid-up life insurance policy ; and solid gold beads are still in plenty on the Cape, and over them, to our sure knowledge, there have been many bickerings and heartburnings, after the will was read. The boys, in turn, inherited the family breeches of " everlasting " from their elder brothers, and no young man ever wore an overcoat. There was some flirting between the 159 Depot, South Truro View of Hills, South Truro 1 60 Truro girls and the red-coated Britishers from the ships, and some ICnghsh sur- geons, married and settled here. Green goose feathers, brought back from Labrador by the fishermen, made good beds. In fact, the people here plucked from every quarter whatever there was to be got, in a ceaseless industry and energy. There was, and is still, a pair of andirons in the town made from a cannon-ball shot ashore by some British cruiser. But it was especially in the Revolution that Truro men and women showed their pluck. Shattered and ended as all their commerce was, the hardy sailors turned their hands to pri- vateering, and showed a strong fist in it. But it was a very dangerous game to play at, and there were cases where prisoners were sure of a scant welcome, and, sometimes, of cruel treatment on the quarter-deck of a British man-of-war. Many them, father and son together, died in the prison-ships, or in England, and only a few came home again, — poor unknown seamen, who died for their country and their bread. From May, 1776, to February, 1778, one hundred and seventy-three American privateers took as prizes seven hundred and thirty-three British vessels, worth not less than twenty thousand dollars, and by all, two hun- Church, South Truro 161 dred thousand tons were taken by our privateers from the British. Indeed, they were a substitute for a navy, which we did not have. No wonder that such a life for so many, for so long, bred Spartans ; and the same blood is here now. This world, according to the Christian writers, is not a feather-bed, to lie down on, but a post of duty, where man and woman are to stand upright, and struggle for something higher, and for progress. Of such towns it has been well said, " Every cloud might well bring a shadow to the brow of wives and daughters ; every wind a sigh from their hearts in these maritime towns. In Truro, the lives of sixty citizens, chiefly the heads of families, were lost in one storm, almost in sight of their own homes ; seven sons and one father out of one house." In 1841, there died fifty-seven seamen in one storm. By this time, thus meditating on old and musty things, the Ark and the Scribe had turned, at North Truro, sharp to the right, into one of those " longi- tudinal hollows," as the people in Truro, Cornwall, England, call them — those narrow valleys running here so often from shore to shore, and Highland Residence of Isaiah Snow, Truro, Mass. 162 View from Sea Breeze Hill, Truro First M. E. Church, Truro 163 View of Truro, Showing the Hills The Endicott Pear-Tree, Planted at Truro, on the Sands of Cape Cod, 1644 164 Light, the Clay Pounds, that was hardly more than a mile away. The houses, especially the older ones, are built in these "hollows," and not on the hill-tops, as elsewhere, as the driver said, referring 'to the violent winds often running hereabouts, " that the owners might know where to find their domiciles in the morning, as they were never tied with a cable-tow overnight." This gave the Scribe a chance to see the, certainly, peculiar features of the country. Such fat, gracious, rounded hills, and so many of them, bald of scrub oaks and young pines, as is common to the land in Eastham and elsewhere on the East Cape, thanks to the old husbandry ; the poverty-grass, with its yellow flowers, a bastard kind of heather, with its wide-spreading stout roots to suck up moisture and to stand against the northeasters, and a general sense of comfort and cultivation on each side over the straight but sandy road. Church, Truro Centre 1 6s Hall, Truro Centre Pond Village, Truro Centre There has been much loose talk about the pigmy height of the fruit trees on this Cape town, which is attributed to the scant soil. This is only partly true. The Frenchman Michelet, in his " La Mer,'' speaks of the tyranny of the sea, how, when strong enough, it smites down, with its salt air, both branch and trunk, all trees towards the earth, from whence they sprung. This is no more strange than that kindred tyranny of the sun, which compels, unless a superior natural force intervenes, to bend toward it as its master, and as if in adoration. Certainly, in these hollows here, and sheltered, the apple-trees grow as tall as anywhere. At the sea end of one hollow, we pass Parson Avery's old house and smithy (they are not there, but gone, like him), and, turning sharp corners, we reach the Highland Light territory, on which stands the largest and oldest lighthouse on this Cape, built in 1798, and rebuilt, as it stands, in 1833. Here Church and Street View, North Truro 167 Cold Storage and Depot, North Truro View along Shore, Truro IS the highest land on this shore, and the government bought ten acres of it, which the present keeper thinks has been reduced to six, by the sea in storm. Yet this hill and Clay Pounds (clay impounds rain when it falls), is a huge clay cliff, breaking out here from the central clay which underlies the Cape gen- erally, and has been watched and marveled over from Professor Hitchcock's time till ours. Facing seaward, due east, and on either side of us from Race Point to Chatham, are the life-saving stations, hid in their ravines, and near the sea, waiting for storms and the shipwrecks, — more of the latter than elsewhere on the Atlantic Coast. The old folks called Truro " Dangerfield, the field of dangers " ; and so it is. But it does not look so to-day, for the wind is off shore, and we can hardly hear its ceaseless babble, one hundred and fifty feet below us, and the sea is very blue, with the white sails of ships moving stead- ily, with a quarterly wind to their port. But a northeaster will soon change all that. With your back to the land, look. From Race Point to Cape Malabar, under that Tjlue sea, is hid a veritable devil-fish, with its merciless tentacles of sand-bars and shallows. The head and mane are just about here at the Lights, and in fine weather are quiet, and not in action. But let a north or northeast wind rise, and they do so often very suddenly, and every sailing ship, and even Highland Light and Cliff 169 Wrecked on Cape Cod, near Highland Light steamers, must get out or go on, and going on means generally death to crew and cargo. Woe to the ship which loses sails or steam in that hell of waters. She may drift a hundred miles or so south, and, as a landsman would judge, to see her far off from the shore, safely. But then, Nantucket shoals, reaching fifty miles off shore, the southernmost tentacle of this devil-fish, will clutch her, pound her, and sink her, with no human help to save her. This is the story, often, of the way Truro lost her sons, in what they call the " great storms." These storms actually create new currents in the sea, of which master and crew are ignorant, and often assist them to their doom. So the Scribe rode back to the town again, thanking his stars that he had never been off the East Cape in a storm. And when he arrived at "The Cor- ner," i. e., where two roads meet, he saw the woman he was in search of, coming out of the grocery store, with her arms full of parcels, dry and wet ( for that store kept a little of everything except virtue on sale), "Aunt Hepsey " (the short for Hepsibah, which was a holy name, and entitled, according to ancient ideas, to some blessing, never exactly defined, as " written in the 170 inq ajnaqipp i]}ta\ 'sSb sippiiu ^sbcI jo ul'iuoav 5|inq-/{iSuoj;s 'Suoj b psiusss gqs 'J3i[ spissq ;l'3s 3i[} no S3|punq isq Suiiid J3}ji3 'psjDsdsui puB paiBSS u31{j\y •}suuoq 3q; jo urejjno yflV(\ si\\ m aiuq aiuos psjBOuqBj pBq sqs ajoq b qSnoiqj pspnjjojd spou siqj 'XBp-OL 'spou JjasJQ b ojai >[OBq UA\Bip JTBq jsq ajoAi piiE 'pspeaqsiBq }U3av AjjbjsusS 9qs uijbj isq uo joj 'Suijisia sbav aqs 399155 uiBiu aqi JO X^TuSip 9qj oj 93U9i9j9p ai SBAi 9ioA\ 9qs jsuuoq 9p}nos-]BOo 9qjL ■XjuiBjjsD p35U9A3jd ss9jp Suo] J9q qSnoqijB 'suBSojq XjqBqoid 9J3a\ '9qij3S 9q; JO uoqB3iAui 9qi }b ^ly sqj 0}ui p9J9quaBp aqs sb 's90L[s j9H ■9]oq p9U9};By siq JO S9SS909I sqj mojj ssnom b sb Tjonra Kisa ^no p93joo[ aoBj laq qotqAV uiojj '9Z1S }B9jS S;i JOJ 9[qB90pOU pUB 's3aU}S J3A[9A 'j[DB[q \[1ltA Xjuo psiiJopB 'a\bhs A\0[]9A jo '}9imOq ,, 3]Jin9S-[BOO,, 10 ^^ 95[0d ,, B p9[[BD 901IO SBAV }BqA\ pUB '}33J 3q; o) A\0[ p9qDB9J qsiqAv 'uA\oS U9[OOA\ 9niq B ui p9SS9jp SBA\ 9qg 'jurenboB {(9A\ 9J3A\ ;j[]oj s,UA\oi 3q} qoiqA\ v(ii\\ 9JnSy b |BqitA\ jnq 'jo;isia 9q5 O) 'u9q; 3snt 'pBoi Xjsnp ^Bqj uj '^no gqs 9JnSif ppo ub sbaa ^j 'OJHJj;, oj giUBD i9a9 sq jt }no J9q }unq oj pssiiuoid pBq puB 'suoi}B[9i oj jisia 91BI b Sai>[Bui sba\ 9qs 9i9qAv 'qavoj ua\o siq ui J9q }9iu pBq 9qiJ3S ^HX '(.iSJlI P ^ooq s,qiuB']; snoS PBq s^sBjH Ja^B jjajjeg -f s^b^; janooqog jo 5[03JAV fcS^i-. Highland Life Saving Station Fishing Schooner Fortuna. Two Lives Lost. "Went to pieces in one Tide off Cape Cod. strong motions, which signified strength, with blue, friendly eyes, and, if the tan had not been so deep, would have allowed her to have been in her youth a fair- haired blonde, with roses, dimmed by the sun, in her cheeks. She was always ready to talk on any fit theme, and, when she pleased, even vivacious and enter- taining. She seerned to be at home at once in the Ark, which was now being driven to the farm, and, what was more strange, the Ark seemed to be at home with her. Neither was young, and both had seen service for their generation, and had fallen on certain bodily stains and scars therefrom, and both would do their best, despite the creakings of its wheels and the tanned and wrinkled face of the woman, and to the finish. The woman was at home at once, and the Ark would behave its prettiest for the new passenger, whoever she might be. For Aunt Hepsey^ was indeed a character. First, she was aunt to the whole town, and especially, the children, and that, too, of several generations, who knew her by no other name. In fact, that name came very near being put in the Parish register, when she stood sponsor for the son of a colored seaman, away on the Banks for fish, as the subsequent erasure by the parson, and insertion of her true name and surname, which last she shared with some of the best in the town, will show. She won the title of "Aunt" in honor of her constant deeds of a kind heart, and a ready hand to help, just as others gain stars and garters for their war deeds on land and sea. For she, too, belonged to the royal army of the Helpful, and had waged war all her life against pain and want, and, what is more, had often won the victory, as folk felt, though they did not always say it. This title of " Aunt," from this town, as it always is, was, indeed, its public diploma to her of respect and love. Of course, she knew everybody and everybody knew her, for the reasons given. She had many family secrets in her keeping, and yet never betrayed one. She had dressed for the first time half the babies of the town, and was constant at christenings. She never refused service in the poorest home. She was a great watcher with the sick, in her own way. And her way was, when the case was not urgent, nor in crisis, to roll herself in some borrowed blanket, and lie down on the floor by the bedside, like a dog in a rug, to be ready for the sick one's call. She was acquainted with all medical herbs, or "yarbs," as some phrased it, and was often on hand, and administering, when the doctor was not. Her medical diploma. and skill (and she had both) were deserved by her long serving. 173 Of course, everybody loved "Aunt Hepsey," especially the girls. Them would she help with her bows and beaus ; milliner and matchmaker, also ; for- getting or despising the old saw of some Eastern pundit, " Never make nor meddle in the loves of others, for how knowest thou that, in contriving happi- ness, thou shalt not engender misery." So, in her long life, she heard many On^the'Shores of Cape Cod like tales, very tender and very long, by repetitions, and gave her sage, certainly never selfish, advice. So, as "one good turn deserves another," some of these girls, in gratitude, ventured to interfere with her " go-to-meeting " dress, and give advice. For "Aunt Hepsey" wore two colors to her dress, which was always of one pattern; red for the meeting-house, and blue for the farm, which her father left her, such as she was now wearing in the Ark. Her father, fisherman and farmer, had left her a pew as well as a farm — a high-backed, square pew, with a carved open balustrade round the top, and far up the main aisle, and "Aunt Hepsey" always went to meeting, when there was any. At first, in her young days, that pew was full, but, as time went on, she came to be alone, except for the strange seamen she insisted should be put there, and she stood up there in the " long 174 prayer." Some watchful women worshippers complained that the red, and the height of her, obstructed their view of the beautiful expression of the parson's face at the common prayer, and she was told as much by the deacons ; but that made no difference with her. "They can mind their own business, and I will mind mine. My father left me that pew," she said, and kept on. Then the girls, "her girls," she called them — girls that she had dressed- for the first time, and every one of whom she had apparently adopted at birth, as she had no daughter of her own — modestly interfered with her, and gave advice about the red dress and the coal-scuttle bonnet, advising the new and current fashions. She broke out into unwonted clamor. " What ! Them hussies in France, to copy them ! Didn't they fight for independence for women as well as men, and ray father lost a new schooner in the war. What are they to me or I to them? " and much more of the same sort. But she went with the girls to the new milliner in town, and many a day after did that functionary of French fashions remember the coming, and much more the staying. Ten girls, with different tastes and advice, and one woman, differing from everybody else, and taking nobody's advice but her own. "Another such week would drive me dis- tracted," the milliner said. But at last all was settled, or rather adjusted, somehow, as no man nor even woman could say. The main struggle arose over that coal-scuttle bonnet, which was changed, at the last moment, for a sailor's straw hat, such as is sometimes worn at this date. One difficulty no woman of the dozen active ones could pass over. It was the age when the sleeves reached only just below the elbows, where all the flounces and laces ended, and the rest of the nakedness concealed by very long gloves. There were no gloves in that town, nor with its neighbors, that would fit Aunt Hepsey's arms. And as to the shoes, to take the place of the brogans ! The victim walked about in a dozen pairs, tried on, and fared very much as a Chinese woman would, trying for the first time to walk. So the brogans must go to meeting, which troubled the girls, but not Aunt Hepsey, much. And she went. In the sunshine, the general effect must have been like Joseph's coat of many colors, but the two bare arms, as she sat in her father's pew, and alone, did the business. If she had worn the coal-scuttle bonnet, she might have hid them, but a sailor's hat — no ! She sat still in prayers, and spoke neither to man or woman going out, and "her girls" never came near her, as they were in fear, as they saw 175 Aunt Hepsey's gait and look. It is perhaps a waste of time to say that she wore the red dress and old fashions to meeting from that day to this. As mortals see and judge, Aunt Hepsey had but one fault. She was a great snuff-taker, and that, too, of the yellow kind, and not over-perfumed ; real tobacco, ground up and " drunk,'' as the phrase ran, through the nose. The Puritan clergy, in early times, made all carnal use of tobacco very unpopu- lar, or at least forbidden, by their sermons, denouncing it as one aid of Anti- Christ, against their religion ; but when they also so far succumbed to the criminal as to put it into their pipes, and smoke diligently in their studies, and even at their holy ordinations, public opinion changed, and a very human taste did the rest, and carried the day. So, in her time, she " snuffed " in peace. The mothers realized this from a well-known and actual fact, which affected them. For, when a half dozen of their infants went to spend the day with Aunt Hepsey, which those town babies liked to do, because there was always much store of sweet bread in her pantry, and hers was a free hand with the goodies, they usually came home at night bespattered with the yellow snuff, and with the smell, and even the stains, of snuff about their white frocks and rosy cheeks, which cost the aforesaid mothers much shaking of the little dresses and furbelows, and many questionings of heart, as to whether they could trust their darlings again to her, unless she would promise to change at least one of her customs. But the good aunt was far gone with the weed, and kept on as usual. Indeed, it was a favorite use of what leisure she had, to take snuff, and read the big family Bible at the same time. And, as to do two things well, but at the same time, is always difficult, the snuff fell down upon and smote the Holy Writ itself, even to the erasure of some holy words ; and, indeed, it was easy to discern who were her favorite authors, and even chapters, from the obscuration of the snuff on the oft-read pages, as may be seen in that family Bible to this day. Had Aunt Hepsey her story? Certainly she had, as every woman, as clever and as old as she, has, and that story is not ours to hear, yet is curiously interwoven with her snuff-taking habit. For the Scribe, in old days, had observed her taking snuff out of a square silver snuff-box, of ancient guise and pattern, with the initials "J. A." upon the lid, and asked her, in mere idle curiosity, the full name. One had better have struck her in the face, she started so. If it had not been for the tan and the wrinkles, the inquirer would 176 have seen a broad blush. She was evidently disturbed, and answered nothing, but went out at once, in an uncertain, bewildered way, and fed the hens. For the next hour or so, indeed, she acted as any young girl would, so and for such cause distressed. But a familiar of both afterwards told the Scribe that "J. A." stood for Job Atkins, her sweetheart, who died at Newfoundland Banks long ago ; that he left it with her, as a keepsake, before he sailed, and she had kept it ever since. Perhaps they two had even taken snuff together out of that box. Yes, Aunt Hepsey, in her brogans and blue dress, had her story, also; such as is not rustic, hereabouts, but perennial. Talleyrand, of Napoleonic diplomatic traditions easily the chief, used frequently to ask the brutal question, when any unusual tragedy, or even accident, occurred in his neighborhood, " Who was she?" as if, at the bottom of all such misfortune there must be a woman for the first cause. But the Scribe holds, with due rev- erence for such solemn and tender matters, that, in much of the tragedy as well as comedy of life, whether among fishermen on the shore or fashionables on the boulevards of cities, one finds, as bottom and tap-root thereof, the heart- love between man and woman. But all this time of meditation, the Ark was nearing Aunt Hepsey's house, in some features as old as she was, and, lest our description should be amiss, it shall be described in the words of a very learned man here, long ago. Old President Dwight, an eye witness, in his travels somewhere about 1800, describes very accurately what "may be called with propriety Cape Cod houses " on the Cape town. And this house of Aunt Hepsey's was one of them — a house of seamen and farmers of average revenue everywhere, then and now, any additions being, of course, new. These are usually of one story, with four rooms on the lower floor, and are covered on the sides, as on the roof, with pine shingles, about eighteen inches in length. The chimney is in the middle, and immediately behind the front door, and on each side the door are two windows. The roof is straight (not broken horizontally, as some are, which is a still older pattern), and under the roof are the chambers, there being two larger and two smaller windows in each end. As Dr. Dwight did not inherit and inhabit one of these houses, as the Scribe does, he does not men- tion that the kitchen, or "living room," behind the two square rooms on the first floor, runs the whole width of the house, with closets, butteries and bed- rooms at either end of it, and that, when the favorite son or daughter of the 177 house married, the " old folks " gave up one end to the newly-married couple, while they removed their domain into the other, sharing the kitchen, with its huge open fireplace, in common, as well as one huge oven, while each enjoyed the one square " best " room, in front, on their side the house ; nor that, under the roof, the chimney dividing, each had one square chamber fitted, i. e., boarded and doored, which left one narrow room more, under the eaves, and that the httle end windows were for the lighting of their eave rooms, where the youngsters slept, where the wind blew through some slight snow in the stormier winter nights, and where they heard that softest of lullabys, in the pattering of summer showers upon the roof, not far above their heads ; nor many other things which a mere traveler was not expected to see from the roadside, then or now, in a true " people's " house on the old Cape. The unfenced yard of Aunt Hepsey's house was as ample and as open as she herself, and as the Ark drove up the side hill on which it stood, toward the barn and outhouses nearby, that aunt said : " I have two families belonging to me here, one in the house and one outside. I must show the outside first. Foxy ! Foxy ! " This epithet was addressed to a long, lank, yellow dog, of the Scotch colley breed, and so called for his fox-like yellow hair, lying in the shade of a big locust-tree on the lawn, who answered not a word, nor a wag of his tail, to his mistress' salutation. " Oh, I see ; it is his watch on deck, now," said his mistress. " He is look- ing out for Jane. I will tell you, later on, who Jane is. She is one of the house family." Meanwhile, the dog, with his long, narrow nose, two of his feet tipped with black, stretched forward, head motionless, but with his great brown eyes moving hither and thither quickly enough, as if taking in the whole landscape, Aunt Hepsey especially. Foxy, like so many other things, had been furnished the town by the sea, for his mother had been washed ashore from some ship im the offing, where all but she perished, and he was born on this place. All traces of his family were lost, but his points showed that he was well bred ; and as he was only a dog, no emigrant or other commisioners were called upon to decide his citizenship, or send him back to where he belonged, for he actually belonged nowhere, and so he stayed here ashore, with none to molest him, and several to minister to his few dog necessities. Nor had he, besides his good looks, anything worthy of notice by any of the most critical in dog ore, except his almost insane aversion to water in every form. This hate was 178 so intense that he would not drink out of the horse-trough in the barn, though no doubt often thirsty, and they had provided a small pail for his own use in the shade of the locust-tree. He was never found wading in the shoal brook, after frogs, as so many of his kinsfolk are, and he never went near the sea except to watch over Jane, when she strayed there ; and, indeed, his only care and business seemed to be as her servant and protector. The few times he had been taken to the shore when it was stormy, almost by main force, his attend- ants reported back that he behaved almost as if mad, barking and bristling up whenever the waves came hissing up the sand, and bounding away, first head and then hindquarters up in ungainly motion, so as not to wet his feet in it, as though it were molten fire. And after such excursions, when he got home again, he was seen to sleep deep and long, as if to recruit his nerves. But Aunt Hepsey's voice had already started into motion other members of her family, in the shape of a large flock of hens, who came flying and running from all sides " as doves to the lattice," expecting something to eat, though it was not the time when, with a big peck measure, she came with the yellow corn grains to satisfy their hunger. They were, indeed, but silly chickens ; but they knew their own wants and their true friend, and would have smothered her, their benefactor, if she had sat down, with their caresses, which is better than some mortals do ; but she kept on to the barn, the hens following in a deep phalanx, to find " Portuguese Joe," the farm-hand, asleep on the shady side of the barn floor, with his head on a pile of meal-bags, while in the midday shim- mering heat, " the cattle on a thousand hills" were standing under a thousand trees, or knee deep in the mossy pools at the hill's base, while, at this bucohc scene, the Scribe wondered that, when so many had told of the blessings of sun- light, as giving the black coal and the beauty of all flowers, so few had spoken of the blessings of shadows — to the urchins in the alleys of crowded cities; to the sailor in tropical harbors, behind the bellying sails ; to the laborers behind stone walls ; and to the cattle, in a hot day like this, under the trees on the hill-tops. "Portuguese Joe," like Foxy, came from somewhere, nobody knew — a Western Islander, perhaps — and had gone fishing with Aunt Hepsey's father ; had fallen overboard in a stiff breeze, been caught by the nape of the neck by the aforesaid father as he was drifting swiftly astern, and ever after had stuck to the man who had saved him, and to the farm. In his inner consciousness 179 it was his farm, from hen to land, but he never took vigorous care of his or hers. As he sank his head to rest again upon the meal-bags, Aunt Hepsey left him for the house, with this ejaculation, " O, poor Joe is too languid for anything " ; meaning thereby that Joe was too lazy to work. Aunt Hepsey and the. Scribe went in by the kitchen door. She could afford to do that, because she was that honest woman who kept her back door as neatly as her front, which is not always the case with maids or men, who seem to take delight in cluttering up the back yard with crippled pans and ket- tles ; and she had hers paved with small stones, all rounded by the sea, and all the grass, which is apt to grow in the chinks between them, was swept clean with her incessant broom. Indoors, the floor of the big kitchen was as white and clean as sand and scouring could make it. Nor did she waste any time or energy on her guest, showing him about in her choicest preserve of her buttery, garnished with pewter porringers, out of which, in old days, children used to sup their porridge — never seated at a table with their parents, but ate stand- ing up, in deference to their elders, in the Pilgrim fashion ; nor the huge pewter platters in which the meats were laid, nor even the wooden trenchers, oblong or oval, out of which much hunger had been satisfied ; nor, indeed, any of her choice old table crockery, which are the pride and solace of such women, but she sat with her back to the huge fireplace, in a half doze or dream, and the Scribe waited for her to wake- up to livelier manners. Nor had he long to wait ; for the door of the east bedroom opened noiselessly, and a young woman glided forth, and across the room, as if going outdoors. She was bare- headed and brown, with long, loose flaxen hair covering her shoulders, and clad in the woolen dress in vogue in that house. "Hold on, Jane, a bit; where are you going?" Jane stopped short, as if a blow had been struck on her mind. Then she held her head down on her breast, as if laboring to recall something, or to answer the new question. She seemed to have been startled from some deep meditation, or even resolution. She didn't look at Aunt Hepsey, but over her head, as at something a long way off, either in space or time, and answered to somebody, after a while, with the single word, " Out," and, suiting action to word, went out at once. She was one in the body among men, but not in spirit, but was living with one or several who were not where she was then. "Yes, that's my niece, Jane. Some folks call her 'Crazy Jane,' but I 1 80 I A 1 ti#»<^ r Race Point Light, Provincetown Cape Cod Shores Race Point Life Saving Station Wreck of Bark Kate Harding don't, although she's wrong in her head, for certain; my sister's daughter, dead, poor thing, and Jane is deader, too, having lost her mind, and I don't mind telling you her story. You are strange here, and it's some relief to talk to somebody, even if you don't say much," and she laughed almost hysterically, as she told the story. CRAZY JANE'S STORY. " That there girl was pretty once, as pretty as a pink. She and Henry Lumbert were great chums, and he went to sea, but never came back. They said the ship floundered at sea. Sure, it never came back, nor no man of it's crew. Nobody never heard nothing about anybody aboard, and that poor girl waited (just as many girls will wait, as long as that there sea lasts) for news. Finally, sister sent for me. She said her child Jane was in a poor way ; she had had converlutions (convulsions). So I went to see sister and her, and the child was bad enough, sure ; worse than she is now. There was her wedding dress, all made, and spread out on her chamber walls, and one night she told me what went on the last night he was ashore. And she told me, not as peace- ably as she answered me just now, but she choked tellin' it, and those big brown eyes were flashing through her tears. Harry Lumbert was a fine fellow, and all the folks liked him. " ' I said, " Harry, don't go. Something tells me you won't come back again. You've got 'bout enough, and I don't mind a small house, nor working hard, if I can have you with me. Don't ! " I begged him hard.' '""Nonsense, Jane," he says; "I'll be back all right, and then I'll stay ashore for good. Only this time, and I'll earn enough to buy that field next our house on the hill, and while I'm gone you can fix up things all right, and I shaU find all scrumptious when I come ashore." WeU, it pleased me that he thought I could help him, and I let him go. It is two years since he went, and no news ! ' And then she choked and lost her tongue, and I was afeered of more converlutions. And that is all. Her wedding dress is in that bedroom she has just left — yellowish-white it is — it has been made so long; but ever since, I told you, she has been queer like. She lives away by herself — always in a hurry, always as if expecting something. She don't seem hke other peo- ple. She never talks much, even with me, her aunt, nor with Foxy, the only one she seems fond of, because he can't talk, and she's sartin he won't tell 183 tales agin her. The old folks, who knew them both, used to say, ' There goes Harry Lumbert's girl ' ; but the new brood of small boys call her ' Crazy Jane,' and that's the name she goes by. But she won't answer anybody who speaks to her, not even the parson, who tried it once about her soul's health. She stared at him a minnit, and went on without a word, just as though she hadn't no soul ; and perhaps, poor creetur, she hadn't — it has flowed away, perhaps. Nobody meddles with her, and she with nobody, since the time the new town constable tried to arrest her, going along the sea-road, when Foxy (you see that his black nose and eyes have gone from that ere door, just as soon as Jane went out) was by, and then there was a big pile of brass, and blue coat, with Foxy and his long yellow tail on top ; and she's just as safe with him as at home." 184 CHAPTER IV. PROVINCETOWN. The smallest part of the marvels of Provincetown is the history of how its people have created a home, very like a city, on the sands and out of the sea. It is the only town on the Cape entitled to the name of city (and cities are plenty in many places), and it may be granted that, because of its locality, and for the security of its harbor, it is a municipality more important to the whole land than any other in this county ; that it shared the same fate as its sister towns in embargoes and wars ; that it had the same educated clergy and fron- tier schools ; that it had the aspirations after religious and civil liberties ; that it had the same holdfast and brave citizenship, and learned the same manly lessons from its hardy maritime service. All this may go without saying, and is undoubtedly true. It is as nearly true that, whatever navy holds sway at Woods Hole or Provincetown, controls our commerce between the South and North, as the history of two wars with Great Britain seem to make manifest. Otherwise there is not much to distinguish this place from others. It was made a town in 1727, and, owing to its exposed position and hardships, was exempt from taxes and mihtary duty. As late as 1755 ^^ contained only ten or fifteen houses, and it fared hard when the British occupied its harbor during our war of the Revolution. And it is now a city. It should be studied on a map, and in such views of landscape as we now offer, rather than in the old records, most of which have, indeed, been lost. In this visible world there are only two chief verities or entities, viz., Man and Nature. All the way down this Cape, we have been remarking on these two verities, and the strange and awful struggle which the two have maintained with each other — Nature making no mistake, 18s Wood End Life Saving Station Commercial Street,'|West End, Provincetown View at Provincetown Drying Fish at Provincetown and man making the supreme mistake of cutting down its woods, and thus let- ting in the sand. But here, Nature seems stripped for the final fray, and, with torn vestments, tearing at and covering the land with sand, seems to have taken her last station, calling on the valleys of the sea and wind to conquer. And all the way down this Cape, especially on the East Cape, we have been impressed and depressed with the sense that there was, in the rare and some- times weird and titanic features of the landscape, much that no life could see, much less tongue express. It is very much the old story of the heathen Pom- pey, searching in the Holy of Holies at Jerusalem for something, and finding nothing but silence and vacancy, though the One, the All, was there, as well as in these sand-bluffs and sea. Here is a line of wharves and houses, fringing the great inner arc of its harbor, protected far out by its lengthening headland of Wood End, and behind the houses, north, ragged hills, to modify wind and sand to the inhabitants below, and, behind them all, trees still stand- ing in ragged valleys and on hill-tops in utter chaos ; trees stunted to shrubs, while still beyond, an utter desert, made so by the greater desert of the sea, which runs round all to Race Point, always embracing but always destroying. If there be any place or time in this life when a Christian man might repeat, with sympathy, those half truths of Arnold, in his " Light of Asia," it is this desert, when the sea is rising on shore, and the wind is blowing the sand entirely round the sand-cliff by which he stands : — " We are the voices of the wandering wind, Which moan for rest, and rest can never find. Lo, as the wind is, so is mortal life, — A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife. " Wherefore, and whence we are, ye cannot know, Nor where life's springs, nor whether life doth go. We are as ye are, ghosts from the inane ; What pleasure have we of our changeful pain ? " And yet, always there are fixed stars shining far above the storm, and the needle remains constant to the pole. Who fixed all this? But the Ark drove up to our hotel, and our friends were looking out for us. Every woman of them had gone shopping, and our brunette. Miss Browne, had bought a new tooth-brush. The men of our party, including the antiquary, with his pocket Bible, had done much worse. They had utilized the lapse of time with pilgrimages to the httle back room of our landlord, who dispensed, in a no-license town, liquids through straws. All the company had agreed to refuse to accompany the Scribe until he got back to Chatham, where only they would join him. That was purely a matter of their own good will and pleasure. They gave not a single excuse for their decision, remembering, no doubt, the saying of that astute bishop who declared that, in his long life, he never knew a person good at excuses good for anything else. So the Scribe ordered the Ark to be ready early in the morning. So it was, and the Ark turned back toward Truro, with a rather sparse company. It was a placid morning, and the drive was, at start, along the East Main street ; on the right, shops and fish-flakes, where the codfish were cured, old wharves broken up, and carpenters' shops to repair them or build new ves- sels ; then the thin, baby waves babbling on the wide sandy shore, while beyond, the harbor waters poured out through Wood End to Truro Heights into the mightier bay, to Plymouth Bluffs and the curve of Sandwich Beach sands, happy, sparkhng and busy in the sunshine, mellowed by the sea moisture. Then, on the left, where were patches of lowland under cultivation, and more sand patches, covered over with brambles and branches, to prevent drifting, and summer villas on either side, owned by people from inland towns, chiefly paint- ers and other artists, until we were outside the town, and face to face again with Nature. We were now on the low, narrow dike, built at the national cost, against the troublesome sea, which long since would have eaten away and sub- merged all the dry land hereabouts, and left the town behind us on an island. Before us, but miles away, rose Truro Bluffs, green in the sea haze, with forests of unwonted height, especially where the oaks and beeches grow close down to the marsh ; the whole in a semi-circle which reached from bay to sea. But on the left of us, and reaching back to Cape Race and its desert and forward in a sidelong direction towards the Bluffs, was the wonder strand of the Norsemen and its still more wonderful sea. Between us and that sea, broad, and far as the eye could reach towards Truro, was a fresh-water pond where people cut ice in winter, walled in by marshes of coarse, fresh grass and rushes in which the smaller birds build their nests. Then east, the long hne of sand bluffs, which seemed whiter and more frayed than elsewhere. And beyond all was the sea, so blue, and the white sails of the fishermen. The Cape, all through, is famous for its high colors, from its whortleberry and barberry bushes in the fall to its sea and sand-cliffs at all seasons. Its colors, also, are in strong con- trasts, and massed. Whites, greens and blues are its favorites, or at least pre- dominate. To-day was one of a long drought over the whole east, and to-day every salt marsh on the Cape laid its emerald miles of color close by the blue of all the indenting creeks and seas, and no drought could even touch their beauty. Besides, in these many and mighty sea curves and distances, on either shore, one may study that subtle law of Nature, viz., great distances enfranchise, great altitudes enslave. But still further to probe the secret of the peculiar beauty of the Cape. It is quite agreed that arcs of circles are the lines of beauty, and the sea, like all fluids, runs to circles when not hampered by obsta- cles, like rocks or clay, when only it submits to angles. But the sea, especially in its tides, has been long at work upon the land. Wherever it reaches, it leaves, plain and distinct, the line of its power. No tree or shrub intrudes, or is but short lived. Shrubs and plants, in turn, cover again the farmers' old for- saken cornfields ; but nothing like that happens to the field of the sea, which this line denotes. Even the bluffs and headlands, which push themselves down from the main land stop short at this line, as if in sudden paralysis, and there they halt for generations or at least for the tides to change their track. It is this habit of the sea which is the great fountain of beauty to the Cape. And the white of sand-cliffs and shore against the sea's blueness ! There are wrecks enough of vessels hid away there under the sand, garnered there from age to age, in storm and fog, to form a great navy were they restored to life again. Only some of their queer patterns would make a strange show- ing in the light of our new naval sciences. Treasures of gold and silver count for naught in such a temple of Nature as this shore and its sea make. And the dead, who died out of these ships, and their bodies not even washed ashore ! It may be cold comfort to those who weep ashore ; but the sea is the most magnificent mausoleum man or woman was ever buried in. The older travelers speak of the many great bones of whales and fishes, not now visible here. Nor, since the sea is so very blue to-day, shall we, as so many do, miss, in travel, the noblest things here. This is the land of the life- saving stations. Over there, across this fresh-water lagoon, somewhere, in some sand-valley among those white sand-hills, they are all ready, waiting for the storm. It will surely come. When it does some ships will come also. Nay, 190 Ship Jason, Wrecked on Cape Cod, December 5, 1893. Launching of Life-Boat she is ashore among the breakers, and the mist of sea-rage and swirl, added to night, makes everything indistinct and shadowy. A cannon-boom, perhaps a rocket, says to the shore, "Save us," and already the beach patrol has noti- fied the rugged men in the station. Its boat has been dragged to the shore, every rope and bolt inspected a hundred times over ; every oar in its place, all ready. Head on, that boat is pushed down to the rage and fury. Once off the sand, and it is simply a hell of waters before them and a disabled ship. If this boat were coming on shore in that sea, the steadiest hand must be at the helm, and it would fly with the swiftness of an arrow on the three waves behind it, and would throw, with the shock of the shore, every man aboard who did not brace himself, head foremost, over the bows on to the beach. One of these waves may weigh a hundred or a thousand tons, and there is no end to such. And these life-savers must pull, in that wildness offshore, against the sea, to the slippery and storm-conquered side of a ship, alone, and no help near. It is, indeed, a battle with the elements, with no bands of martial music to rouse courage in the combatant, nor roar of friendly cannon over the hill announcing that comrades assist ; no pension, no fame, with great audiences or gifts to reward the battlemen hereafter, but only duty. " All hands push off that boat, astern here, and aboard" ; and off she goes, — the men silent, resolute, firm- lipped, strong at the oars, — off to some fate, whatever it may be. There is no higher type of heroism known to man, nor will there be, than this. The reward they receive at the hands of a great country is thirty dollars a month, and not to be mentioned in Congress often, and very seldom with praise. Leonidas and his three hundred come cheap on this Cape, when only saving life. Nothing of all this was seen on this gracious morning, but only the white winged gulls circling over the shores, and the blackbirds, with their sharp, garrulous clatter and gossip, flying as fast and as far away from man as their wings could carry them ; and it occurred to the Scribe whether phiHppics and votes of two hundred years of town meetings, setting a price on their heads, had not slightly soured the blackbird's temper. " Can you tell me, driver, the difference between the nest of ' a red wing ' and of a crow-blackbird's, now? " " Naw ; can you? What would you be axin me thim connundrims for? " " Oh, only just to stir you up to say something to break in upon my meditations. I ransacked nests of those fellows enough, long ago, in the Cape 192 Cahoon's Hollow Life Saving Station ^1^ '^smsivm^ --i^-^i. Sand Dunes swamps to know, and I do, but I won't tell you." So this conversation ended as so many others among us mortals do, with no human hearer being the better or the wiser for the same. "I'll tell you what, Capt'n," said the driver, after a long silence, the horses crawling up the sides of Truro Bluffs, " I know one thing ; we are going to have a storm after all this fine weather, and, more than that, before long ; a dry northeaster, too." " How do you know that, driver? " " Several ways. The gulls are crying louder ; the wind has shifted from west to northeast, and round agin the sun ; it's thickening up to leeward, and it's getting smoky-like overhead." So that was settled, according to our Jehu seaman, and we drove, quick time, into Aunt Hepsey's dooryard, when he and the Ark left for their Eastham home. Aunt Hepsey was moving about with more than her usual activity, not to say nervousness, in her red "go-to-meeting-gown," and the Scribe, who knew some of her signs and tokens from seeing or hearing of them from others, without more ado asked her what the matter was ? " Matter enough, I should think ; I'm going to have a surprise party here to-night — the folks round here going to give it." " Well, you are surprised rather early, aunty, since they won't come before seven or eight to-night, and you've got your red gown all ready in your surprise at two o'clock — six hours beforehand." " Well — dear suz, just only — I mean, please shut your mouth and come in and get suthen to eat. I'm tired already in thinking it all over. I wonder who is comin'." The weather was thickening up, and the wind rising for a storm from the east ; but about eight o'clock that night the Scribe found out who was coming for then there was a loud, hasty knock at the front door, and then the muffled sound of the feet of a crowd running away ; and then the surprised Aunt Hepsey in her red gown, making a dash after them, and next a laugh from all round in the shadows when the first laggard was caught, red handed, by the aunt ; and the people poured into the old kitchen, which was soon ablaze with the lights of innumerable tallow candles, and, somewhere. Aunt Hepsey had provided food enough, even for the ravenous, if there were any. Here was a motley but honest crowd of her neighbors out on a local spree ; rough-handed, 194 Peekhill Bar Life Saving Station Town Hall and View at Provincetown soft-hearted, chiefly young men and women all eager for a good time and with plenty of leisure to have it in. Here was, indeed, a " hanging of a May bas- ket." It was a custom that had probably come down from a very early date in England, and had been modified here by the Pilgrim and local necessities. The basket itself was of no great size or capacity, but an oblong frame affair, usually trimmed and fringed with many-colored papers, cut into a ruffled shape. If the host was poor and the neighbors wished to feed or clothe, then a barrel of flour, a kit of mackerel, or a whole clothes-line of sheets and garments were brought (not all in the basket, of course), and laid on the front doorsteps by the generous folks. This was supposed to save the pride of the people thus served, and the givers were to remain impersonal in the darkness. As Aunt Hepsey was well to do, nothing but gifts of candy and several packages of rare snuffs were in the May basket, and everybody, without introduction, was soon at home in the big kitchen. There would be feasting, and often dancing, and courting would go on with the same industry that the soft swains would catch fish. It was one kind of Cape ball at the high altitude of utter sociability and glee, such as befit sensible persons. During the evening, sometime in the frolic, the Scribe, who sat by Aunt Hepsey, heard what Portuguese Joe said to that lady as he came in from his domicile of the barn. It was : — " Jane and Foxy are out. It is a stiff northeaster blowin'." " Well, what can we do ? Let her go ? " The Scribe followed him out doors. It was, indeed, a wind in gusts, howling and shrieking in its old way. " What do you want? " said Joe, abruptly. " I want to go with you and find Jane." " No good ; she wouldn't speak to you if you found her. She's gone down to the beach. She alius does when a northeaster's coming on. That's the way Harry went last vige. She's alius at that ere sea, and the dog is with her, for sartin. He alius goes." " Well, let us go." So they went, no lantern with them — for that light might confuse the sailors offshore — along that narrow valley, with the wind shrieking among the pine trees on either side the way, and sweeping up the valley as in a tun- nel ; stumbUng over the cart tracks, deepest in the wet places ; the moan and ig6 rage of the sea sounding louder and fiercer at every step they took, until they came out of the ravine to the beach. It was a black, high-headed, giddy sea before them, white capped, and pounding with its innumerable hainmers upon the sand, without cease or let up. And the two looked round. The great light on the cliff top only cast light down where they were, spasmodically, and then left it all dark again ; but after one of these flashes, Portugese Joe hallooed in the ear of the Scribe : " There she is. I saw her then, sitting down half way up the hill, out of the sea's way, and the dog, too." And the next flash that came the Scribe saw her also, and the dog beside her on his haunches — both ears straight up, as if in close attention. " Let's crawl towards her," suggested the Scribe. And they crawled on hands and feet to the base of the clay cliff on which Jane sat half way up, and listened. She was singing something, but the sea was so noisy they could hear little. But then, and afterwards, they came to know that what she sang was a version of the Portuguese Hymn to the Virgin, made, perhaps, by the famous Truro pastor who translated Job into blank verse. At any rate, these are the words, as the Scribe afterwards verified them : THE HYMN. (The words are by Mrs. Hemans ; the music is by her sister.) " Ave sanctissime, We lift our souls to Thee. Ora pro nobis, 'Tis nightfall on the sea. Watch us while shadows lie, Far o'er the waters spread ; Hear the heart's lonely sigh, Thine, too, hath bled. Christ, who hast looked on death, Aid us when death is near. Whisper of heaven, of faith, Sweet Saviour, sweet Saviour, hear. Ora pro nobis, The wave must rock our sleep ; Ora, Christe, Ora, Lord of the deep." 197 " But they say the poor girl is crazy. What is that? Not to be like other folks?" " No," said the Scribe. " Then the martyrs and best folk would be crazy. Nobody knows exactly what it is. The ancients thought the insane to be the inspired of God, and treated them accordingly." Here was a modest, simple, Cape girl, nurturing her love for one so persistently as to exclude so many other things so dear to her sex and age, in a passion so long, so sweet, in a world where so many forsake, and the world calls her crazy. Yet Goethe says that genius in anything is only a whole mind steadily applied to one definite object. Was Beethoven or Strauss insane? Yes ; verily, Jane was crazy. For a woman, on such a night, to pray to such a sea for mercy, was beyond reason. Yet the sea is His, also, and faith has removed mountains, as He said who stilled the waves of turbulent Galilee. Anyhow, Joe and the Scribe crawled back again, and walked home. It was no use waiting. And later on. Crazy Jane walked through the lighted kitchen, and its dancers, speaking to no one, and no one to her, to her bed- room and bridal dress. She had at least done what she could, and to save. That night the Scribe had his room under the eaves and could look out through its little window. What with his visit to the beach and the kitchen party, he could not sleep. The fog had come in later, with the wind. And every now and then the great, flaring eye of the light -on Truro Highlands, magnified to still greater majesty by the fog, looked in upon him ; and he heard the hoarse foghorns on shore, crying, "Look out," "Keep off"; and far out, fainter but shriller, the answering cry of the steamer's whistle, " Aye, aye, my hearties; we will, we will." Is it possible that many of us look at this life of ours, now passing before us, with hooded and muffled eyes ? That Hfe, even for the lowly, had grandeurs and tragedies almost everywhere and every year, grander and more ghostly than any poet can sing or painter color, or even the prophets can foresee or say ? (^ FIRST LANDING PLACE OF OUR FOREFATHERS AT PROVINCETOWN, NOV. nth 1620. This harbor is com- pletely land-locked, and is known as one of the finest on the Atlantic coast. The " Mayflower" ":' anchored within half a mile of the end of Long Point. Here the shore was found very bold, — ''"-_J_--^---;-~i~^-^__:'r- = _-' — -—-.--" and the water deep, and, for the first time in the world's history, a social compact was realized in practice. Before they left Holland, it was evident they expected " to become a body politic," using among themselves civil government, and choosing their own rulers, and, "on the nth of November, in the year of our Sovereign Lord, King James of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620," one hundred and one of the passengers of the " Mayflower " prefixed their names to this compact, just that number having sailed from Plymouth, England. On this day they chose John Carver their governor for the first year. The same day they set ashore some fifteen or sixteen men, well armed, to obtain some wood (as they were out), and also to see what the land was. The men appear to have been landed on Long Point. It was tolerably well-wooded with oaks, pines, birch, juniper, etc. They returned on board at night, without finding any person or habitation, having loaded their boat with juniper. On Monday, the 13th, they tell us, they went on shore to refresh them- selves, and the women to wash. On the 15th, sixteen men set out in single file, with caution, every man with his musket, sword, and corslet, under com- mand of Capt. Miles Standish. They marched about a mile by the sea, and espied five or six peojjle, with a dog, coming towards them ; these proved to be savages, '\^'hen they saw them they ran into the woods, and whistled their dog after them. When the Indians saw the Pilgrims they ran away. They were followed by their footprints about ten miles. The next morning they 199 could see their trace, and pursued them until they came to a creek; but they marched through boughs and bushes without meeting them. As they had taken "neither beer nor water with them, and only a few biscuit and Holland cheese and a little aquavitae," they were getting hungry and thirsty. They saw a deer, and came to a spring of water ; and when they had refreshed them- selves they went to the shore and made a fire, that they might be seen from the ship. In this vicinity, which is a portion of Truro, they found fowl and deer, with a clear pond of fresh water. Here, too, they found corn, which had been planted by the Indians. They went off farther, and found new stubble, of which they had gotten corn this year, and walnut-trees full of nuts. And they found where a house had been, and four or five planks laid together, and a ship's kettle, which had evidently come from Europe. They found, also, by digging, a great new basket full of Indian corn. It held three or four bushels. They were in suspense what to do with it, but at length concluded to take the kettle, and as much of the corn as they could carry away. Some time during the next year, the corn, if not the kettle, was restored to the Indians. They saw two canoes upon the shore, but returned that night back to the fresh-water pond, making a great fire. In the morning they sunk their kettle in the pond, and trimmed their muskets, and, in their attempts to return to their vessel, lost their way. They marched some time in the woods, and at times in water up to their knees, until they came near to their ship. By shooting off their muskets, a boat was sent to the shore for them. They returned weary, and delivered their corn, to be kept for seed. The weather became suddenly cold and stormy, and brought to many colds and coughs, turning to scurvy, and causing many to die. On the 27th of November they again set out in their shallop with thirty- four men. The weather was boisterous, and they rowed to the shore, making but little headway, and landed at East Harbor for the night. It snowed and blowed hard that night ; and some that afterwards died, it is said, took their death here. The next day they sailed to the river, now known as Pamet River in Truro. They landed a part of their men, and marched some four miles ; the shallop followed them. The next morning they got to the head of Pamet River ; here they found the corn they left behind them when they were there before. They dug a little farther off, and found a bottle of oil, Indian wheat. and a bag of beans ; they found in all about ten bushels of coin, which was considered sufficient for seed. This they considered a part of God's provi- dence, else they knew not what they should have done, as they thought they never would have seen a grain of it except for their first journey to this place. A portion of their people went home with the corn (some who were sick), and the shallop was returned to them the next day. The next morning they came upon a broad and beaten path, but it did not lead to the dweUings of the Indians, as they expected. They marched five or six miles farther on, but could see no signs of people. They came to a place not bigger than a grave, and, digging, they found, under planks and matting, a bundle of perfect fine red powder, and the bones and skull of a man ; other articles were bound up in a sailor's canvas cassock and a pair of cloth breeches. Another bundle vvas found, the same kind of powder in it, and the bones and head of a little child. About the legs and other parts of the child were found strings and bracelets of fine white beads. They covered the corpse up again, taking away a few things with them. While ranging, two of the sailors by chance saw two houses which had been recently occupied. They entered the houses and took out some things, but dare not stay. The houses were made of sapHng trees, bended, both ends stuck into the ground, with wrought mats, the door made of a mat to open. The chimney was a wide-open hole ; in the top they had a mat to close this with when they pleased ; they could stand erect in them. About the fire they lay on mats. They found here wooden bowls, trays and dishes, pots, baskets (made of shell), also an English pail or bucket ; it had two iron ears, but no bail. There were curiously-wrought baskets, and sundry other household stuff — deers' heads recently killed, eagles' claws, baskets of parched acorns, pieces of fish and of broiled herring. Some tobacco-seed was also found, and other seeds unknown, with bundles of flags, sage, bulrushes, and other materials to make mats. The meaner wigwams were covered with mats made of bulrushes. Some of the articles found here were taken away. Afterwards, " Young's History " informs us, full satisfaction was given the Indians. Some of the party were inclined to abide at this place, as it had a con- venient harbor for boats, and because it had corn-ground ready for planting, and because Cape Cod was likely to furnish good fishing ; and they had seen, before entering Provincetown Harbor, several whales, which in pleasant weather would swim and play about them. These would furnish them the best kind of oil and bone. But, finally, a company was chosen to go out upon another dis- covery. While some were employed in this discovery. Mistress White was brought to bed of a son. He was born on board the " Mayflower," and called Peregrine, and was the first child born of English parents in New England. He lived for many years in Plymouth County, and died in Marshfield, aged eighty-three years. Wednesday, the 6th of December, it was resolved that further explorations should be made ; and they again set forth for that purpose. Captain Standish, Master Carver, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, John Tilly, John Howland, Richard Warren, Stephen Hopkins and Edward Dotee, and two seamen — John Alderton and Thomas English — were of the party. The weather was exceedingly cold, and it was a long time after they left the 'ship before they could get clear of Sandy Point, — the end of Long Point. The weather was so boisterous that two of their number became very sick. At length they got clear of this point by hard rowing, and got their sails up, and followed the shore for a long distance, until they came to what is now known as Billingsgate Point, in Wellfleet. As they drew near the shore in Eastham, they saw ten or twelve Indians. They saw the smoke of the fire which the savages made that night, four or five miles from them. On the morning of the 7th they divided their company, — eight in the shallop, the rest on the shore. They found this nearly as good a harbor as Cape Cod, for a ship might ride in five fathoms ; and the land was level, though not very rich. Those on board the shallop found nothing encouraging, and returned. They saw that the Indians had struck into the woods, by the side of a pond in Eastham. Here they found corn had been planted that year, and the houses of the Indians recently occupied ; but there was nothing left but two or three pieces of old mats and a little sedge. They espied, before night- fall, several Indians, whom they called to them. They proved to be friendly, and glad to see them. On the morning of the Sth, after prayers, they tried their muskets, and prepared for breakfast and a journey. Before they got away, however, the Indians fired their arrows among them. Capt. Miles Standish, having a musket with a flint-lock, made a shot ; after him, one or two others. The arrows were fired by Indians behind trees. One of them stood three shots from a musket. and, after an extraordinary yell, they all went away. They were followed some distance with the firing of muskets, that they might know they were not afraid of them. By the noise, it was thought there were not less than thirty or forty of them. After they had given God thanks for their dehverance, they took their shallop, and went on their journey. Having a good wind they sailed all that day, but saw neither creek nor river to put into. The distance along the coast from Eastham to the high bluff at Manomet, in Plymouth, is about forty miles. They encountered a snow-storm an hour or two after they left Eastham, which prevented their seeing Sandy Neck, the entrance to Barnstable Harbor. If it had not been for this, it is highly probable they would have entered Barnstable and made their settlement there. In this case, Barnstable would have been the Plymouth ! In the afternoon the wind increased, and, the sea being very rough, the hinges of the rudder broke, and it was with difficulty that the use of two oars would serve their purpose. Master Coppin bade them be of good cheer, for, although near night, he saw a harbor. It was the cove between the Gur- net and Saquish Points, at the entrance of Plymouth Harbor. They tell us that it pleased a Divine Providence that they fell upon this place, where their shallop rode safe and secure that night. On the morning of the loth of December, Saturday, they landed, and marched about upon what is known as Clark's Island, just within the entrance of Plymouth Harbor, and so called after the mate of the " Mayflower." They made a rendezvous here for the day, but found no inhabitants. The following day, Sunday, they rested, and on Monday sounded the harbor and found it good for shipping. They then marched into the land, and found corn-fields and running brooks, and otherwise presenting a favorable appearance, and returned to the " Mayflower " with good news to the rest of their company. This is the ever-memorable day of the landing of the fathers at Plymouth. This was comforting news to the Pilgrims. They left the " Mayflower " in Cape Cod Harbor the 6th, were three days getting to Clark's Island, in Plymouth Harbor, and started on their return to the ship about the 13th, and, going across the bay, reached her on the 14th. They found that the day after their leaving the vessel, Dorothy, the wife of William Bradford, who was one of the party in the shallop, fell overboard and was drowned. "Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers " informs us that, on the 15th 203 day of December, they weighed anchor in Provincetown Harbor, to go to the place they had discovered. They did not get across the bay until Saturday, the 1 6th, when they got safely into harbor. Monday, the i8th, they landed upon Clark's Island, which is the only island in Plymouth Harbor. They landed in the "long boat," manned with the master of the ship and three or four of the sailors. They went along the coast seven or eight miles, saw no Indians, but found where they had planted corn. That night, becoming weary, they went on board again. The next morning, being Tuesday, the 19th of December, some went on land and some in the shallop, to make further discoveries. They found at the place visited the day before, some three miles up, a very pleasant river. At full sea they found that a bark of thirty tons might go up, but at low water it was with difficulty they could go up in their shallop. They took a liking to this place, and thought it best to remain until they had more strength. That night they returned on shipboard, with resolution the next morning to settle on some of the places about Plymouth Harbor. So in the morning, December 20, after calling on God for direction, they came to the resolution to go ashore again, and take another view of two places. After landing (beheved this day to be on Plymouth Rock), they came to the conclusion to settle on high ground (which is on a hill facing the harbor). From thence they could see far into the sea and Cape Cod. In a clear day, the white sand-hills of Provincetown may be distinctly seen from this hill. So there they made their rendezvous for their people, and the next morning about twenty concluded to go ashore and build houses. But Thursday morning, the 21st, was stormy and wet, and they could not land. It was with difficulty that those remaining on the shore could keep dry. About eleven o'clock the shallop went ashore with provisions, but could not return, the gale was so strong ; and the " Mayflower " was compelled to ride with three anchors ahead. House-lots were finally laid out for nineteen families, not on the hill, but in front of it, on Leyden Street. Not until January did they commence their labor of building their houses. It was agreed that every man should build his own house. They had to make mortar and gather thatch, and, during the month, Edward Winslow says, " they had completed seven dwelling-houses." On the 17th of February, on account of anticipated troubles with the Indians, 204 they called a meeting for establishing miUtary orders, and chose Miles Standish commander. During this month, seventeen of their number died. It was not until the 2 2d of March, 1621, that all of the passengers were landed at Plymouth from the " Mayflower," when the weather had become fair and warm. During the month of March, thirteen more of their number died ; and in all, during the three months previous, one half of their company perished, the greater part in 'the depth of winter, and for want of houses and other comforts; at times, two or three died a day. The scurvy fell among the sailors, and almost half of their number died before they sailed. But spring finally came, and it put new life into the people, though they bore their sad affliction with great patience ; and on the fifth day of April, 1621, the "Mayflower" sailed from Plymouth, and arrived in England the sixth day of May. It is worthy of notice that, not- withstanding the hardships, privations and mortality among the Pilgrims after their arrival at Provincetown, the 9th of November, during the winter months, not one of them was induced to abandon the enterprise and return home in the " Mayflower." (%^ 205 CHAPTER V. RETURNING FROM PROVINCETOWN VIA ORLEANS TO CHATHAM AND SOUTH SHORE. ARE-TRAVELED road is much like a " twice-told tale," for much the same reasons, and so we find our way back around Orleans to Chatham, which bears a strong shore-likeness to its sister towns on the east Cape, especially Provincetown, whose southern antipodes, in location, it certainly is ; this like- ness consisting in the great sea distances visible on all sides, and in the long spear-shafts of its sandy necks, and Cape Malebar, thrust out far between the waves, which foam and fret and gnaw around their base, making them less as time goes on. In the garden behind the old lighthouse, the salt water is at least ten feet deep at high tide, and the last lighthouse is built far back in n field, for safety. 206 a CO w •a a w a si Namequoit River, South Orleans Street View near Hon. John Kendrick's, South Orleans 208 CHATHAM. /■CHATHAM, lying in lat. 41° 41', long. 69= 56' W. Greenwich, was first settled V^ by wandering pioneers, with money in their pockets, who bought land from the Indians, in 1665. It will illustrate the kind of truck in which the old settlers paid the Indians for their lands, to note that, in 1665, William Nicker- son bought of two sachems here a parcel of land, not small, paying this, viz. : "One shallop, ten coats of trucking cloth (of poor quality, no doubt), six ket- tles, twelve axes, twelve hoes, twelve knives, forty shillings in wampum, a hat (did the two sachems wear it alternately, as joint property?), and twelve shil- lings in money." Chatham was certainly a town, by Pilgrim law, as early as 1686. It was incorporated under this name in 1712. It lies at the southeast corner of the Cape, nearly opposite Nantucket, some twenty miles distant, south, and that island can be seen from the hills, on a clear day, distinctly. Its Cape Malebar runs south into the sea ten miles, towards the same. The town and its people have always been saturated with the sea, and marine fashions have always colored its social and economic life ; and life here has proceeded in that grand diapason of the organ of the sea, echoing from its shores on all sides, which is so remarked by the visitor. If the glare of the summer sun be too violent, its ocean, both vassal and master, sends speedily sea-fogs more than usually dense, to., restore coolness. It is a Cape sea-town, and therefore must breed Spartans, and this. j;own has- had its full share of them. Great men, and many of,them, -.have been here, or emigrated from here, the Searses among them, on whqse-family monument is written, what should not be forgotten: "Worth is . better than wealth; goodness greater than nobility; excellence.brighter than distinction." Indeed, this town, for the sake of such men;; deserves ...to have recorded here, what may be applied in other degree elsewJiere,,the truth in the old English saying, viz. : " In some ages, men of wil- low-d-well in houses of oak, and in others, men of oak dwell in houses of willow.'' The poverty of these men might compel them always to live in houses of willow, but they themselves were always the men of oak. Men not self-reliant, always died very early on the Cape, and from natural causes, easily recognized. They fared together, fought together, fell or rose together ; but in town and social interests, they stood together, and the hands went out together, and in the same direction, in any common work. For instance, the town voted, in 1700, 209 o Oh d to build a new meeting-house, 20 x 32, and " 13 feet in the walls, and appro- priated ^6 I4J-. 2d. for the framework, and J[^\ ioj. for ammunition." It was also agreed, by the inhabitants, " to take their turn, and their teams, and go out with Edward Small, to get the timber, two days each man." A few months later, "Thomas Atkins was appointed to look after the said meeting-house, sweep, lock and unlock at every service," and was to receive ten shillings a year for his trouble. In this same year, the town raised only ;^ii for all its charges. Now, here was a people, evidently poor, their lives and property exposed to enemies, and where every day's work counted at their own tables and family comforts, " turning out, they or their cattle," to build, at their own toil and cost, the Lord's house ; and personal sacrifice took the place of the wealth which they lacked. In our two wars with Great Britain, Nantucket was in the hands of the British, about as completely as Ireland is, and then East Cape towns were under the British guns every day. This situation will explain two votes passed by the town, so as not to impugn its patriotism. In 1768, a letter was sent round by the town of Boston, to other towns, for a convention to consult (the war of the Revolution was then coming on). The town, after discussion, voted not to send delegates, " on account of our circumstances," though ap- proving of the object. So, in 1775, the resolves of the Continental Congress, being read in town meeting, it was voted, "Not to vote to concur." "A large number signed against tea." Yet this same town always furnished its quota of men and money for the wars. In the year 1812, an American privateer had sent ashore here some goods captured from the British. Shortly after, a British frigate appeared offshore, and sent a barge to demand the goods, with a threat that, unless they were delivered, the frigate would burn the town. A public meeting was called, and some of the more timid property-owners advised surrender, and, in fact, com- menced removing the goods to the ship. Then one of "the men of oak," Salathiel Nickerson by name, a business man, having large interests at stake, a selectman and representative many times over, and a soldier of the Revolution, broke into the meeting raging, forbade them to touch the goods, although some of his neighbors threatened to burn his house if the British did not, and drove the barge from the harbor, defying the frigate. The town suffered no damage, and Mr. Nickerson died in 1847, at the age of eighty-seven. Mr. Joshua Nickerson served as selectman for eighteen years. p4 o V M Eldridge Library, Chatham Interior View of Eldridge Public Library, Chatham Dill House, Chatham Chatham occupies the whole of the ragged "elbow" of the Cape, having the broad ocean for its eastern and southern boundaries, with Harwich territory on the west. Its entire coast line is broken by indentations caused by the encroach- ments of Old Ocean, — bays, creeks, harbors, coves, inlets, — every kind and order in fact of seashore formation that can make irregular and tortuous the line that marks the meeting of the land and sea. %*tltt .« Beach, Chatham 214 ^ "v » ^s-'sr Oldest House in Chatham " ■ i*' j^-h.^:iML&&^ Monomoyck Inn, Chatham 216 a Id o M %- Harbor View at Chatham "No stir in ttie air, no stir in tlie sea.' -Sfidhev. vm^z. Hammond House, Chatham 2lS J3 (D > Life Saving Station, Chatham Old Ruins at Chatham We are now fairly on the south shore of the Cape, homeward bound, and it is the same Cape as before, only with differences. This shore seems more open and full of sunshine than the other, and less stormy. For this the ab- sence of hill-ranges and high bluffs will partly account, and it seems to lie more open to the sun ; the land is more level, but still broken. Besides, the islands south modify both the winds and waves, as breakwaters. Here the water is often on the same day nineteen degrees warmer than on the north shore. There is nothing regular in the landscape. Indeed, there is nothing regular on this CaJ)e, except the tides and sun in their movements, and these the Pilgrim never undertook to control, though they appeared in his own territory, and sometimes troubled him. Nor was this a misfortune altogether, certainly sel- dom a disgrace to any people. Regularity begets monotony, and that is death to any people at any time. Take a whole nation that is uniformed, and it is only wearing its graveclothes. This, too, in spite of all that Paris or other marts of fashion can do or say. The glory of the Cape, both land and people, is that it never was, is, or will be regular, like a big prairie or a plain, but full of variety and individuality. If one could just here overlook from some high hill the land as far as Hyannis, it would look as if the human race had explored every nook and corner, and planted homes wherever the sea or land would allow. Many of our pictures will show this. There are few harbors here worth much, — mostly sealed against commerce, except the more trivial kinds, by sand-bars across the harbors' mouths. The soil is very ordinary, and yet the accumulated property chiefly won by the thrift of generations of these " toilers of the sea" is wonderful. There are plenty of small houses, but very few poor and dilapidated ones, in the whole territory. A Cape man or woman has great faith in the use of a paint-pot. The inhabitants here are a busy and thrifty people, as all their ancestors were. These southern villages, as we may call them, strike the visitor as rather new, and this may be accounted for partly by the fact that the older villages were generally on the north shore, and men migrated southward in the town- ships to this shore. It is to the older village of Harwich that we must now go before we inspect her offspring to the south. So across the wooded hill-ridge from Chatham to ancient Harwich. 223 J3 o HARWICH. The town was incorporated in 1694, although white settlers had been here as early as 1647. A church was gathered in 1700, of eight male members, and the same day Parson Nathaniel Stone was elected minister of the town (in- cluding Brewster). Before this, all the province, from Yarmouth down, be- longed ecclesiastically to Eastham and its great missionary Parson Treat. The town, in early days, had much trouble with its eastvvard neighbors about boun- dary lines, owing to loose legislation and to what we should now call " squatters,'' and even under grants of a higher order, like that of the Nickersons, who had bought of the Indians without due license from Plyniouth. The nominal allegiance to the British crown is brought to mind by the date of one of these deeds of agreement made between Eastham and Harwich about 1703. " Signed and sealed the i6th day of October, in the fourth year of the reign of our gra- cious Lady, Queen Ann." Nor, to illustrate our forefathers and their quaint surveying, can we abstain from adding to what has already been said, a word about another line reported surveyed between this town and Chatham, then called Monomoick : " A pine knot driven into the marsh on the easterly side of Red River, and so running northerly to the head of the swamp where the said river issues, and to a pine tree marked on two sides, H & M, and so running along a valley, with trees marked, and from said valley to a grassy pond, a pine mark on the southerly side," etc. The fate and history which Harwich shared with its sister towns are varied only by a few incidents suitable to our survey. In 1 749, Deacon Ammiel Weeks being chosen constable, " having hid himself so as not to be found," as the old record puts it, another party was elected in his place. In 1735 the amount raised for town charges- was jQ2t6. In the general phihppic against pestiferous birds, it was ordered that, as " crows, blackbirds, bluebirds and jay- birds are so destructive in pulling up the corn in spring-time and opening ears at harvest-time, every householder shall kill six of these smaller birds and two crows, yearly, and every single man of 21 and upwards shall kill three smaller birds and one crow," the heads to be brought to the selectmen before the last day of May, under penalty of a fine. In 17 17, the pay of the representative to the General Court was five shillings a day, six extra days being allowed for going and coming. 225 street View, South Chatham View at Harwichport 226 J3 p< \ULfe'^ street Scene, Harwichport Road Library Block, Harwich In 1747 Rev. Edward Pell was called as town minister at the following salary and tern:is : "160 bushels of grain, viz., 15 bushels of rye and 10 bush- els of wheat, to be paid annually in the month of September, and 135 bushels of Indian corn, to be paid annually in November ; also to buy a piece of land and build upon it a convenient house for his use, and deliver to him annually, at his door, 16 cords of oak-wood and 20 cords of pine, so long as he shall continue in the ministry of this precinct." In the fluctuations of colonial money, generally downwards, this pay in kind was quite on the side of the par- son, though his ministry was not long ; and he it was who, at his death, is reported to have made the request that he might be buried in the north pre- cinct, for the reason " that if left behind among the pines of the south precinct, he might be overlooked in the resurrection." That the division of Brewster caused much heartburning among the Har- wichers is clear from the vote taken by the town in 1803, as to where the county academy should be located : " Voted, that the academy should not be built in Brewster." I I 230 fiSwHiiwwa^^' ■'"''^''■'*tj«4 Street View, Harwich, Showing Savings Bank and Library street Scene, Harwich Harwich is situated u])on central southern sec- tions of the Cape, with its villages mostly upon the outer or ocean shores. Usually the territory of the towns of Barnstable County stretches away across the Cape, and is found upon both bay and ocean coasts ; but hereabouts the towns of Brewster and Harwicli divide the section, taking the inside and the outside portions respectively. Congregational Church, Harwich High and Grammar Schools, Harwich s i fc i' : •m-Mmi bt a to 3 o M a S Capt. Gustavus V. Crowell Commander, S. S. City of Panama, of P. M. S. S. Co. u u n! H a '% m land so singular, depends largely on the very eccentricities of nature and man, and it is simply silly to demand that the Seers shall see here Middlesex or Essex or any other county than Barnstable. Such sensi- tiveness under such writers only shows that some are not certain of their own position, very much as an awkward clown from the country feels among his city cousins. It should be said once for all and stuck to by all, that the Cape has no need to stand cap in hand asking a character from any one. It has made its own character in its two hun- ^^^^^ ^y™° ^^"^ dred and fifty years, with its own right arm and its own brain, as its graveyards and the careers of its children abroad will show. It is only those who live in glass houses who need pay any attention to stones or mud. And the Cape houses have never been famous for their glass. As we were, as we are, and as we shall be, it is the Scribe's only business to record; and this true Cape will, in the long run, demand and be satisfied with only truth from him. If this thought needs further emphasis, it may be found in the preface (p. 6) to that most charming " History of Truro " by Shebuch Rich. Street View at West Harwich .C4 o n a Pi u ' 4l J a <^2h24^i^'n^^^^^ One of Cape Cod's Prominent Physicians Its \ I ^1 p_j!)i iSti \, ¥ H ^ :i T -T-«.*' I 1^' tt> Residence of D. R. Ginn, M.D., West Harwich 254 DENNISPORT. Ginn's Bazaar, Dennisport 255 a Grammar School Building at Dennisport Street View, Dennisport SOUTH DENNIS. The Late J. K. Baker Congregational Churcli, South Dennis The Dennis villages on both shores are thronged with visitors in summer time, and her hospitable, comfortable homes in every part, harbor numerous sojourners through- out the months from spring to the late autumn. Her ponds and streams and the bay and ocean on every side afford inexhaustible facilities for enjoyment and recrea- tion ; her inland situations are full of novelties ; and all experiences of her people and their surroundings are of the most pleasing nature. The breezes of the Cape, and especially of the upper half of its territory, are healthful and to the last degree invigorating, and they temper the summer heats of this latitude in a way to render the same extremely grateful to humanity seeking for rest and re" newed life. Laden with salty perfumes and ocean exhala- tions, and with balsamic pai tides and qualities from the pine growths on every hand, they " do good like a medi- cine," and surely dissipate the seeds of disease. o p< o HISTORICAL LETTER. THE DAWN OF THE CENTENNIAL YEAR. — ITS OBSERV- ANCE IN BARNSTABLE. THE historic old town of Barnstable and Cape Cod made no extensive arrangements to commemorate the advent of the centennial year ; but when the supreme moment came, the church bell was rung, the old gun fired, the public buildings and numerous private houses were illuminated, and the streets were alive with enthusiasm. There is good reason why our citizens should thus honor the occasion. It was here the patriot James Otis was born ; here upon Meet- ing-house Hill were the first troops raised upon the news being received of the declaration of war with England. Everything relating to the early history of this section of the Old Colony will be found interest- ing. Plymouth has at last conceded that at Provincetown, Cape Cod, was the first landing from the "Mayflower" of our Pilgrim Fathers; there the first germ of civil government was enacted ; there the first governor Tvas elected, and the first child was born ; and, as Professor Palfre}' said, in his eloquent address at the second centennial celebration at Barnstable in 1839, " For who is there that has not blood in his veins from this, our copious Barnstable fountain ? " And the occasion leads me to refer to the address of Mr. Palfrey because it was so full of historical facts. As early as July, 1621, Barnstable Harbor was visited by a party of ten men from Plymouth, in a shallop commanded by Miles Standish. There were some English settlers here as early as 1638 : Thomas Dim- mock at that time was appointed to exercise people in arms ; and the P.ev. John Lothrop emigrated from Scituate, arriving here in October, 1639. Mr. Lothrop died November 8, 1653. By his will, he gave his wife, Mr. Palfrey tells us, one house in Barnstable ; to his son Thomas, another ; and to his son John in England and Benjamin here, each a cow and five pounds ; " Daughters Jane and Barbara," he says, "having had their portions already." The colonists were not common men, and they did not despair. All seemed against them, but they had stout English hearts and stout yeo- man's hands, and the protection of the availing prayers that went up from 260 «.-==»■. Grammar School, South Dennis Residence of the Late Capt. Obed Baxter, South Dennis 1-1 pious homes. At length, by the blessing of the God of hosts, they tri- umphed. But it was a triumph won at almost intolerable cost. Barnsta- ble always bore her full share of the deeds and sufferings of those days. As early as the spring of 1676, she was called on for one-tenth part, and her share of the disbursements of one period of the war is found to have been exceeded by only two other towns. At the time of the annexation of Plymouth to Massachusetts, Thomas Hinckle3' of Barnstable was gov- ernor of the former colony. He was a native of England, where he was born in the year 1618. He lived and died in the house which stood opposite to the dwelling of the late Mr. Jabez Nye. Two ministries of Rev. Mr. Russell and Mr. Shaw covered the term of a complete century, within five years. Rev. Joseph Green, of the East Parish, died October 4, 1770, and was succeeded April 10, 1771, by Rev. Timothy Hilliard, who, after twelve years' service, asked for his dismissal, and ended his days as minister of the church in Cambridge. Within the limits referred to, a son of Barnstable had done a work and attained a glory scarcely equalled by any great name of the American continent. On the 5th of February, 1725, in a farmhouse at Great Marshes, was born the pioneer of the American Revolution, James Otis. As long as the question shall be asked, " Whose ardent steps pressed on foremost in that front rank in the great action of American independence, whose burning eloquence fanned the flame in this nation's bosom, which never expires until the right is won, or till there is no more martyr's blood to flow? " History, as Mr. Palfrey so beautifully says, will have to reply, "That illustrious instrument was the Cape Cod boy whom I have named." His individual greatness came not the less naturally for being attached to a long Barnstable ancestral line. The family from which he sprung was of ancient consideration in our town. John Otis, whose grandfather of the same name had emigrated from England to this country and become one of the first settlers of Hingham, was born in that place in the year 1657, and removed when a young man to Barnstable, where he lived to attain the age of seventy years, having for twenty years represented the town in the General Court. His son James, commonly spoken of as Colonel Otis, born on the paternal estate in 1702, were not his fame eclipsed by that of his greater son, would fill a larger place in history than he now does. 263 2 to a '$ Pf) n a 13 Capt. Luther B. Croswell, West Dennis The great question which came to involve all that was at issue between the mother country and the colonies was, whether general search- warrants, called writs of assistance, might legally be granted to officers of the customs, to give them admittance to suspected houses ; it was power- fully argued in the negative by Otis. What belongs to history is the effect produced. "Otis," said President Adams the elder, who was one of the delighted hearers, "was a flame of fire. With a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, and a rapid torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him. American Independence was then and there born. In 1776 he grew up to manhood, and declared himself free. The same venerable witness testified on another occasion, "I do say, in the most solemn manner, that Mr. Otis's oration against writs of assistance breathed into this nation the breath of life." In reference to his services, some one has said that ' ' No spot in the country has made such a gift to the country as the spot called Great Marshes in Barnstable." 265 ^ Grammar School Building, West Dennis Street View, West Dennis, showing M. E. Church There are naany events whicli carry us back to the heroic age of the nation. Among them was the impression made here by the first news of the Lexington fight. Deacon Phinney says, "Thursday, the 20th of April, was received the news of the engagement between the Regulars and Provincials." On the 21st he says soldiers were mustered, and nine- teen were sent ofi^, and adds that he believes these nineteen stout Barnsta- ble farmers "reported themselves at General Ward's headquarters at Cambridge as soon as Nature's vehicles could bring them there." On Saturday, the old muskets of the French war had been cleaned, the flints and cartridge-boxes looked to, and blankets folded in the compact knapsacks by the loving care of trembling hands. Tuesday, the 25th of April, was town-meeting to raise money to buy guns, when three hundred pounds was voted for a chest of arms and some ammunition. This will furnish some idea of the state of mind in Barnsta- ble at the beginning of the Revolution. Money was liberally raised from time to time to increase the bounty offered by the Commonwealth for enlistments in the continental service. The naval war of the Revolution was in a great measure carried on by private armed vessels. This is shown by the fact that when the ill-fated privateer, the " Arnold," Cap- tain Magee, which sailed on the 30th of December, 1778, from Boston, went on shore at Plymouth the same night, in a snow-storm, out of sixty- eight men of her company who perished, ten were from Barnstable. I will close by making only a slight reference further to the second centennial at Barnstable, which was so full of interest. It is painful to notice the many changes which so few yea.rs have wrought. Your Bos- ton readers, where there are so many of the descendants of Barnstable, will scarcely credit the account that so many of their number who took part with us in September, 1839, are no longer among the living. I am induced to furnish you with the names of some of the public men of that day who were in Barnstable. The orator of the occasion was Prof. John G. Palfrey ; marshal, Henry Crocker ; toastmaster and toast committee, B. F. Hallett, Henry Crocker, Joshua Sears and John I,. Dimmock. Others of the managing committee were William Sturgis, Francis Bacon, George Hallett, Thomas Gray, Adolphus Davis, Horace Scudder, Robert Bacon, Benjamin Rich, Benjamin Bangs, Benjamin Burgess, Matthew Cobb, Prince Hawes, Daniel 269 3 Pi Hi U C. Bacon and Thomas Thatcher. Judge Nymphas Marston was president of the day. Go'^ernor Everett responded to the toast, "Plymouth and Massachusetts Colonies," and charmed his hearers in his happiest strain. His address at this time has often been spoken of as one of his most eloquent. Then followed, in a deeply afiFecting manner, Chief-Justice Shaw, to the toast, "Cape Cod" ; Hon. William Sturgis, to the "Emigrants from Cape Cod." The remarks of Mr. Sturgis were followed by a neat original Yankee song on the towns and names of the Cape. Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, then speaker of the house of representatives, responded to the toast of "The Younger Winthrop of Connecticut." "The New England Guards " was responded to by Captain Bigelow, who many years since occupied the bench so worthily as our chief justice. Toasts were also responded to by other distinguished gentlemen. Ex-Gov. John Henry Clifford, then one of Governor Everett's aides, gave: " Cape Cod. Her pine trees once furnished to Massachusetts the device for her flag. She has retained the prouder distinction of furnish- ing, through all history, the truest hearts and the stoutest arms by which the flag has been defended." To the " West Barnstable Church," Uriah Crocker of Boston. These were followed by toasts by Prince Hawes, Henry Crocker, Joseph A. Davis, S. B. Phiuney, Adolphus Davis, and innumerable other citizens of Cape Cod . Interesting letters were read from Judge Mellen of Maine, Hon. Harrison Gray Otis of Boston, Hon. Judge Dewey, George Hull; George Bancroft, Collector of Boston ; Josiah Quincy, President of Harvard College ; David Wilder, Treasurer of the Commonwealth ; and John T. Bigelow, Secretary of the State. So much we take pride, as the sons and daugh- ters of Barnstable, in referring to as we enter upon the centennial of 1876. By one who has taken part in very much that has transpired since the war of 1812. Major S. B. Phinney. Barnstable, January 4, 1876. 271 Pi street View, West Dennis >i 273 SOUTH YARMOUTH. Briage Street, South Yarmouth Residence of Osborne Howe, South Yarmouth street View, looking toward Bass Kiver Bridge, South Yarmouth Residence of D. D. Kelley, South Yarmouth >«jM3)»w.Si»»..)£bSaStU^ > a 2; IS o qjnomjBA tunog 's3[jom IIBs P!0 qjnoutjBA mnos ';33J;s m^HI View at South Yarmouth \,^,^''f"^_-iy.iSft^i£-f('\*^l^ -Xii*?; Oldest House at South Yarmouth street View, South Yarmouth '>K~^ '~^Y ■ South Yarmouth, Lower Village 279 WEST YARMOUTH. View of Lily Pond of Simeon Lewis, West Yarmoutli Old Mill, owned by F. A. Abell, West Yarmouth 3 o B a CO g s CO THE FIRST LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS. AT the annual meeting of the Cape Cod Association, held in Boston in November, 1877, upon motion of Major S. B. Phinney, of Barnstable, a committee of three was appointed to consider the feasability of erecting a monument in honor of the first landing of the Pilgrims in Provincetown , on the nth of November, 1620. The meeting believed that Plymouth had enjoyed the honor and the glory long enough, and that history should be set right by erecting a monument at Provincetown, Cape Cod, where not only the first landing was made, but where the first germ of civil and religious liberty was planted. Hon. Alpheus Hardy and Major Henry C. Brooks of Boston and S. B. Phinney of Barnstable, were appointed on that committee. At the suggestion of members of the Association, Major Phinney afterwards caused to be draughted by a skillful architect, a plan of a monument, which is now in his hands. It was designed to be of stone, some seventy feet in height, and containing about eleven feet space inside to admit of a stairway to a room in the tower to answer the purpose of a lookout for pilots and others, and a lighted clock that may be seen by vessels at night in any part of our harbor. It was also intended that a storm signal should be connected with it. Since that time, the General Government has established a signal at the point originally contemplated by the committee. They then procured of one of the most extensive stone- builders in Boston an estimate of the cost of constructing a monument from the plan submitted. Its cost was considered reasonable ; and with a view of getting our citizens interested, the whole was submitted to a com- mittee for further consideration. This monument should be built. 284 a as k5 ^ a ■ am&:ia^- _ -^sa_j«i^ o a 3 3 -4-* )^ & o 3 Si U n < 3 o 1 6s ^; duiBO mnoxuiBA •>»\V3 !■*'% •SQNnOHO dMVD HXflOHHVA HYANNIS. Universalist Church, Hyannis New Yacht Club House, Hyannis a a O S o H CIS « a a Pi m d B m p< (3 o 1^ U M 1 a o 6 K 1 a a W 3 B 13 a ns W p. m w w J a o . a H cU rt o a o si g £ s :^ without question such a center, it has settled what was long an angry and dis- puted point, raised before 1800 a. d., as to where the great academy of the Cape should go. It went temporarily to Sandwich, where the school, under Parson Burr, was speedily broken up. - And no such institution was attempted for a long time after. And just here some things may be said of our ancient com- mon schools, so dear to a Cape Codder wherever we may go. The law compelled every town to educate its children, and if it did not, it was fined, and had to. The teachers were like the fish in a net, of all sorts, and some very poor. Some were college men, and helped the parson in his pulpit, and if any one could teach navigation, he was a rich prize. A few towns insisted on Latin and Greek. The salary was in general about one half that of the town parson. At first, the schools were held in private houses, and went round to the different parts of the town ; and the teacher went round with them, encountering such a variety of dirt as rendered him a dyspeptic. The schools were shaped very much on the English plan of birch and ferule, a rough sort of arena, where very rough cubs were to be licked into shape. Some education was got somehow, but what was got, stayed, and was found useful. The whole school economy was Spartan. Of course, private enterprise came later, to the rescue, and schools, like those o£ the Wings, at Spring Hill, Sandwich, helped improve things far beyond their own domains. The school buildings shown here are very hopeful signs of the future. Across the Harbor, on the west, lies Hyannisport, the landing place of the section before the railroad built its fine wharf at Hyannis. This village presents one of the finest summer resorts on Cape Cod. Sea breezes, shore situations, boating, fishing and bathing of the best ; excellent roads leading in every direc- tion inland. 307 Main Street, Hyannis Main Street looking East from Baptist Church, Hyannis a < a a a > o u ^ ,«^..ijaaEj^sAs o a a a >> W > . S^M:^^ Main Street, looking West from Winter Street, Hyannis One of Cape Cod's Prominent Men. MAJOR SYI^VANUS BOURNE PHINNEY was born in Barnstable, October 27, 1808, in the building now occupied by the Sturgis Library. He is a Democrat, his first vote having been cast for Andrew Jackson ; seventeen years president and twenty-five years a director of the Hyannis National and Yarmouth Banks ; for many years secretary of the Barnstable Savings Institution, in the days of its prosperity, and in 1870 chosen president of the Hyannis Savings bank ; was commissioned by Gov. lycvi I/incoln as major of the First Regiment Massachusetts Militia, at the early age of twenty-two years, and served in the regimental reviews at Sandwich and Falmouth in 1832 and 1833 ; represented the town of Chatham in the Constitutional Convention of 1853; was the Democratic candidate for Congress, and councilor of the First District, and represented the First District in the Democratic National Conventions of 1844, 1853 and 1857 ^'^d, upon a vacancy existing, received a majority of the votes of the state senate for councilor. 314 Hyannis Light Pier at Hyannisport 315 1 HYANNISPORT. ^^.M Hyannisport Ill M U U ;^li|it ill m 3 Hallett House, Hyannisport He was instrumental in procuring from Congress an appropriation of thirt}' thousand dollars for building the custom house and post office at Barn- stable ; and raised by subscription a sufficient amount of mone}- for purchas- ing the grounds and building the Agricultural Hall (Hon. William Sturgis sending him a check for one thousand dollars to aid him in his work); was for some years president of the Barnstable Countj' Agricultural So- ciety, and represented the society twelve 5'ears at the State Board of Agri- culture. During the war of the rebellion he was appointed bj- Gov. John A. Andrew a member of the " Committee of One Hundred," and presented the Sandwich Guards, Companj^ D, Third Regiment Massachusetts Battalion, with a costly flag, upon which was inscribed, " Our flag floats to-daj' not for partj", but for country." Hon. W^illiam H. Osborne, in his " Historj' of the Twenty-ninth Regiment," speaks of his unwavering fidelitv to the Union, and his determination to sustain the National Administration in its efforts to crush out treason and rebellion. 317 CRAIGVILLE. View of Craigville Bluffs from Craigville Beach View of Craigville from Craigville Bluffs, Showing Chiquaquett House over Trees, Lake Elizabeth and Cottages Chiquaquett River, Craigville, Showing Craigville in distance Camp Ground and Tabernacle, Craigville This View is Looking down Craigville Road toward Main Road to Hyannis 319 CENTREVILLE. Main Street, Centreville Ce'ntreville, Osterville and Cotuit are other villages of the same town, conservative, dignified, and with the Pilgrim atmosphere about them, though modified by the large influx of people from abroad. The landscape at Cotuit deserves a whole book for itself. When the railroad is built along this shore the country will know its beauties better than it does. ^^'"^f^uessst Church and Library, Centreville a •a o p< U >. ^ in ~w~^ Residence of Russell Marston, Esq., Centreville Residence of Howard Marston, Centreville Wequaket Lake, Centreville ;^^S^^S^^^»^'^^-af^*»**-^*^'i^'&^'^' * '• Henry M. Nourse's Residence, Centreville OSTERVILLE. street View, Centerville, near Soldiers' Monument Residence of George S. Dexter, Osterville Back Road from Wianno Beach to Osterville, looking towfrd "Aunt Tempy's " Union Hall, Osterville 326 CO M-l O (D Interior View of East Bay Lodge Dining-Room East Bay Road from East Bay lodge 328 < CO o « 341 ,=1 O 3 GO si +J o « « a M 1 Lower Harbor, Cotuit View of Nantucket Sound from Ocean View Avenue 344 J « 345 > rt ^ 346 Afternoon on Cotuit Beach Photographed by Gurdon R. Fisher Street View near Hotel Pines Photographed by Gurdon R. Fisher 347 Eagle Pond, Cotuit Photographed by Gurdon R. Fisher Road through the Perkins Woods Photographed by Gurdon R. Fisher 348 Village Post Offica, Cotuit A Village Street, Cotuit Main Street, opposite Santuit House, Cotuit Back Road to Santuit, Cotuit 350 Wakeby Lake, South Sandwich Photographed by Lillian White Triangle Pond, South Sandwich Photographed by Lillian White 351 Cotuit Harbor Union Church, Cotuit 352 Wakeby Lake, South Sandwich, Showing Jefferson's Island in Distance Photographed by Lillian White ^-■^".^ ■■ ,.\, ■•J- Wakeby Lake, Steamer Ruth, Capt. Benj. F. Boardley, South Sandwich 353 M' CHAPTER VI. MASHPEE. ASHPEE is and has been the name of a plantation of Cape Indians, whose municipal fate and fortunes have been very different from those we may call, perhaps, her sister towns in Plymouth Colony. This is due to the sig- nificant attempt to keep the Mashpee, or South Shore Indians, as they are often called, subordinate and the wards of the State, to the great disadvantage of the inhabitants in governing themslves in their own way, which is the Puritan theory. Their whole treatment of the red men shows a profound distrust of their ability to govern themselves, and the undeniable contempt of the white race for their red brethren, as their inferiors and savages. Indeed, the pol- itical history of this plantation is as tangled and perplexing as its own forests, or as the very irregular bays and headlands on its coasts. Mashpee lies be- tween the towns of Sandwich, Barnstable and Falmouth and the Sound which bound it on the northeast and southwest respectively — in the rough, some eight miles long and four broad. It contained at first about thirteen thousand five hundred acres, but having very early alienated portions of its land to its neigh- bors, it now has only ten thousand five hundred acres, or sixteen square miles. It was from the start intended as the Indian's land, where he might have a permanent home, and it so far has remained so. Mr. Hawley, one of the earliest ministers, and much versed in Indians and their affairs, writes from here about 1750: "There is no place I ever saw, so adapted to an Indian town as this," and gives his reasons for it. So, in 1834, a State report says, " It is hardly possible to find a place more favorable for gaining a subsistence without labor than the territory of Mashpee," and also gives the reasons why. 354 Mr. Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, our greatest missionary to the Indians with the exception, perhaps, of John EHot, was here before 1660, buying land (for he brought much money from England) and trying to secure to the Mash- pees firm titles and just laws, in which he only partly succeeded. In 1670, he was ordained pastor of the Mashpee Indians, John Eliot himself and the Cottons assisting at the ordination. An Indian succeeded him and held office forty years; he was succeeded in 1729 by Rev. Joseph Bourne, great-grandson of Richard, and son of the chief justice of Cape Cod Plantation. Then fol- lowed pastors, both Indian and white, as long as there were Indians left, mostly good men and some high-born and well-educated. Rev. Gideon Hawley (who died in 1807 at eighty, after fifty years of service), a Yale man who had been a teacher of Indian children under the famous Jonathan Edwards at Stockbridge ; a minister to the Iroquois and Five Nations of New York ; a friend of Sir William Johnson, the great warrior in be- half of the English on the frontiers ; a chaplain in Colonel Gridley's regiment against Crown Point and the French, was installed here as successor to the Indian pastor Solomon Briant in 1758, and at the instigation of the English Society to the Indians, who paid part of his salary. A pious Englishman, Williams, left in the hands of Harvard College a rather large legacy for the same purpose. But the Mashpees were seldom satisfied with their pastors, good men as they were, because their own hand did not select them. They appeared abject and widely different from the Iroquois. The Mashpee Indians had adopted the English clothing, but a half-naked savage was less disagreeable than Indians who had lost their independence. So the Mashpees kept on complaining and petitioning the General Court for relief. Laws were passed and modified again and again until as late as 1834, and after they had brought into the struggle a bright Pequot Indian, then pastor, William Apes, to help Israel Amos, the Mashpee Washington, under the "Act, restoring the rights of self-government in part to the Mashpee Indians,'' they were given most of the usual rights of white men. This act gave reason- able content to the Mashpees ; for at times their discontent had risen to resolu- tion, and they gave published notice that at a certain time they would take things into their own hands, and did so to the extent of unloading by violence a wood-cart which offended the said Mashpee law, and some of them got fines and imprisonment from the courts in consequence. All this strife was an honor 355 to Mashpee manhood and in the direct line of Puritan behavior. The Mashpees alleged all along that the State treated them as minors, paupers, people unfit to manage their own affairs, — that is, as though they were not American citizens, as they were. So much has been said of this plantation in order to add that, in the examination of the vexed but important question as to whether our fore- fathers treated our Indians fairly or not, Mashpee history is a good point to A Mashpee Boy Photographed by Gurdon R. Fisher 356 start from. The opinion of this book is that there are two sides to the question. Selfishness, Hke the small-pox, never dies out even from the most religious age. Men are prone to get oftener than they give. Politicians often had the dis- bursement of Indian funds, and many of our people have long since learned that, as the world goes, the only good politician is a dead one. On the one side, the testimony of Richard Bourne is to be taken as of great weight, who, when he resigned his mission in 1742, "complained much of the ill treatment which the Indians received " ; this is supported by the view of every intelligent Indian in these parts to-day, very strongly held under an impassive countenance, and succinctly expressed in the words of that Virginia Indian who said : " We took the white man by the hand and bade him wel- come to sit by our side and live with us as a brother. We gave him all that he needed; he soon wanted all that we had, and we were driven out.'' On the other side, one fact only here. The most strenuous efforts were made to help the Indians, and ex-Governor Mayhew of the islands, after he was seventy years old, would walk twenty miles to visit and comfort them. In 1674 Richard Bourne reported ninety-five "praying Indians" in his charge, of whom twenty-four could read and ten write. In 1685, after King Philip's war. Governor Hinckley reported one hundred and forty-one praying Indians on the plantation, and fourteen hundred and thirty-nine more of the same sort in Plymouth Colony. This did not include youths under twelve years of age, which would have made the whole much larger. In 1767 there were in the plantation twenty-one shingled houses, fifty-two wigwams, and two hundred and ninety-one souls ; and at Scorton nine wigwams. In 1800 there were here eighty Indian houses and three hundred and eighty souls. Thus this plantation waxed and waned through the earlier centuries, but their patriotism and loyalty never, was anything but at high-water mark. In King Philip's war hostile Indian prisoners were sent here so frequently as to alarm the neighbor- ing towns ; but the Mashpees kept all in peace. In the first regiment raised for the continental army were twenty-two men of Mashpee, and all but one died in the service. A regiment raised in 1777, for three years, showed twenty- six Mashpee names on its rolls. There never was an Indian hung for murder in Barnstable county. Of course the " poor whites " and the negroes came in to share the land and the home of their red brethren here. Since about 1800 there has not bfeen 357 a pure-blooded Indian here, and it is a question whether the Cape negroes have not saved the tribe from extinction. These negroes, mostly descendants of slaves, will have scant mention in this book ; but they have a story of their own for any one who can gather it. Not over clean in morals, as no race, especially a servile one, is, they were often strong and laborious men. The record is still told of the negro Tobias and his sweetheart, " Massa Joe," a very fat, middle- aged colored woman, that when while walking the roads they came to the bars Tobias would put one hand under her foot and lift her over the bars easily. The record of the Mashpee Indians, all things considered, is remarkably good, and the present population will rank easily with the intelligent and useful members of other communities. WAQUOIT. Residence of Mr. Ignatius Sargent, Waquoit 358 'TT^.^ ,,— «IK*«!-V- Tobey House, Waquoit. The Huntsman's Paradise The Old Mill at East Falmouth 359 TEATICKET. Morse's Pond, Falmouth Teaticket School 360 FALMOUTH HEIGHTS. Summer Residence of Commodore E. P. Boggs, Falmouth Heights Steam Yacht Nashawena, Flagship of the Mass. Yacht Club, Owned by Commodore E. P. Bog FALMOUTH. FALMOUTH was incorporated in 1686, but, j-ears before, white people of the most respectable stock had emigrated there from Sandwich and Barnstable. It was at that time abundant in Indians and wolves, and reached from Mashpee on the east to Woods Holl on the southwest, and so followed Buzzards Bay to the Bourne line and Sandwich, and has now, by additions, become a township ten miles long and six wide. The Indian names for denoting its villages have been more carefully preserved here than in other Cape towns, viz., Waquoit, Cataumet, Quisset, Nobsque and Sipperwisset. It is a town of some forty ponds, seldom small, and has a fair share of good land for the plough, which partly accounts for its early settlement by men who came into the wilderness to serve God and buy land, all of which was accomplished in the usual way. From the start it was governed in its crises and policies by the men of oak as before described, and if it has any mark to distinguish it from its sister towns of the Cape it should be called the military town, not because it raised more men or money for the wars, but because more actual service and fighting took place on its territory, or in parts adjacent, than fell to the lot of most of our other towns. The Dimmick race were among its more prominent warriors. Indeed, it was never a town where peace abounded, — quite the reverse. Its citizens all wanted their own way, according to the Pil- grim habit, and the majority always had it, but according to law. This is especially seen in the history of their parishes. As early as 1663, the Plymouth Court recommended to the settlers at Saconessett to apply themselves in some effectual way to procure " an able, goodly man for the dispensing of God's word amongst them." And Saconessett not being strong enough yet to start alone, it was ordered by the court that at pres- ent the parish shall belong to Barnstable, which would send the Pilgrim worshippers some fifteen miles to Barnstable town on their Sabbath. In 1700, Mr. Samuel Shiverick's name first appears in the records as minis- ter of the town. Judge Samuel Sewall says he was a Huguenot. In that year the town voted ^19 5s. ; ;^I5 for the parson ; repairing the pound, /2 5.f. ; assessors, £1 los. ; and to Sylvester Hatch, los. There were too many rocks in Mr. Shiverick's path to make it 363 pleasant holding for either party ; for the next town meeting, in Decem- ber, "the town being orderly warned and assembled together," voted that "Mr. Samuel Shiverick is none of this town's minister"; and three months later another meeting voted, "that they will not employ Mr. Samuel Shiverick any more to preach to them, and did choose Mr. Joseph Parker to tell him of it. ' ' Two men were appointed to pay him what the town owed him for past services. The town applied to the Sandwich and Barnstable ministers to help them get another pastor. Mr. Shiverick continued to dwell in Falmouth, and many of his old parishioners were very kind to him, as the gentle, conciliatory, conscientious man deserved. How far the Quakers, a numerous body in the north and west parts, had a hand in shaping parish policies it is at this time hard to say. Nor did the selectmen of this town, now grown so noble, forget their spring wrath against crows and blackbirds. In 1707, under advice of the ministers before named, the town invited Rev. Joseph Metcalf of Dedham (H. C, 1703) to become their pastor. They offered him ^160 settlement, two good cows, twenty cords of wood, £^0 salary for the first three years, then ^45 and ^50 from the seventh year ; then to be annually increased as ratable property increased until he received ^70 ; he to build on the town land, and the town to dig and stone his well. There were other business-like specifications about prop- erty thus held in case he left or died. He accepted the invitation with this proviso, that ' ' I will appropriate so much time as necessary journeys and yearly visits shall require, without being thought an offender, though I provide no one to supply my absence." In 1723 Mr. Metcalf died, after sixteen years' service, in the odor of sanctity, and has had no gravestone erected to his memory. It must be a comfort to some that the angel of the resurrection will not concern himself enough about gravestones to read even the inscriptions on the best of them. The story of the new wig from Boston involves itself with the current events of this parson's career in Falmouth, to teach posterity how alike the impulse of human nature are in every age, no matter how they differ in mere form, and how ancestry and posterity conform to each other in behavior. His old wig was in Boston with him on a visit, and both found themselves confronted by the new and fashionable wigs then in vogue. What more natural than that he should buy a new one — not very costly 364 Summer Residence of C. Pierson Beebe, Falmouth Summer Residence of Dr. W. H. Lyon, Falmouth Town Hall, Falmouth St. Barnabas Memorial Church, Falmouth a S a 3 — for he was a poor, country parson, nor very elaborate, as the simplicity of his country life forbade. He came home late on Saturday night, and appeared on Sunday in the pulpit with his new head-gear on, without due notice to his bewildered and alarmed congregation. There was a very tempest of criticism at once, which criticism increased, especially from the women folk, as the week went on. ' ' The wig was not extravagant, was fashionable and becoming the station and dignity of the wearer, but it had a look of worldliness and pride." Possibly it had, and so the hats of women may have in all generations. Meanwhile Parson Metcalf, who had probably had his fill of new wigs, found himself at the week's close in company of some of the select ladies of his parish and advised regard- ing the offending wig. Should he lay aside wearing wigs altogether ? Never. Should he wear the old one ? Not to be thought of ! What, then, should he done? Every woman had probably a pair of scissors in her pocket, and the parson finally suggested that each woman in turn should clip off' what offended her as pride or ultra fashion, and then see how the wig would go or stand on its merits. But when it came to the last woman she refused the scissors, and said that for her part she was of the mind that all wigs were forbidden by the second commandment, which begins, " Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image," etc. The tired parson, regretting by this time that there were any such things as wigs or women, had still some spirit left, evidently, and answered his last tormentor with his sad wit, that this particular wig, as it then was, was outside the scope of that commandment, because it was " like nothing else in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth." The parson and his parishioners called themselves Reformers, and claimed to be of a Reformed Church ; but one thing is plain — they had among them a reformed wig. In the peaceful years before the Revolution the belligerent spirit spent itself chiefly in town wrangles over building a new meeting-house or repairing the old one, or leaving things as they were. Town votes were passed and rescinded several times. The General Court assisted in the pious work, and the houses were finally built. The people were evidently not of one mind, as the votes and the flourishing society of Quakers still at West Falmouth show. The new meeting-house in 1715 was thirty by thirty-four feet, and eighteen feet to the roof This could not have been much of a house, for in 1739 it was voted to " build a new meeting-house, forty-five feet square, on the same lot where the old house stands." There was a party opposed, as usual, wishing the house further east and nearer themselves ; an advisory committee from the neighboring towns further disagreeing, the house was not built. In 1747 it was finally con- cluded " to mend the old one (i. e., their meeting-house) for the present." In 1750 it was voted to build a house forty-five feet square, with seventeen pews below and twelve above.. In 1791 the meeting-house business came up strong again, either to repair or build, and possibly remove to a more central locality. It was finally agreed to divide the town into two par- ishes, east and west, and Hatchville, so long a part of the mother church, was to have its own minister. In 1796 a new meeting-house was_built for the old parish, which we think was its last till now. There were three long pastorates in the parish of the town, viz., Rev. Joseph Metcalf, 1707-1723, sixteen years, aged fortj'-two ; Rev. Mr. Palmer, 1731-1773, died in the forty-fifth year of his ministry, aged sixty-eight ; Rev. Henry I/incoln (H. C, 1786), 1789-1823, minister for thirty-three years. The rest died away from the town, and comparatively young, always excepting that dear old Huguenot Parson Shiverick. But it was in the two wars with Great Britain that Falmouth people stood forth ready and strong. They might often show a tight fist in town and parish expenses, but when war was coming, they carried an open hand, and carried it filled for use against the enemy. At an early date they ordered gunpowder, flints and muskets in large numbers, and as their bread supply was likely to be cut off by the enemy's vessels, they ordered wheat from the west to be stored and sold to the citizens and to be given away to the poor of the town who had not money to bu}'. They furnished their due quota of money and men to the Continental Congress. Yet the situation of the town was peculiarly dangerous, as a glance at the map will show. The sea was on at least three sides of them ; and most of their property lay near the sea. Woods Holl was almost a penin- sula. Buzzards Bay afforded an open path on the west, and the islands to the south, like the Vineyard, Nantucket and Naushon, swarmed with American refugees and tories, bitter, active and ready to guide to places they well knew or had been citizens of. Besides, the British had under- taken to harass undefended towns and to destroy the property of non-com- 369 Summer Residence of Richard Olney, ex-Secretary of State, Falmouth Kl^i15i,. imn^iam i\ iaJk^'- i -^ si,.;.*- Tennis Tournament on Grounds of ex-Secretary Richard Olney, Falmouth batants, and thus hasten peace. Some of our strongest men were away with the armies, and twenty-four men, at three shillings a night, were the only watch and guard of Falmouth shore. Quissett Harbor, and parts adjacent, are among the most remarkable places on the Cape ; very different, indeed, from places like Truro and East- ham, but yet having a mingled grandeur and beauty of their own, hard to sur- pass. Buzzard's Bay, on which they He, deserves a full book to narrate its peculiar attractions as part of the Cape, and we shall chiefly speak of its East, or Cape, shore. The map shows this bay with ragged shores, with the creeks and bayous forever intruding, and hiding themselves in the more solid land. For, though in general here the waters are more genial, and less eager to eat the land, as on the east Cape, there are times, wind and tide acting together, when the bay, with its swollen waters, rises to an alarming height, and very eager to waste shore and boundary, as far as it can reach. At such times, the wind is usually from some point in the south. Such a sea-storm here is reported by Governor Bradford, in his Journal, at the early date of August 15, 1635 : " This year was such a mighty storm of wind and raine as none living in these parts, either English or Indians, ever saw ; being like to those hurricanes that writers make mention of in ye Indies. It began in ye morning, a little before day, and grew, not by degrees, but came with violence an ye beginning, to ye great amazement of many. It blew down sundry (211) houses and uncovered others ; diverse vessels were lost at sea, and many more in extreme danger. It caused the sea to swell (to the southward of this place) above twenty foot, right up and down, and made many of the Indians to climb into trees for their safety ; it took off the boarded roof of a house which belonged to the plantation at Manomet (Monument River), and floated it to another place, the posts still standing- in ye ground ; and if it had continued long without ye shifting of ye wind, it is hke it would have drowned some part of ye countrie. It blew down many hundred thousands of trees, turning up the stronger by the roots and breaking the higher pine trees off in the middle and ye tall yonge oaks and walnut trees of good biggnes wound like a withe, very strange and fearful to behould. It began in ye south east and parted towards the south and east, and vered sundry ways ; but ye greatest force of it here was from ye former quar- ters. It continued not above five or six hours, when the violence began to abate. The signs and marks of it will remain this 100 years in these parts 371 where it was severest. The moone suffered a great eclipse the 2d night after it.'' What like storms were before or after this one, history does not say, but it is safe to say that the shores of this bay have remained till now very much as this storm of Bradford's left them. Traces of this storm lie all along the Cape shore, as we may see. QUISSETT. A" Summer Residence of Mr. Sherer, Quissett C.;'*! UaJI in Residence of Mr. Harris, Quissett BUZZARDS BAY. This bay, with its many green headlands and islands showing out from its blue, placid waters, and the quivering haze of summer lying in among the hill- tops, reminds the traveler of the Italian lakes. However that may be, the old history of these waters is as hazy as its summer landscapes. And this simply because there is such slight record of undoubted facts. That Bartholomew Gosnold ])roceeded to build a town on an island in a fresh-water lake, near the mouth of this bay, and seriously intended an English settlement somewhere here before 1610, sailing up and down the bay, is within the reach of the white man's record ; so also is the story of English men-of-war anchored as high up as ^V'ing's Neck, and sending their armed launches across these waters into our tovvns, like AVareham, to burn and to distress our people, as some who are 373 now alive can testify as eye witnesses ; but the tale of tiie Norsemen, voyagers here five hundred years before Columbus sailed, with their painted and lofty prows ; their banks of huge oars aiding their one huge mainsail into greater speed, and the hoarse cry of their sailor crews as their galleys move over the bay, can neither be heard nor seen, any more than the Indian canoes, almost as many as the leaves ashore, which carried the red men to their war or fisher- eries for ages before any white man was here, or the ships of the old voyagers, like Champlain and Smith, and a crowd of European adventurers before the Pilgrims landed. There are reasons why this should be called the bay of mys- tical waters ; many old things are so flitting, evanescent, shadowy here, like figures reflected in the steel mirrors of the Greeks in ancient days. Summer Residence of John S. Bleikie, Quissett 374 ^; vs Xl *j:t:S»i:Sja®g»«laS5iffi«'.^«*^i »#-^ Residence of Capt. John Rogers, Quissett Church of the Messiah, Woods Hole WOODS HOLE. Woods Hole, a part of Falmouth, some miles from the center, is in the southwest corner of the Cape, and the high ridges of hills, with fre- quent and rounded hollows, which comprise most of the dry land here- abouts, form a permanent division between the waters of the Sound and those of Buzzard's Bay. These Hills are plentifully sprinkled over, by the icebergs, with rocks, which denote an ancient moraine. This ridge subsides into the flat land of the Hole. Two main attempts were made b}^ expeditions from the British ships to land in Falmouth, one in either way ; and what would have happened had the3' succeeded can be seen from their treatment about the same time of towns farther west, like Fairhaven and New Bedford. Of course forays in open boats backed by war-ships were many and as troublesome as Cape gnats, but the sufferers were generally the men who owned cattle and sheep, and could not hide what was eatable and drinkable in their houses. Unless we mistake the laws of civilized warfare, the behavior of the British vessels in Buzzards Baj' and its vicinity will leave an indelible stain upon the British military and naval character until publicly atoned for. In 1779 it was determined to destroy Falmouth village, and on April 2, a strong fleet, with plenty of soldiers on board, after harassing Woods Hole on their way, anchored off the town in plain sight and proceeded to send in their boats under cover of their guns. But there were Anglo-Saxon men on the beach too, a couple of hundred of them, who had come over night from the town and Sandwich, under Freeman and Dimmock, who from behind an embankment, in good order and good guns in their hands, were shout- ing to the invaders to come on. But they didn't. They went away, and the great fleet sailed off with no Falmouth plunder. We may save one bit of comedy from the many associated with these miserable and cruel times, to illustrate the temper of our people, — the story about Mrs. Manassah Swift, who lived near Woods Hole. It was the day before the attack on Falmouth town. Mrs. Swift was famous for her dairy, and the Britishers on board ship were hungry for fresh butter and cheese. Some of the boat's crew were cutting up on the shore the dozen cattle they had already killed, and the rest made their way with an officer to the house where Mrs. Swift was alone with her children. She 376 stood in the doorway to prevent entrance and called lustily for an ofiScer. When he appeared she appealed to him as a gentleman not to make a raid on a defenceless woman and children. To turn the edge of her tongue, which was getting rather sharp, he politely asked if she had any cheese. "Yes," she answered " but no more than for my own use." He was wil- ling to buy and she unwilling to sell ; so there was no trade. Meanwhile a Tory who knew the house showed two of the soldiers to her pantry, and each stuck a cheese on his bayonet and proceeded to get out with them. But she still stood in the doorway, and as they passed her she slipped the cheese off the bayonets into her check apron, and the whole gang retreated under a brisk fire of her tongue to more comfortable quarters. In the war of 1812, Falmouth was bombarded, and some of the British shot are still preserved in the village as mementoes of a cannonade which, though not very pleasant, did very little mischief, and the militia who flocked thither, many after a nineteen mile march, did not arrive in time to take part in the struggle. In this war the town fared very much as it did in the last. The fighting was confined to the Sound, where, amongst its islands, British privateers and warships brought their prizes or ventured forth to make attack upon the villages. The townspeople being adept sailors and in their own waters, managed their vessels with superior sea- skill. Indeed they were not backward in coming forward to smite the enemy that smote them, and as the war went on they went on improving in their craft and boldness. Some of the most daring ' ' cutting-out expe- ditions ' ' are reported from this quarter, as told in history. For instance, in 1 8 14 Capt. Weston Jenkins took thirty-two men who had volunteered in a little sloop which sailed to Woods Hole, where, becoming becalmed, they towed to Tarpaulin Cove, where the British privateer " Retaliation," which had much distressed our navigation, lay at anchor. When they reached within three-quarters of a mile, the long gun of the ' ' Retaliation ' ' stopped them, and they came to anchor. A boat from the Britisher, with the captain and five men put off at once for the sloop. Captain Jenkins kept most of his men hid until the boat had made fast to his vessel, and then a score or so of loaded muskets were pointed down into the boat, and its crew ' ' threw up their hands. ' ' Then putting a dozen men on board the privateer's boat, they got their sloop under way again, boarded the priva- teer and took five guns, two American prisoners and much plunder. 377 CHAPTER VII. NANTUCKET ISLAND. IT appears to be certain enough, that the first modern discovery of this island was by Bartholomew Gosnold in 1602, and that it was then in possession of Indian tribes, and that these occupied it for many decades thereafter. Gos- nold's landfall was in the neighborhood of Sankaty Head, the highest point of land on the island; and there is no evidence whatever that this navigator did more than rediscover the island. It was included in the original grant of lands to the Plymouth Colony, and was said to have been covered with a luxuriant forest growth of oaks at the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and for many years afterwards. It became part of the Province of New York in 1664, and was ceded back to Massachusetts in 1693. In 1 64 1 Nantucket was deeded by Lord Sterling to Thomas Mayhew, who in, 1659 deeded it to Thomas Macy and nine "original purchasers, receiving for it the munificent price of eighty pounds sterhng and two beaver hats." Macy and his brother purchasers at once proceeded to conclude a bargain with the Indians in possession, something after the manner of WiUiam Penn in acquiring rights in Pennsylvania. Each of the ten "original purchasers" also chose an associate, and these twenty with their families proceeded to "settle '' the island. Among this number were the names of Macy, Coffin, Hussey, Starbuck, Look, and others well known to the present day in the family nomenclature of Nan- tucket. At that time there were about fifteen hundred Indians on the island, and these had decreased to three hundred and fifty-eight in 1763, a pestilence car- rying off two hundred and twenty-two of them in that year. In 182 1 the last full-blooded Nantucket died, and in 1854 the last half-breed. The decadence 378 View of Nantucket of the Indian natives in this section of New England is illustrative of what is historical relating to them in every part of the United States. Thomas Mayhew, who conveyed the island to the original ten, included himself among that number, and retained possession of one tenth of the island, together with the section known as " Quaise " or Maisquetuck, an Indian name signifying " reed land." Here in later years was the celebrated Miriam (Keziah) Coffin's country seat, the headquarters of smuggling on a somewhat grand scale, which finally caused the arrest by government of the renowned lady owner. In 1665 the Indian King Philip visited the island, and in 1666 the first mill for grinding corn was erected. Along the Wharves, Nantucket 379 Entering Nantucket Harbor Main Street, Nantucket Residences at Siasconsett In 1671 the first town was incorporated, and in 1073 it was re-named Sher- burne. The island was then a part of New York, and it was not until 1795, or upwards of a century after it had been ceded back to Massachusetts, that the name Sherburne was changed to Nantucket, which has been retained ever since. There has been considerable controversy over the name "Nantucket,'' as to its origin, the source from which the island received it, and its significa- tion. There seems to be little doubt, according to the best authorities, that it is of Indian origin, but its meaning is by no means so clear. Certain it is, how- ever, that the name " Nantican " was applied to the place by the early discov- erers ; but this is admitted to have been probably a corruption of the Indian name which these explorers found there, so that the title is a Norse — or some other — corruption of the Indian, instead of an Indian corruption of the Norse, but no authority attaches to it any significant meaning. In 1678, or thereabouts, was inaugurated the great industry that for two centuries thereafter was to distinguish this island, and constitute a most substan- tial foundation for the upbuilding of its interests and the career of its communi- ties. In this year the pursuit and capture of whales was begun from Nantucket shores, the enterprise being from the first successful, and for many decades thereafter peculiarly beneficial to the advancement and growth of the place and the fame of its inhabitants. The Nantucketers, thus early in the field in the pursuit of Leviathan, brought to this industry a determination, ability, and daring that soon distinguished them throughout the world, and eventually gave them the first place in the estimation of all countries in the prosecution of this form of adventure. The kind of whales thus taken from the shores were what is known as "right" whales; and it was not until 17 12 that the first sperm whale was ever captured by the islanders. About the year 1732 Davis Strait was visited for whale capture by vessels from Cape Cod and Nantucket, and in 1745 the Nantucketers sent a vessel direct to England with a cargo of oil. From this beginning grew a foreign trade embracing the countries of France, Russia, Spain and the Mediterranean shores, and China, — a trade which, having oil and whale products for its sole commodities on the one side, made return of every conceivable article of com- merce from the other, besides innumerable rewards in substantial cash, the results and the evidences of which remain and are apparent in Nantucket to 381 "1 Nantucket Harbor An Old Fire-place 382 Old Mill, Nantucket, built 1746 Billy Clark, the noted Town Crier, Nantucket 383 this day, and which have influenced the maritime and commercial operations of every port and part of the New World nearly ever since. When the War of the Revolution opened, Nantucket had a fleet of one hundred and fifty whaling vessels, manned by 2,025 men, and was producing 30,000 barrels of sperm and 4,000 barrels of whale oil annually. At the time of the Revolution, the greater portion of the population of Nantucket were Quakers, or "Friends," as they were called in those days. The island and its interests suffered terribly throughout the war, and endured terrible losses in vessels and other property. At the close of the war, the ship " Bed- ford," with a cargo of oil, was despatched to London from this port, and had the honor of being the first United States vessel hoist- ing the national flag in any British port. The island of Nan- tucket is of an irregular triangular form, about six- teen miles long from east to west, and from three to four miles in width. The surface is slightly rolling, being nearly level in all parts on the south, and more hilly on the north, the elevations nowhere reach- ing above one hundred feet in height, and in but few instances attaining any- where near that altitude. The highest point of land is Sankaty Head, where is situated a famous light- Town Clock, Unitarian Church, Nantucket 384 fi Nantucket Jail Old House in Siasconsett Old House in Nantucket, "1724" 3S5 View at Nantucket house, — a national provision, the beneficence of which can scarcely be es- timated. The post villages of the island are Nantucket and Siasconsett, or " Scon- set," as the latter place is now known. Other villages, or, in reality, diminutive hamlets or localities regarded as such, are Surfside, " Tuckernuck," Polpis, Quaise, Quidnet, Madaket, Wauwinet and Coatue. The island is almost entirely without tree-growth, except that here and there at rare intervals are to be found stunted or dwarf pitch-pines, in some cases the remains of the plantings of for- mer years, and only occasionally a natural product growing sparsely and feebly. Nevertheless, the soil of the island is of fair quality, and capable of vegetable growth of a pretentious order, and good farms and gardens are not impossible here. From the breakwater and the wharves of the principal village, the harbor of Nantucket extends northeastward upwards of six miles, and is shaped in two basins, each about one and a half miles across in the widest part. On the south side of the first basin is the indentation known as Polpis Harbor, an ap- pendage of the village of that name, as its title indicates. Across the entrance 386 The old CofBn House, Nantucket. Built in 1686 An Old Fire-place to the great harbor stretches a narrow, sandy shoal, or " bar/' averaging about a mile in distance from the harbor mouth, and exceedingly embarrassing and vexa- tious to navigation. The efforts and provisions of the National Government have of late years somewhat improved the condition of this harbor entrance, but nothing adequate to the situation has ever yet been done, or was even attempted within the years of the prosperity of the island. Scattered about the island are a number of fresh-water ponds, some of them upwards of two hundred, and even three hundred, acres in area, and well stocked, naturally, with fish. A century or more ago these ponds were more numerous than at present, and of considerably larger area, many having been- greatly reduced in size as the years have passed, while some then known have disappeared altogether. The larger of these ponds will become familiarly known to the sojourner in Nantucket who makes riding or pedestrian excursions outside the villages, and he will appreciate the contrast they offer to the broad patches of ocean waters that come into view continually from different standpoints as he passes about. Occasionally these ponds show specimens of the white pond-lily so universally esteemed in New England. The whaling business of the island languished greatly, in consequence of the complications arising out of the hostiUty of England and other European peoples towards American interests. In the War of 1812 the Nantucketers lost upwards of one-half of their ships, through these being captured by war cruisers. At the opening of the war there were forty-six whale-ships belonging to Nan- tucket at sea. But after the close of this war the island recovered rapidly from its losses and reverses, and at the end of the year 1820 Nantucket possessed a fleet of seventy-two whale-ships, besides a large number of smaller craft, including brigs, schooners and sloops. The business touched high-water mark in 1842, when the Nantucket whahng-fleet consisted of eighty-six ships, two brigs and two schooners, of an aggregate tonnage of 36,000. From this time the whaling interests declined again, and in 1869 the last whale-ship sailed from this port and the business departed ; and at the present time there is not the slightest probability that it can ever return. The discovery of gold in California, the scarcity of whales, the increased expense and danger of Arctic fishing, the dis- covery and use of petroleum, and the great decline in the value of whale pro- ducts, all combined to give the death-blow to the sole business of Nantucket. 388 Sea Cliff House, Nantucket "■^-ii.V«rl^ The Breakers making in Shore off Nantucket, after a Gale The "Harbor View," Nantucket View at Nantucket 390 Bank Building, Nantucket ^ '^ ■ ^ Vl On the Moors, Nantucket Interior of Museum, Nantucket Springfield House, Nantucket 392 From the town, Great Point — the " Nawma," Sandy Point, of the Indians — stretches away for nine miles northward, and its extremity forms the most northern, or northwestern, reach of the island. About this point cruise the bluefishers in their season, and upon it is a government lighthouse. The long- drawn sandy shores of Great Point are among the first land of the real island sighted on the trip across, and its offing, on the Cape Cod side, a white- winged fleet of coasters occupies almost continually. The lower part of the peninsula, of which Great Point is the extremity, is known as Coskata, and occu- pies a position abutting upon the inner basin of the harbor. A side penin- sula, extending from Coskata to the harbor's mouth, and lying over against the town and divided from it by the narrow outer harbor, is known as Coatue, a great resort for the young people visiting the island in summer. The 'Sconset of the past was neither more nor less than a collection of fishermen's huts, built of the simplest materials that would keep out wind and weather. I found the village pleasantly seated along the margin of the bluff that rises here well above the sea. Underneath the cliff is a terrace of sand, to which a flight of steps, eked out with a footpath, assists the descent. This ter- race pitches abruptly into the sea, with a regularity of slope like the glacis of a fortress. The sand here appears to be composed of particles of granite ; in other parts of the island, it is like the drift at Cape Cod. The village is an odd collection of one-story cottages, so alike that the first erected might have served as a pattern for all others. Iron cranes projected from the angles of the houses, on which to hang lanterns at nightfall in place of street lamps. Fences, neatly whitewashed or painted, enclosed each house- holder's possession, and in many instances blooming flower-beds caused an involuntary glance at the window for their guardians. On many houses were the names of wrecks that had the seeming of gravestones overlooking the sands that had entombed the ships that wore them. In one front yard was the carved figure of a woman that had been filliped by the foam of many a sea. Fresh from the loftier buildings and broader streets of the town, this seemed like one of those miniature villages that children delight in. The sand is coarse-grained and very soft. The waves that came in here projected themselves fully forty feet up the escarpment of the bank that I have spoken of. Bathing here is, on account of the undertow and quicksands, attempted with hazard, and ought not to be attempted except with the aid of ropes. 393 Broadway, Siasconset Oldest House in Siasconset 394 Vestal Street, Siasconset ,, SAHKATY LIGHTHOUSE. OLD GRIST MILL. BRANT POINT UGH THOij 395 Siasconset Old Fish Cart, Siasconset This was not only the ancient 'Sconset, the " Nantucketer's Seaside Re- sort," but it was also the "Patchwork Village " of the sea as it existed at the time Mr. Drake wrote his sketches, or a score or more of years ago. To the novice in Nantucket, the diminutive proportions of the ancient fishing settle- ment, the "miniature village that children delight in," are its chief attraction; and it is in this regard, perhaps, one of the greatest curiosities to be found any- where. Of late years, however, it has been invaded, by the " summer resident," and a goodly number of modern built cottages are there to be found, the village population having increased many fold under this " booming." One quality it still possesses without doubt — the finest of all in the estimate of many persons : upon an island in almost every part a perfect sanitarium, 'Sconset is the most healthful and recreative section — a distinction of no mean significance and importance. It might go without telling that for ocean bathing, boating and fishing, Nantucket is second to no place on earth. Both still-water and surf bathing may here be freely indulged in at the desire of the individual, and either will be found superlatively excellent in quality. For still-water bathing, perhaps no locahty on the island excels the "Clean Shore," a stretch of beach of whitest and cleanest sand, extending from Brandt Point westward to near the inter- section of the Breakwater with the island shore. The retreating tides leave the beach exposed to the sun's rays for some hours, and upon their return, the waters flowing over the heated sands are deliciously warmed, although their temperature hereabouts would be desirable even though no such natural pro- cesses aided in making them acceptable. The water in all this neighborhood is always calm and placid, the locality is absolutely free from dangers, and the beach is easy of access from any part of the town ; consequently, these bathing grounds are the favorite with every class of visitors, men, women and children alike, and especially the last two classes named. 397 1 Bluff and Hamlet at Siasconset \- If^TfU^i nnTniiiffr?Trf!'tr"r Ocean View House, Siasconset CHAPTER VIII. MARTHA'S VINEYARD. IN the spring season of the year 1602, Capt. Bartholomew Gosnold engaged in a cruise in Northern Atlantic waters, along the coasts of that section of country which afterwards became known as New England. In the course of this cruise — or of these explorations, for such they were — Gosnold made several landfalls upon different portions of the coast, affixing his mark upon many of these points in the way of names for their localities, which in many instances have remained distinctive of them ever since. It was in the course of these explorations that this navigator discovered the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. In reality, the first landing which Gosnold made hereabouts was upon a small island now known as No Man's Land, lying off the south coast of the larger island ; and it was to this islet that he first applied the name of Martha's Vineyard, although it was at that time but little better than a barren sand-heap, with few natural attractions of any kind, and certainly with none which would justify the somewhat pretentious name of " Vineyard." Pursuing his investigations, he soon landed upon the larger island, where he found an entirely different state of things, for here he discovered lakes, ponds and streams of purest fresh water, green bushes bearing delicious berries of various kinds, a plentiful tree growth from which descended fruitful vines, and birds and wild animals animating the section. Remaining in the .neighborhood at that time about three weeks, before leaving for other parts, he transferred the name Martha's Vineyard from No Man's Land to the larger island; and this name the latter has retained ever since. Upon the island of Martha's Vineyard there are five towns, — Chilmark, 399 Cottage City, Edgartown, Tisbury and Gay Head. Scattered here and there upon its surface are little hamlets, seldom rising to the dignity of villages even ; indeed Gay Head itself is scarcely more than one of these. The island is up- wards of twenty-five miles in length from north to south, and about ten miles wide in its broadest part. The " Vineyard," as this island is familiarly called, does not differ largely in conformation or physical features from its neighbor, Nantucket ; but it has more territory. The thousands who visit Martha's Vineyard every season are made up of representatives of every better class, condition and element in society. Of the permanent summer dwellers, so to speak, in Cottage City, there are the rich, the well-to-do, the persons or families of moderate means and the average toiler upon life's highways, illustrating the various and corresponding conditions of culture, social position, efc. These dwell together here in harmony and reason- ably good fellowship. The man of wealth seeks his pleasures and pursues his employments in his own way, unquestioned by his neighbors and unquestioning from his own standpoint, caring little, or not at all, in any critical way, how other mortals seek results, so long as the reign of order and fair decorum re- Baptist Church, Cottage City 400 > mains unbroken — as it continually does herea- bouts. And in the same way every sojourner upon these shores, dropping for- malities and rigid conven- tionalism at the threshold of his cottage or hotel, throws oft' his dignity and reserve with his best suit, and comes down in dress and habit and pastime to the level of Nature, or at least takes long steps in that direction, the old dame herself assisting in the metamorphosis by her irresistible attractions, here outspread on every hand. And so it happens that, all these people being given o\'er to waiting upon Na- ture, drinking at her founts, engaging in her pastimes, in\-estigating her mysteries and conjuring her pleas- ures, they meet together upon the shore and beach- es, becoming talkati\'e and communicative along the avenues and in public and private places, and disco\'er myriad good points in each other and, as of yore, a touch of nature makes the whole world kin. 401 street View, Cottage City Episcopal Church, Cottage City 402 The island of Martha's Vineyard offers nothing wonderful, or even largely entertaining, in its ancient or modern annals to reward the lover of great deeds or remarkable events as told in story. No startling traditions or legends of amazing adventure and marvellous happenings are repeated from the old to the young, or from mouth to mouth, among her populations. It is not even claimed that any part of her territory was once the rendezvous of famous pirates or des- perados, or that she has ever originated any remarkable sect or ism, or become the refuge or trial ground of any experimental society or organization, such as, upon the neighboring mainland, have rendered certain locahties notorious. Here is simply an island in the sea, a gem of earth in ocean setting, so to speak, without historic fame or association, and appearing, for the most part, very much as in the beginning, when it was planted fresh from the hands of the Creator. In 1 641, Thomas Mayhew, an English gentleman, bought Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and the neighboring islands of Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Earl of Sterling. This Mayhew had been one of the original settlers of Watertown, Mass., and subsequently, with some of his neighbors, decided to found a plantation at Great Harbor (on the Vineyard), as Edgartown was then called. This Thomas Mayhew had a son, the Rev. Thomas Mayhew, Jr. These gentlemen evidently intended organizing their new purchase under the manorial system of England, for we find in the oldest records that the island is styled the "Manor and Lordship of Martha's Vineyard." But the pious zeal of the younger Mayhew seems to have led him to make Christians and brethren, rather than retainers and vassals, of the primitive people which they found on their little domain. In due course of time success crowned the labors of the new-comers in their efforts to develop the resources of the Vineyard, and the Indian saw that they were his superior. But what an " island in the sea " this same Martha's Vineyard is, to be sure ; and how little need she has to depend upon historic associations, storied legends, or famous traditions for her ennobling ! The waters that surround her are of the very fairest portions of the Atlantic, as found within the zone fitly called "temperate" by the educators, and include about her shores every for- mation of sound, strait, bay and harbor. The breezes that blow over her gently rolling landscapes have the purity of absolute uncontamination, and are filled with health-giving and recreative qualities. 403 Methodist Church, Cottage City Metropolitan Hotel, Cottage City Sunset Lake, Cottage City " When summer's seething breezes blowJ - Holme Methodist Tabernacle, Cottage City Pawnee House, Cottage City Baptist Tabernacle, Vineyard Highlands CHAPTER IX. EDGARTOWN. EDGARTOWN, the shire town of the county, is about five and a half miles south on the coast from Cottage City. It is most delightfully situated on sheltered harbor waters that open upon a picturesque bay, and is a quiet, dreamy old town, — a relic of the days when the whale fisheries were active and at the height of their importance at Nantucket, New Bedford, Mattapoisett and hereabouts, and the whole coast was animate with the industries, and flour- ishing with the prosperity that these pursuits engendered. Edgartown formerly included the whole section of the island upon which Cottage City and itself are now found, and its jurisdiction extended over the entire northeastern shore of the Vineyard. Edgartown has the only harbor upon the eastern coast of the island. Cottage City having none whatever, the latter lying, so to speak, directly upon the ocean front and looking the Atlantic squarely in the face. The natu- ral protection for the harbor of Edgartown is Chappaquiddick Island, which extends four or five miles north and south off the shores from the mouth of the harbor and along the eastern line of Katama Bay. Katama is a short three miles south from Edgartown. A peculiarity of the place is that the Gulf Stream runs nearer to its shore than to any other along the Atlantic coast. Katarna Bay is the southern outlet of the waters of Edgar- town Harbor, extending for a few miles in the direction indicated, and between the Vineyard and Chappaquiddick shores, to a junction with the ocean. On the charts the place is called Cotamy Bay, and the headland which holds the Katama establishment is set down as Cotamy Point. From this point, away up to the outlet of Edgartown Harbor, the bay is of singularly uniform width. The scenery is thoroughly marine in all its features, and is interesting chiefly from 407 this fact. For bathing, no beaches in New England can equal these Katama shores, the waters being perfectly still, safe, and of high temperature. For boating and bathing purposes the element of perfect safety is here secured for women and children. In these neighborhoods, too, are found some of the most noted fishing-grounds of the Vineyard waters. About one and one half miles in a direct line, still south, from Edgartown, and about four or five miles from the same place by following the winding shores, is South Beach. South Beach is to Martha's Vineyard what Surfside is to Nantucket ; that is, it is the locality where the rolling surf may be seen under conditions of grandeur and impressiveness seldom attending upon such natural exhibitions. Even at ordinary times, when the waves only ripple upon the shores between Cottage City and Edgartown, and when the waters of Katama Bay are smooth as a mill-pond, the surf shows an angry, threatening front at South Beach, and its baritone may be heard far within the sandy natural for- tresses that frown upon its encroachments. But when the south winds are blow- ing fresh, and especially when a " southeaster " musters its forces and attacks all along the line, " sublime " and " magnificent " are terms all too tame to be used in description of the ensuing scenes. On the north or northwestern shore of the island is found ancient Tisbury, reaching far inland from the coasf bordering on the Holmes' Hole waters, until it spreads its largest and fairest village of Vineyard Haven along the shores of East Chop Light the natural harbor of refuge at the extreme north of the island, which gives this village its name. Vineyard Haven and Lagoon Pond separate the territories of Tisbury and Cottage City in the midst of the island, while Edgartown and Chil- niark form the southern and western Tisbury boundaries. The drives in every part of this section of the island are numerous and grand. Main Street, showing M. E. Church, Edgartown LOCATION AND DESCRIPTION OF MARTHA'S VINEYARD. Martha's Vineyard is the largest island on the New England coast. It is in the form of an irregular triangle, about twenty-three miles long and ten and one-quarter miles wide at its widest part. It is bounded on the north by Vineyard Sound, east, south and west by the Atlantic Ocean, and is situated two and eight-tenths miles from the main land at its nearest point. The surface of this beautiful island is gently undulating and gradually rising to an elevation of three hundred feet above the level of the sea at the highest part, which is a little north of the central part of the island, and is known by the name of Indian Hill. It is largely covered with woo'•#*!'» m^^ Mi Shell Road looking north from Vineyard Haven to West Chop dent occurred shortly after Pring's adventures here which caused it to attain still greater fame, and enjoyed for a short season the reputation of a veritable Eldorado. Epanaw, a Vineyard Indian, had been captured by a certain Captain Hunt, viho took him to England, and displayed him in London for a while as a curiosity from Kapawack in America. He afterwards fell into the hands of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and seems to have discovered the predominating trait of the white man, and how to excite it, for he told Gorges that on the island of Kapawack, his native home, there existed a mine of gold — the white man's god — and if he would take him back he would show it to the Englishman. Epanaw's cunning statement had its desired effect upon Gorges, for he, in company with some of his friends, sent a ship to Kapawack, in command of a certain Captain Hobson, having Epanaw on board. In due time they arrived, but when the ship came to an anchor at her place of destination (Vineyard Haven), the crafty savage quietly slipped overboard and swam ashore, as he had all along intended, and was soon at his old home. He ever after laughed among his kindred at the Englishman's credulity. Still Gorges and his asso- ciates, like many wiser men since, kept up the search for the Eldorado, for, under their patronage, a few years later, Capt. John Dermer made two expe- 418 Vineyard Haven, showing Water Front ditions from the Island of Monhegan, on the coast of Maine, to Kapanack (the Vineyard) in search of the gold ; and even the famous Capt. John Smith con- templated entering the occupation of gold-digging here, but for some reason gave up the enterprise, and wrote rather disparagingly of "those who did prosecute it to an unsuccessful end." Main Street, looking toward Post Office, Vineyard Haven ^ ^ si o CO a B o CiJ Vineyard Haven ^^ JP" 1 t -. w^^^s^^ ■^HWi 1 1 ^y ^^A. ■ "■^-w*.^jit^ -jagjggli fe iH Mm "'^^ ^sflfli ^^^^^^H ■ ^ % W^ -^te^ ■^;^3^H pBH|H^BBH|^HH^^H|HBi^H|k^ '' r ' '''-'' \ 'V M , ^^^ ^'W^ y^^m..., .,,... ,.,!^^^ 1 fr Tashmoo Lake, Vineyard Haven Photographed by W. H. Ashton 422 ^^^3«*i The Corsair, Steam Yacht of Com. C. M. Morgan of New York, at Anchor in Vineyard Haven A few years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in the early morning of our country's history, when occasional sails began to fleck the east- ern horizon along the Atlantic coast, like the first rays of light that foretell the coming day, and prophetic of the human tide that has since poured into this favored land with ever-increasing force from every land, a wave-weary craft, bearing a little band of tried men and women fleeing from oppression and death, find a port of refuge at last. Now their long, determined contest with wind and wave is over, and they cast anchor in the liltle haven on the northern , shore of Martha's Vineyard (now known as Edgartown), secure at last from persecution and the dangers incident to a voyage of many weeks' duration. As winter was near at hand they decided to linger in this beautiful haven and await the return of spring before proceeding on their way. Finding, however, a genial climate, with fish and game in abundance, they abandoned their original intention of joining the Virginia Colony, and decided to establish a permanent settlement, which they did, on the present site of Edgartown. Of this little band of tried and hardy adventurers there still remain many worthy representatives, occupying,, as their fathers before them, high places in the confidence of the people, ready to labor and fight wherever the honor and welfare of their island and country required a strong arm and cool head. According to' reliable authority, these pioneers of the Vineyard came from Wiltshire county, England. There will be found Tisbury and Chilmark, the original of our own towns by that name, and the family names, there as here, of Luce, Vincent, Norton, West, Pease, Smith, Daggett or Doggett, Look, Holmes and others. {By permission from Geo. IV. Eldridge's History of the Island.) 423 Lake Tashmoo at Vineyard Haven ■-PMoroamPn Bi wh.ashton, 'J!* l//A/£VAOJ^' HAVFf^. MASS Williams Street, looking North, showing Stephen Lucas' House on the right, Vineyard Haven Williams Street, Vineyard Haven 425 Cottages at West Chop Sound from West Chop " The Cedars," West Chop. Conducted by Miss Clifford Cottages at West Chop Church Street, Vineyard Haven, showing M. E. Church on the left Crocker Avenue, Vineyard Haven 427 West Chop Lighthouse Pumping Station, Lake Tashmoo, Vineyard Haven Spring Street, showing baptist Church, Vineyard Haven Main Street, looking North, Vineyard Haven 429 Tashmoo Inn, West Chop Conducied by Mrs. Hapgood Josiah Cleveland with 50,000 Herring He is known all uver the Island as ihe hardest working man in the conntry. He owns a small vessel and freights clay, brick, sand, etc, from the Island to Provi- dence, New Bedford, Boston, etc., making eel pots during his spare moments and curing herring in the spring. The Quisetta, Amonita and the Colonia rounding West Chop on their return to Newport, August 11, 1893 MARTHA'S VINEYARD. Sweet isle, so blessed by wind and tide, Thy name I love, thou are my pride : And can it be that o'er the sea A fairer land than this can ,be, Where birds sing sweeter, Or skies are brighter? Nor wind nor wave hath answered me. I know this' wondrous, isle, do you? The fairest, sweetest, oft I've said ; There blossom roses, white, amber, red. There health-giving slumbers bring happiest dreams To idlers, who sleep by her murmuring streams. And the God-given hours, Are like sweet, nameless flowers. Thus, flooded with fragrance and exquisite hue. In this wonderful isle in an ocean of blue. I have dreamed of this wondrous island, have you? Of its trout-haunted brooks, of sun-gleams that pass, Then wander to seaward, athwart the sweet grass. And of drowsy waves droning on yonder fair beach, Which ever and always are just beyond reach. Of rainbowed Gay Head Rising out of God's bed. Of its tide-kissed shells, so old, yet new, What dreams of this isle in an ocean of blue ! On the shores of this isle, I know it is true. From the mad working world scarce a keel ever grates, And life's busy cares seldom knock at its gates. There the soft, southern wind in the casement atune Murmurs unwritten music in the long afternoon, — There want is unknown And life's flower full-blown. Why not come to this isle and prove that 'tis true, A lost paradise found in an ocean of blue? Vineyard Haven, Mass., July 26, 1897. G. W. Eldridge. 431 > o e 432 Life Saving Station, Gay Head Gay Head Cliffs 433 ON RETURN FROM FALMOUTH, EAST SIDE BUZZARDS BAY. Gay Head Light Gen. Joseph Dimmock and his brother Lot stand out among the " men of oak " in war-days, as full of military push and daring, tempered with sound judgment. Of Lot it is only necessary to say that he was loyal to his brother and his country, and that the inscription on his tombstone is : " He merited the noblest of mottoes — an honest man." But Gen. Joseph Dimmock had been a lieutenant of militia with General Abercrombie at Ticonderoga. In the Revolution he was among the first to take up arms, and his townspeople trusted and honored him with offices until his death. A large man with finely-chiselled features and a dignified bearing, very fond of little children, who were also very fond of him ; religious and attending regularly the church services, — simple, helpful, just a great soldier and patriot. His restless and relentless pursuit of British warships and their prizes, gives to the history of our naval warfare several of its most brilliant and romantic pages ; while the memory of this great Fal- mouth man, among his own people, is likely to last as long as its manj' waters and the beautiful headlands which enclose them. Falmouth is a Cape town, but it has always had its own high-bred people, and is likely to retain the same to the last. The ''men of oak" hold a strong hand in peace as well as in war ; and the enterprise of men like the Swifts and Nyes and Lewises has left a certain stamp of greatness upon the ancient township. It ought to be a sufficient honor for the Fal- mouth Robinsons that they are lineal descendants of the famous John of Leyden. 434 From Falmouth town to Manomet River the county road winds alona; over and along a hill ridge, the forest on our right and the bay some miles away on our left, as we travel generally north. On this road are strung along, as on a cruimpled thread, the villages of West and North Falmouth, Cataumet, Pocas- sett and Monument Beach, with many side roads to the shore. In parts, there are a few old houses on this main road, and some of these old houses are thor- oughly disguised by improvements, in a reformation which some will think a deformation. The curve of the coast, from ^Vest Falmouth south to end in the west bluffs of \\'oods Hole — in shape a sickle with its concave bending in shore — is almost a tacsimile of that Irish coast where, the wind blowing twenty-one days from the southwest, the Spanish "Armada," sailing for Spain, tried in vain for that time to weather the headlands, and went ashore on the lee beam in utter wreck. It is a good place, with " Froude's History" in hand, to study the marine difficulties and disasters of those ancient sailors, which left Englishmen free, and helped shape our own fortunes in our late war with Spain. Summer Residence of Mrs. Scull, West Falmouth 435 Old Landmark at West Falmouth Owned by Silas Swift Residence of Timothy Bourne, West Falmouth 436 .jji^4^ CHAPOQUOIT ISLAND, WEST FALMOUTH. 10^^ Summer Residence of Samuel G. King, Chapoquoit rmtaMU Summer Residence of R. J. Edwards, Chapoquoit * Summer Residence of W. B. P. Wicks, Chapoquoit Summer Residence of Mr. Farnsworth, Chapoquoit I NORTH FALMOUTH. In 1689 the land at North Falmouth was granted to John and Ebenezer Nye, and ever since the Nyes have generally been among "the men of oak " in this township, and, as to that matter, on the Cape. In 1719 (the item is noted to help the reader in estimating the real value of salaries) , a pound in currency was worth about forty-four cents in honest money. Our colonial forefathers had a hard time, and got very badly burned, at a rather early date, trying to make paper money as good as any, without the precious metals to back it. In 1802 the town voted $400 for schools, $900 for town expenses, and |8o for roads. Residences of Downer Brothers, Wild Harbor 439 MEGANSETT, NORTH FALMOUTH. f^. '■' Summer Residence of W. P. Higgin, North .Falmouth *••-« ' At Megansett Beach View at Cataumet from Land of Mr. Stillson ¥* >^ M. E. Church and Parsonage, Cataumet 1 Summer Residence of Alden Teele, Megansett Summer Residence of B. F. Shattuck, Megansett CATAUMET. All along this shore, men from abroad have brought to these old lands their new wit and wealth, as the pictures we show will prove. The forest on our right, extending east through Barnstable, and once the abode of deer and wolves, and now every summer resonant with the laugh and chatter of the sum- mer merrymakers, as seen from our hill range, is at Cataumet meeting-house almost as wide as the bay. The meeting-house itself was carted from Scussett about 1830, and its underpinning was cut out of the forests by the pious, and is very old. Half a mile north, in a broad hollow, still stands the manse or parsonage of one of the missionaries, Tupper, who ministered to the Indians and white folk here at a very early date. For the Indians are much in evidence here, in these extensive shell heaps, as at Penguin Cove, further on, as this was a region always rich in food supply from the sea. And so we reach, on our road, mingled forest and cleared land through the Pocassetts to Monument Beach, and its many new houses on our left, which will speak for themselves. From here to Bourne village, a couple of miles or so, the scenery and situation are about the same. Looking from Veranda of T. A. Baxendale's residence showing the'^Bay 444 B < S3 H s e M View at Cataumet Beach Summer Residence of Robert Winsor, Cataumet o 44s Summer Residence of Mr. Alfred Winsor, Cataumet iiifiiii{|^ Residence of D. C. StiUson, Cataumet a) & 3 w POCASSET. Shore View at Pocasset Beach, Barlow Landing Wing's Neck Light, Buzzards Bay 453 Summer Residence of Prof. Edw. S. Wood, Pocasset Dining Room of Prof. Edw. S. Wood's Summer House, Pocasset 454 MONUMENT BEACH. "" """yi a w-'iSw ^iteiBas^Bia View from Tobey Island, showing Monument Beach in distance ONE may ask why it is that so many retired doctors, by the hundreds, come here for the summer, and a good many stay the year around, and min- isters and lawyers and statesmen and congressmen, and the ex-secretary of the United States, Richard Olney ; and his honor, the ex-President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, not only comes for a few weeks, but comes again and again, for five successive years, with the accomplished and beautiful Mrs. Cleveland, and stops in this quaint place four months each year. The reason why is because it is acknowledged to be one of the most healthful and the most beautiful places, either on land or water on God's earth ; the boating is in every way unsurpassed, and for bathing, the water is warm and delightful, and with the great abundance of good fishing, is it any wonder that it is so much View of the Inner Bay, showing Tobey Island Club House in distance 455 ^Kr. Spring House at Monument Beach "O, )iiy soul is full of Ionising for the sccrd of the sea, And the heart of the great oeeaii sends a thriU'nig pulse through uicJ' P,' Beach View, showing old Wreck and Tobey Island, at Monument Beach 456 Oak Grove, near Tobey Island Club House sought after, and that so many noted public and retired men come here for rest and enjoyment? The drives are beautiful, and this, with its native quaint- ness and with all kinds of vegetables raised on the nearby farms, and plenty of fish right from its waters, I think is enough to tell the story why these peo]jle enjoy this beautiful and rustic location ; and another thing, the tax rates are lower in Falmouth and Bourne than in any other two towns in Massachusetts. Those who come once always come again. Looking across Little Bay from Tobey Island, showing Summer residence of George A. Gardner 457 The Tobey Island Club House on Buzzards Bay Oak Grove, showing Tobey Island Club House on the right 458 3 S View at Monument Beach, showing Tobey Island in distance Street View, Monument Beach, showing residence of Benjamin 0. Caldwell 460 \.;A]} View at Monument Beach, looking South from Mr. Gurney's Cottage Beach View at Monument Beach, showing the Old Split Rock 461 '•sfH^Bl View at Monument Beach, showing Summer Cottages of Messrs. Flagg and Jones Looking North from Norcross House, Monument Beach 462 s B 3 -ki' '^^a. iis fe« y «»-j " J^^l^^ -'A'J^ ^^J KnR^' ^£^^-"'' ^^^^Bs«^^ ' ' ^91 ^H ^T^y!^5iiH?SBBiW B^^ ^^^A^a£^ ^ ^^^^^fi^^SI ■ki^ *y v.jyxj^ :^3^^^^^^^^H^I ^^BHhh Summer Residence of Fred Packard, Monument Beach Summer Residence of the Hon. Wm. L. Douglas, Monument Beach 464 Many a man has broken the neck of his logic over a simile or a metaphor, in his search after truth, and ended in a pitfall, whither these same forms of English speech have misled their victims. But this Scribe confesses that the locust-tree is, in many things, like the cavaHers of King Charles II's time, and their leaves remind him of the lace and furbelows, their dances and their graces, not to make prominent the defects of either, which divide them from the Puri- tans. We may say the Puritan is like the oak, though the cavalier never was ; and why the Puritan on this Cape surrounded his home with the locust-tree, so unlike, is a knotty question. It is at least a tribute to his inner, undying sense of beauty, which some define as " the smile of the good God," to confess that he brought and planted here around his home, for some reason, one of the most graceful shade-trees known to this continent. But we may halt at the head of Back River to notice the salt marsh to our left. It was so called, probably, by the Pilgrims at a very early date, because it is back from Plymouth, and especially from the Pilgrim trading-post on Manomet River, hardly a mile north, and parallel. This marsh was once a cedar swamp, with oaks and maples in it of large size, and a stream flowing through it. Their stumps are still found in large numbers under its mud and in the ooze of the creeks. Loads, of them have, been taken out, and many are in their old places. When Bradford's storm, in 1635, fell down upon this bay, it broke and shattered the headlands and ridges hereabouts, letting in the sea, kilUng the trees, and creating a marsh over which it has ever since exercised its sovereignty. What happened here must have happened all along the bay. In our travels we have passed many old orchards, which we must confess are not in a flourishing condition. In fact, they have nearly all died out, thanks to the sea air, neglect, and their rough handling by the gales. Nor were they ever of very fine stock, even Governor Prince's famous pear-tree at Eastham bearing " button pears," which some now alive remember as very small, and of a very juiceless flavor, though the forefathers through the Northern States paid early attention to their planting. Governor Endicott of Salem, especially, with his large nursery. The "Summer Sweeting," a tall, spare tree, of which we present the reader with a specimen picture, lasts the longest, but is said not to thrive here now, and is seldom planted any more. The flora of the Cape, as well as its geology, will be treated later on by the savants who have made long investigations into their unique phenomena. It may be said now, however, with certainty, that the sea-currents, especially from the South and West, are yearly bringing the seeds of flowers growing on the continent to the shores of this bay, and so on to and down the Cape gradually. This may be verified on many headlands here, where " wild honey- suckle " and other plants unknown to the natives are found growing just above the reach of the tides. 473 Summer Home of C. F. Chamberlayne, showing three old Hightop Apple-trees, Monument Beach Looking down the Creek from roadway near Rev. N. H. Chamberlain's, Bourne 474 Lilac bushes and Locust trees near Rev. N. A. Chamberlain's View at mouth of Eel Pond, from new Bridge, Monument Neck MONUMENT NECK, BOURNE, MASS. Water View in front of Summer Residence of Arthur Hunnewell, Monument Neck Summer Residence of Alpheus Hardy, Monument Neck 476 m f^ a M 477 View of Monument River from new Bridge, showing the first point of the old Fort ^' ■«- ^ , n'«&».K5KA54iff'r': ; '-r. Summer Residence of John Parkerson, from the boat wharf, Monument Neck ^A"?' 479 ^-'^1 IfcF v>- a- a o 480 m w 3 E 481 BOURNE VILLAGE. CAPE COD MEMORIES. WRITTEN FOR E. G. P. BY E. J. ELLIS. YOU ask for the scenes of my childhood reviewing, Then list while I give them to 5'ou in a song : The scenes of my memory like childhood come trooping And painted in lustres to youth that belong. The old-fashioned brown house my father first lived in — My childhood and youth there in pleasure were spent, The shallow spring well whose sweep kept reviewing. The roots and the corn that the garden then lent. The old lumbering stage-coach from Woods Hole to Boston, That passed by the door as it went and it came, — The driver 's departed, the stage is forgotten, ~ The pleasures it rendered are now known but in name. The fields of the farmer, so rich in my memory. In summer were covered with rye and with maize. And rich was the bloom of the sweet opening clover. With fruits^in abundance in autumn's bright days. Summer Residence of Mr. Geo. B. Appleton, Old Homestead of E. J. Ellis, Bourne 482 "The wide-spreading pond and the mill that stood by it," There farmers had ground their corn and their rye, The little old farmer that always would run it, — His barn and his cot just a stone's throw were nigh. The house, ^ it is standing ; all else is forgotten. The ancient old farmers are with us no more ; The wide-spreading millpond its bed has forsaken And fled in disgust to the Back River shore. The roads — they are changed in their ancient endeavor. The well-sweep is gone, and the orchard 's no more, And the clover, the roots, and the hay, and the corn Are past recollection, — ^ the clams fled the shore. The old-fashioned school — it is lost and forgotten, Where once the youth went thirteen weeks in a year : If memory were green and not dead and half rotten — At sixteen they passed the collegiate door. But the Puritan 's gone ; then leave his cold ashes : Their laws for their times, they were healthful and good. But could we enforce them, e'en now it were better Than double bolt locks on our granary door. The wealth of the nation our sand-dunes is owning. And domiciled wealth has enveloped our bay ; We have thrown off the yoke of poverty's morning And leave it to Spaniards just over the way. A few of the faint hearts are round us repining. The slow, plodding ways of our fathers are gone, But the nerve of Cape Cod for these cannot linger, — The logs have departed, we're building with stone. The wealth of the live brain is dotting our shore With palaces, grander than Greece ever knew ; But the pleasures of ease we are asking no more. No more for the old ways, we're following the new. Yet the strength, and the nerve, and the brain of Cape Cod, As a bird, spread their wings over every strand ; Though sterile our soil, we have nerve for commanding — We are holding the gavel in many a land. The whole of Cape Cod from the Woods Hole to Plymouth, And sweeping far down to the Provincetown shore — You will find it the same wherever you travel, You'll find 't is the Right Arm of I^iberty's power. Bourne, 1899. The Old Stage Coach In the year 1884 the territory of the town of Sandwich was divided by act of the legislature, and a new town created which was called Bourne. Bourne includes within its territory very much of the woods, streams, and fresh-water collections that formerly made the Sandwich territory famous ; and, besides, it has within its limits some of the finest and most picturesque portions of the Buzzards Bay shores. The Monument River, which empties into Buz- zards Bay, and along whose course the great ship canal will run, if it is ever fin- ished, lies largely within its territory. The shore line of Bourne, from the railroad bridge at the head of Buzzards Bay, throughout its entire course to the point of the southern boundary at Cataumet, has become of late years an extended succession of summer resorts. Scattered along upon this shore are some of the most noted summer estates in the country, among which are "Crow's Nest " (on Buttermilk Bay), the summer home of Joseph Jefferson (its buildings were destroyed by fire early in 1893, but have since been replaced by others) ; " Gray (tables " (Monument l^oint), 484 that of ex- President Cleveland ; the estates of Moses Williams of Boston (Aga- wam Point), William W. Appleton of New York, Alpheus H. Hardy, John Parkinson and Arthur Hunnewell of Boston. The outlook from these estates, and the approach to them either by land or water, are of the very finest. " Gray Gables" is about a mile distant, southward, from the railroad bridge, and may be seen from the car-windows as trains pass over that structure. Used by permission, from Oil Painting by Charles S. Raleigh, Marine Painter, Bourne 4S5 UkMiiiM miiimiii^ W Grammar School, Bourne M. E. Church, Bourne New Library at Bourne Looking South at Bourne Corners 487 Residence of M. C. Waterhouse, Bourne Residence of A. F. Swift, Bourne Near the Bourne depot and Manomet River are some of the oldest fields hereabouts, of the Pilgrim trading-post times, probably rich in traditions ; and some remember the ancient pear-trees which once stood there. A short dis- tance across the river stands the Bourne House, with the date 1662 on it, somewhat rejuvenated; and one incident connected with this family may illus- trate fortune or fate, if there be any such thing in marriages and the simple manners of the times. It was when every prominent family owned slaves, and its women spent more time at the loom than some do now at the piano. But nobody in the family knew the art of weaving cloth. Therefore they sent to West Barnstable for a daughter of a deacon of that parish, and she came up to instruct them, and finally gave her hand to a citizen of the place ; and from that union came some of the best blood to this day found in the village. From here to the " head of- the bay," and almost directly north, the landscape is rather mixed, and the population too, although " the head " is the favorite resort of city clubs, and its families in olden times, as now, were among the most respectable in old Sandwich. We show here two houses of the oldest type on Cape Cod. One of Bourne's old residential places. Estate of the Late Capt. Elisha Perry Residence of the Late Capt. Henry Bourne, Bourne. House erected 1662 HEAD OF BAY. street View at Head of Bay, Bourne, near residence of Col. Horton *l 4*' n n w w _3 o Here ends our itinerary of Cape Cod, about a mile from where we started. We trust that the ]iromises have been kept which were made in the beginning. Some day some sa\-ant, calHng to his aid the new discoveries in botany, zoology and geology which have then been made, will complete the picture in tones he may think wisest and best. AVe venture to suggest to him that he note the strange wild flowers from other latitudes growing here, and their story; the pitch and tone of our different forest trees in the wind; the sound of the wind blowing round the corners and eaves of our houses, and whether an old house gives out different music from a new one ; the pitch and tone of the sea in storm and calm ; and, above all, record the music and cry of our Cape birds in strophes and bursts of melody in shore and forest. But whether he do that or not, it is safe to say that no man or woman can honestly try to tell the story of this Cape without producing a book of strange history. Spartan man- hood, sweet womanhood, pathos and poetry, not unworthy of being read by those who would improve themselves in all generations. "-Escape of the Frigate Constitution. From an Oil Painting by Chas. S. Raleigh, Marine Painter 493 Summer Residence of Rev. W. V. Morrison, Buzzards Bay JtiA. ^bH Old Gibbs House at Head of Bay, Bourne.] ^ Owned by Col. Horton VILLAGES IN EACH TOWN ON THE CAPE. Botti-ne. Cataumet Pocasset Wenaumet Monument Beach Monument Neck Buzzards Bay Bourne Head of the Bay Bournedale Sagamore Falmouth. North Falmouth West Falmouth Quissett Sippiwisset Woods Hole Falmouth Heights Teaticket East Falmouth Menauhant Waquoit Hatchville Ashumet Brewstef Villagfe. East Brewster West Brewster Factory Village "Wellfleet. South-Wellfleet Brook Village Yarmouth. South Yarmouth West Yarmouth East Yarmouth Yarmouth Port Truro Village. Pond Village North Truro South Truro Dennis. East Dennis West Dennis South Dennis Dennis Port Chatham Village. North Chatham West Chatham South Chatham Chatham Port Harwich Centre. Harwich Port West Harwich South Harwich East Harwich Pleasant Lake Eastham. North Eastham Sandwich. East Sandwich Spring Hill Scorton Wakeby Farmersville Forestdale Barnstable. West Barnstable East Barnstable Cotuit Santuit Osterville Centre ville Marston's Mills Newtown Hyannis Hyannis Port Craigville Cotuit Highlands Pondville Orleans Village. South Orleans Rock Harbor Naniskakett Provincctown. Mashpee. South Mashpee INHABITANTS OF CAPE TOWNS. Census 1895. Barnstable, 403s Mashpee, 330 Bourne, 1580 Orleans, 1198 Brewster, . 901 Provincetown, 4S5S Chatham, . 1809 Sandwich, . 1580 Dennis, 2545 Truro, . . 815 Eastham, . 476 Wellfleet, . 968 Falmouth, . 2655 2532 Yarmouth, . 1655 Harwich, 27.654 THE SOUTH SHORE. ALTHOUGH the North Shore is one of nature's own dehghtful summer resorts, still, for beautiful sandy beaches, excellent bathing, boating and fishing, the South Shore by far excels the North Shore. Rightfully the South Shore begins at the branch of N. Y. N. H. & H. R. R. at Braintree, one of the oldest townships in or about Boston. The town was incorporated in 1640, and was named from Braintree, England, like many other places which bear ancient names of the mother country. For years this town was connected with Quincy, Randolph and Holbrook, but in the year 1708 it was set off as a separ- ate township. Many noted persons were born and raised in this old town of Braintree. John Adams, second President of the United States spent his boy- hood's days here, and John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States was born here, also many other noted and distinguished men. Braintree is particularly noted for its extensive estates, its modern built residences, its beautiful drives, and its delightful views from the higher elevations. From Braintree we can see the Blue Hills and Cochato Rivers, which unite to form the Monatiquot River, and this empties into the Weymouth Fore River. Also there are two fine fresh-water ponds, originally called Gooch and Cranberry, where fish abound in goodly number. The next town below is Weymouth. This town was incorporated in 1635, five years before BrainJ;ree, and many stories could the old inhabitants tell of encounters with the Indian chieftains and warriors. Many fierce battles were fought by our forefathers and earlier settlers, and it was at Weymouth that Myles Standish led his band of brave followers forth to battle. Sometimes he was met by several tribes, and history gives it that two noted chieftains, Mattawamat and Pecksuot, with many of their brave warriors, were here slain by Myles Standish and his followers ; but in 1676 the town was again attacked by the Indians, and many .buildings burned. The Indian name of the place was Wessagusett, but the town was supposed to be named from Weymouth, England. The first settlers here were not our Pilgrim Fathers, for they were not a rehgious or a peace-abiding people ; they were in- clined to be lawless and far from doing right. The original colonists remained only a short time, and soon a better class took their places, and the latter really were the founders of the town. 496 HINGHAM. THERE is no town on the South Shore where there are so many imposing dwellings as Weymouth, and this town can boast of having exceedingly picturesque water views. From the higher elevations it is perfectly enchanting. Being so close to Boston, Hull, Nantasket, and many other inviting summer resorts, it is no wonder this fine town is always overrun with summer tourists. The water is exceedingly fine for bathing, boating and fishing. Next town is Hingham, where we find the coast is not so evenly laid out, there being many ragged boulders all along the shore front, which the summer tourists like to see ; also many inlets and small bays, making its shores wonderfully attractive for their native naturalness, and near by we can see the Weir River, with a very ragged coast. On the highlands there are some of the most commanding views of the adjoining towns. Prospect Hill is about 250 feet above sea level, and several other hills are nearly as high. There are some fine farms in Hingham, which send their produce to our Boston market. Hingham has some fine fresh-water ponds like her adjoining towns, already visited. They have a fine public Main Street, Hingham, from Railroad Crossing Photographed by F. L. Temple 497 library, and it is in tliis village that the Derby Academy was endowed by Sarah Derby in 1797. And it is here that they have the oldest church in all New England, first used in 16S2, and they have one of the finest cemeteries in Mas- sachusetts. We see on the headstones names of many noted men there laid to rest; and it is here, in Hingham, that our Secretary of the Navy, John D. Long, has his beautiful home. Many beautiful old elm trees adorn the streets in this grand old place. The town was settled in 1633 by people of the old country, who formerly came from Hingham, England, and was incorporated in 1635. The Indians had many a bloody battle here under Philip, and here many noted men were born. The high elevation of land, with just breeze enough from the water, makes Hingham a delightful summer place. Its streets are always well kept, and many enchanting drives here abound. It is only a few miles from here to Nantasket Beach, and many fine farms are scattered about. The drive from Hmgham is very delightful, as there is just roughness enough in the natu- ral make-up of the country to make it wonderfully attractive. Many fishermen's cottages can be seen. The roads are made to look as rustic as possible, as the old lanes and country roads have been travelled for centuries both by our old- fashioned country friends and, originally, by the Indians. Little did the country people dream it would some day be such a fine watering place as it is now. Residence of the Hon. John D. Long, Secretary of the Kavy, Hingham 49S NANTASKET. NANTASKET is of very narrow width, from forty to sixty feet from bay to ocean, and many are the associations connected with Nantasket as a sum- mer resort. It surpasses aU others in New England for its enchanting water views. The most renowned Minot's Ledge Lighthouse can be seen from this point, and many a mariner has thanked his Creator for the grand flash of Minot's Eight when tossed about in storm and tempest. The hills, that used to be unadorned, now boast of some of New England's finest summer houses. Not only do our richest people find enchantment here, but many in the humbler walks of life come down here to pass their vacation, camping out in tents here pitched bv happy families for their summer outing. Countless are the fine turnouts always on the move at this fascinating seashore watering place. Pleas- ant, indeed, is the sight of the bathers waiting for a big wave to roll in so they can dive under its dashing billows ; and thousands are the ships of all grades and classes, from the pleasure steam-yacht to the transatlantic steamers plowing along to far-off lands, that can be seen here. A very short distance from Nan- tasket is the noted '' Harding's Ledge," where there is a large bell-buoy. In bad weather the mariner is ever on the alert for this warning bell. Farther out is the whistling buoy on the so-called " Graves." View at Nantasket Beach. Photographed by E. A. Bartlett, Nantcs'iet [On Jerusalem Road Unitarian Church, Hingham. Oldest Church in New England, Built in 1682 -ouao3 psjiuo sttiBu UEipuj we XheuiSuo sr.u isssBqo^ 'SAup oiistu [njijni33q siL[} Xofua i[B j[qs • s>{[oj XiiutioD uiBid jtio jo sjiioiuaj snoijus^sjcl sss| [)iit; snosSioS SS3J XuBiu puu 'qou sqi jo sjnoiutu suy Xurai a.iaq sas 3a\ uajjo ,,<;puB[§ua A\3^ p3AO[3q jno siq} sy ,, 'ttia'pxa o} }dc si suo '[iijiinBaq os si aSiiqq; aqj pui: 'souajyiuSEni Xp^uis i[3ns ihia\ }no piiq 3.ib ssjeiss sqj j ^assBnoo 'looqas s,pooSso 35i;qq; y—y 'XHSSVHOD New Driveway, Cohasset hassett, and much interest is always shown in looking at the rugged rocks and projecting cliffs seen all along through this section of our journey. The scenes in Cohasset are wonderfully fine, and the fashionable summer rusticators are always found here in great numbers. Its situation is so near Boston, it makes a summer resort very convenient for business men. Beautiful as the estates are, the country is rough and rocky. Oftentimes the cliffs rise i8o to 200 feet above sea-level. ^ ' "'-"'„: Jl^*;>-^f^^.- View of Cohasset from Kent's Rocks, looking west 502 NORTH SCITUATE. Life Saving Station at North Scituate View of Coliasset from Kent's Rocks, looking southwest 503 SCITUATE. Looking East from Cedar Point, Scituate The^Old Scituate Light 504 GREENBUSH, SCITUATE. In a part of Scituate called " Greeiibush ' Old Oaken Bucket" homestead. we find the much renowned THE OI.D OAKEN BUCKET. How dear to this heart are the scenes of mj- childhood, When fond recollection presents them to view ! The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wildwood. And every loved spot which my infancy knew, The wide-spreading pond, and the mill that stood by The bridge and the rock where the cataract fell ; The cot of my father, the dairy-house nigh it, And e'en the rude bucket that hung in the well. The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket. The moss-covered bucket that hung in the well. That moss-covered bucket I hailed as a treasure. For often at noon, when returned from the field, I found it the source of an exquisite pleasure, The purest and sweetest that nature can yield. 505 It, How ardent I seized it, with hands that were glowing, And quick to the white-pebbled bottom it fell ; Then soon, with the emblem of truth overflowing, And dripping with coolness it rose from the well. The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket. The moss-covered bucket arose from the well. How sweet from the green, moss^- brim to receive it. As poised on the curb it inclined to my lips ! Not a full-blushing goblet could tempt me to leave it, Though filled with the nectar that Jupiter sips. And now, far removed from the loved habitation. The tear of regret will intrusivelj^ swell. As fancy reverts to my father's plantation. And sighs for the bucket that hung in the well. The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, The moss-covered bucket which hangs in the well." Samuel Woodwokth. Minot's Light 506 BRANT ROCK. Life Saving Station, Brant Rock Brant Rock, looking South from Life Saving Station 507 MARSHFIELD. THE Indian name of the town was Missaucatusket. We find that from here it is only a short drive to Duxbury, Pembroke, and several other villages. It was incorporated in 1640. It was here that Daniel Webster was finally laid to rest. A short drive brings us to Green Har- bor. Marshfield shores are very attractive to sportsmen. Sea ducks and shore birds abound. Cut River and Brant Rock are some of the most noted places. Brant Rock is noted as a healthfal and delightful summer watering-place. Many very distinguished people come here to spend the summer months. Ancient Winslow House, Marshfield Marshfield Hills and Sea View are also very attractive summer places. It was at Marshfield that Edward Winslow first settled, and called his place " Careswell Place," after his English estate. Daniel Webster came to Marshfield in 1827, and after living here five years he finally purchased an estate belonging to a revolutionary royalist, where the British soldiers were stationed in the war. This fine old mansion he took great pains to adorn with lawn and shady trees. But a few years after his death the house was burned. 508 Daniel Webster Place, Marshfield Grave of Daniel Webster, Marshfield 509 THE ANCIENT TOWN OF DUXBURY. HISTORY states that soon after the landing of the Pilgrims, as they were desirous of obtaining their independence, and many were anx- ious to have their own farms or tracts of land, the colony was divided into two separate townships. Plymouth was under the generalship of Bradford, and Duxbury had the grand old Captain Standish as its leader, with Winslow, ^Brewster and Alden as his co-workers. Standish and Brewster settled near each other on a hill named by them " Captain's Hill." The town of Duxbury was named for the ancestral home, " Dux- bury Hall," England. The home of Standish was built on the lee of the hill, commanding a view of the bay. The Brewster house was named "Eagle's Nest," for in some old trees the eagles had many nests. Standish and Brewster were not only leaders in daring deeds of meeting their enemies, the Indians, but they were both leaders in gospel truths. When Brewster died he left two sons, and their saintly father's name has been handed down to this day. Soon after the death of Myles Standish, his home was burned. It is said that some of the timbers were saved, and his son erected the house which now stands. A grand monument on aptain's Hill will ever stand as a memento to the grand old captain. Another much noted house still stands, the "John Alden House," famous as the home of this honored name ; and when John and Priscilla were married, and came to this farm at "Eagle Tree Pond," it was from that time on an ever historical place. The old location is designated by a marble slab. The Ancient John Alden House, Duxbury Copyright, iSq2. A. S. Burbank, Plymouth, Mass. Sio French Atlantic Cable Office, Duxbury Street View, Duxbury KINGSTON. THE homestead of Maj. John Bradford, at Kingston, Mass, This house now stands on the original site of the house built by the grandson of Gov. William Bradford in 1675, who lived there until his death, in 1736. History informs us that, during King Philip's War, this ancient residence was set on fire by the Indians, but was finally saved before much damage was done. The Winslow House was built in 1774 by Edward Winslow, great- grandson of Governor Winslow, who came over in the ' ' Mayflower. ' ' After many years of hardship the Winslows departed from the colony in 1770, and the house was then sold. The lindens now by the front door were planted by Edward Winslow's daughter. The rooms are high and very commodious, showing that our forefathers were as thoughtful for health and fresh air as we are at this day. Maj. John Bradford's House, 1675, Kingston Copyright, i8g2, liy A. S. Burhank, Plymouth, Mass. Village View at Kingston ii ^*';- S[^ ^ p.^ ■ii^ .;" rftiF 1^ a ^ -la; '■■■'-' . V 1 :,,,,,,,« •»«*»''•■• ;'•'■■■ •*;"■ ■' ^•■"^'■W"-^' ■• ■"-■y^ Si^r^y"-^ Town Hall at Kingston 513 '■'S r, //; 1 ^.i.?^^if*s;?r -C ___, H CJ :: p: n hn rt i-H a 11 n G ■]> ^ CJ b/J > I— a-> ,C fi> o ^ ■1-1 ^ if) o ho c ■-1 rt a- ^ '/■, QJ ■: 1) -C o ^ <1 o 1J a > 1J ^ IJ , ■ 3 r- o h •r. 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