Part 1

CAPE COD

By F. Mitchell

Illustrated by George F. Edwards and Walter J. Fenn

[Illustration: THE OLD MILL.]

The Century Magazine. Vol. XXVI. SEPTEMBER, 1883. No. 5.

The most striking feature of the New England coast-line is Cape Cod. Standing far out, lonesome, into the ocean, it gives, from the map, the impression of a sand-bar. In looking at other sea-coast reaches, the imagination flies at once to a sheltered inland: to village streets and peaceful farms and bush-fringed ponds and wild flowers; but looking at this weird projection, it seems impossible to conjure up an inland.

There are wastes, in fact, along this stretch of sea-board. The farthest town has not a farm, and the soil of its gardens is brought in the holds of vessels. Nothing could give a stronger impression of desolation than the wild sea of shifting sand-hills lying open to the Atlantic on the outer coast of Provincetown, and the sand-hills on the harbor side, which crowd two miles of houses to the water. The open plain between Provincetown and Truro is wild and barren; its vegetation is for the most part little more than moss; although in favored spots is seen the mock-cranberry’s red-berried creeping vine and some recent plantations of pine, all making headway.

When the Pilgrims entered Cape Cod harbor, this stretch of country was all covered with soil, and bore a forest growth of oak and pine. Woods and soil, like the Indians, have given way before civilization, and, under the white man’s rule, sand has beaten in and swamped the vegetation. Even now, in Provincetown, one can see the process of desolation going on. In every violent gale, the looser sand is drifted about, and after the storm is over, here and there peep out the tops of newly submerged bushes.

All through the Cape, too, are barren stretches of “old fields,” crossed by decayed rail fences or stone walls gray with moss: such fields as are seen through the whole of eastern Massachusetts. The last generation of farmers beggars the land and leaves it. It is hard to realize now that Eastham was once the granary of Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth; that the sandy tip of the Cape was covered with trees; that the “old fields” once waved with substantial crops. Nevertheless, such are the facts.

With all the grandeur of wildness that has seized upon a great part of the outer coast, from Provincetown to Chatham, speaking in every line of storms, of surf, of wrecks, of bodies heaved up by the sea, a quiet inland beauty nestles still in the shelter of Cape Cod. There are woods and farms; there are elm trees overhanging village streets; there are blue ponds and still, dark flumes and wild flowers.

[Illustration: COMMERCIAL STREET, PROVINCETOWN.]

Two hundred and sixty years ago, and more, the _Mayflower_ anchored in Cape Cod harbor, off what is now Provincetown. Although the settlement of the Pilgrims was finally made at Plymouth, it was at Cape Cod that the first birth and the first death occurred, and that the famous compact of government was signed. It was on Cape Cod that a party under Miles Standish made the first excursion inland, tracked Indians through the woods, laid hold on corn, rifled a wigwam and, with that delicacy which always characterized their captain, explored an Indian grave.

Carried by steam, to-day, through the whole length of the Cape, in cars of the latest pattern, raising our eyes from the last novel to look upon stretches of open country, it is hard to frame a vision of Cape Cod as it was when the Pilgrims landed. Shut your eyes to the sand-hills, to all the neglected acres white with daisies or gay with golden-rod; clothe the seventy miles of curving peninsula, except the broad salt-marshes, with forest trees; think of the numberless bays and ponds and streams that light up the country still; picture here and there an Indian clearing, a cluster of wigwams, and a sachem with his followers; fill the woods with deer and wolves and foxes, and you see Cape Cod as it lay on that November morning when the plunge of the _Mayflower’s_ anchor broke the stillness.

Soon after the settlement at Plymouth, a trading-house, the foundations of which may still be traced, was built at Manomet, now known as Monument, near the head of Buzzard’s Bay; but the first settlement, properly speaking, on Cape Cod, was made at Sandwich. “April 3, 1637,” say the Plymouth records, “it is also agreed by the court that these ten men of Saugus [naming them] shall have liberty to view a place to sit down, and have land sufficient for three-score families.”

In view of the later history of Cape Cod, there is an amusing ring in this liberty to “sit down,” granted to the nucleus of a people who in their growth have shown a constant desire to do anything but sit down; who have disclosed, on the contrary, a most determined disposition “the ocean’s depths to sound, or pierce to either pole”; who hang Calcutta hats upon their hat-trees; whose parlors give out a sandal-wood perfume from the islands of the Pacific. If there was any one form of words that was to prove peculiarly inappropriate to the settlement of Cape Cod, it was this of a liberty to “sit down.”

Soon after this settlement was begun, two commissioners were sent from Plymouth, directed to “go to Sandwich, with all convenient speed [which was probably about three miles an hour], and set forth the bounds of the lands granted there.” Their names lend a certain flavor of romance: Miles Standish and John Alden. When they came to settle the titles of Sandwich, the eventful deputation to settle the title to Priscilla, if any such there was, had long since taken place. We can hardly think, without a smile, of these two heroes, all unconscious of the poetic halo that was to gather about their names, peacefully working together in the unromantic task of running boundary lines, parceling upland and salt-marsh.

The mention here of the two famous suitors reminds me of two bachelor settlers--such they seem to have been--whose lot was less romantic. They had undertaken to “sit down” in Sandwich, and had begun to clear allotments. They presumed to be “disorderly” by “keeping house alone,” and for this they were arraigned at Plymouth. Poor Pilgrims! Who knows their story! Perhaps they had dutifully tried to win for themselves two humble Priscillas, and, through John Aldens of their own, had failed. Nevertheless, the rigid views of the colony, could not allow them, as bread in the desert, even this pale joy of keeping house alone.

The settlement at Sandwich was quickly followed by others, at Barnstable, at Yarmouth, and lower down the Cape. Eastham was settled by a colony from Plymouth, headed by Thomas Prince, for many years governor, whose descendants live there still. The question of a general removal from Plymouth to Eastham was seriously debated.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR THOMAS PRINCE’S BIRTHPLACE.]

Many interesting historical associations are connected with the different towns. In the scattered village of East Sandwich stands, on a little rise of ground, a large, bare building, which, from its absolute plainness, you would know, if you took it for a house of worship at all, to be a Friends’ meeting-house. This building dates only from the beginning of the present century, but it stands in the place of an older structure, and the society is of long standing. The Sandwich monthly meeting has been said to be the oldest in the country. The surnames which prevail in the neighborhood figure in the ancient court records of the Plymouth colony,--for this was a marked locality in the early struggle for religious liberty.

Nicholas Upsall was a member of the Boston church. When he was far advanced in years, he was, for outspoken disapproval of the persecution of the Quakers, fined twenty pounds and banished. His choice of a retreat being limited, he came to Plymouth; but he was now viewed as a Quaker, and it was illegal in the Plymouth colony to entertain him. Nevertheless, a man who was returning to Cape Cod took the old man in his convoy to Sandwich. Here he must have been harbored, for we find an order of the General Court to John Newland of that town, forbidding any further meetings at his house tending “to the disturbance of the public worship of God,” and a direction that Nicholas Upsall, the “instigator” of this trouble, “be carried out of the government by Tristan Hull, who brought him.” Upsall seems to have sown some seed, for, shortly after this, a number of persons were punished for encouraging what were called “Quaker” movements. In 1658, a large number of citizens of Sandwich were fined for expressing sympathy, in one way or another, with Quaker views, and feeling ran so high in the town against the strictness of the colony, that the town constable could not, or perhaps would not, perform the duties of his office, and a sort of metropolitan police, in the form of a special marshal, was appointed by the Plymouth government to fill his place. In Barnstable and Yarmouth, too, the local officer was superseded.

Barlow, the marshal set over Sandwich, had no morbid delicacy. When he had a fine to levy upon the goods of a Quaker, he would select for seizure the article least to be spared, as the family kettle. An Indian charged with theft justified himself by precedent: “I have done,” he said, “only as you do by the Quakers.”

There was a long contest between Barlow, backed by the Plymouth government, on the one hand, and public opinion in Sandwich on the other, with many amusing features. How natural and human it makes the life of those early days, to read of the superseded constable’s prosecution for “railing” at the marshal who supplanted him!

Perhaps, in the features of the settlements on Cape Cod, including their absolute freedom from the witchcraft mania, the curious inquirer may seek for a certain clew to traits that have marked Cape Cod in later times. Her genius has been practical. The strongest characteristics of her people have been a common-sense sagacity and a capacity for affairs. Perhaps it is that very enthusiastic temperament which, in other sections, led to extreme and fanatical convictions in religion, that has unfolded itself, in later times, in the imaginative literature of Massachusetts.

[Illustration: AN OLD INHABITANT.]

One of the most curious buildings of Cape Cod stands in East Sandwich. It is a block-house, built in 1644. It is now the parlor of a dwelling-house, and its neat and peaceful interior, cheered by a cabinet organ, is in strange contrast with the thought of Pilgrims, in peaked hats, standing guard against possible forays of Indians.

Next below Sandwich dies the scattered village of West Barnstable, anciently called “Great Marshes,” from the vast sweep of salt-marsh, rich in suggestive beauty, which makes far out to Barnstable Bay. From the road that rises to the southward to cross the Cape, you look on woods and farms, on bits of swamp, green in the hottest summer, on the great marshes and the bay. The meeting-house, high up the hill, is nearly one hundred and seventy years old, being one of the oldest in the State. It takes the place of an earlier structure, and the church which worships in it has a history. In the early part of the seventeenth century, Henry Jacob, a clergyman of the Church of England, wrote against the English Congregationalists then in exile. Shortly after, he went to Leyden, where he met with John Robinson, and, influenced probably by him, changed his views. On his return to England he took the lead in the establishment, in 1616, of an Independent Church, of which, for eight years, he was the pastor. He was succeeded by John Lathrop. Another eight years the congregation worshiped in secret in London, but it was finally discovered, by the bishop’s pursuivant, at the house of one Humphrey Barnet, in Blackfriars. Forty-two persons were apprehended, and the prisoners were held for some two years. Mr. Lathrop, the pastor, was detained longest, and it was only after the death of his wife, on the intercession of his children, that he was released, on condition of leaving the kingdom. He came to New England with thirty of his people, and settled at Scituate; but in 1639, with a majority of the members of the church, he emigrated to Great Marshes, and so began the settlement of Barnstable. “This circumstance,” says Palfrey, the historian of New England, himself a native of the town, “makes the first church in Barnstable the representative of the first Congregational church established in England, unless, which perhaps was the fact, the church of John Robinson, now surviving in that of Plymouth, was organized on Congregational principles before he left the mother country for Holland.” “Another interesting fact,” he adds, “connected with that primitive English Congregational church which still survives in our church at Great Marshes, is that from its bosom also proceeded the first English Baptist church: so that it is further entitled to the eminent rank of parent of the now very numerous churches of that denomination both England and America.”

[Illustration: MARSHES (EVENING).]

Among those who came with Lathrop from Scituate to Barnstable were the famous James Cudworth and Isaac Robinson, a son of the great Leyden pastor. Robinson was deputed by the General Court to attend, with others, the meetings of the Quakers, and to endeavor to convince them of their errors. He went, and in the end became convinced that there should be no persecution of them, and for his open defense of their right to religious freedom was disfranchised. He subsequently settled in Falmouth, and built the first house in that town. Descendants through him of the famous Leyden pastor live there to this day.

Half way down the hill, between the church and the railway, stands a large square house (formerly the parsonage), the birthplace of Chief-Justice Shaw, whose father was the minister of the parish. A quarter of a mile from there, on the road to Barnstable, is the site of the Otis mansion, where Colonel James Otis lived, and his son, the patriot Otis,--“the soul of the Revolution,” the elder Adams calls him,--was born.

This unnoticed hamlet is, therefore, the seat of a church which is the representative of the earliest or the second of the English Congregational churches, and the parent of another great denomination; it has also given the country one of its loftiest statesmen and one of its greatest judges. Other men of mark have sprung from the town of Barnstable: Governor Hinckley, Nymphas Marston, and Samuel A. Otis, member of Congress from this district and the father of Harrison Gray Otis; Solicitor-General Davis, and Mr. Palfrey, the historian, among others.

One of the most interesting relics of Pilgrim days upon Cape Cod is a cradle which has descended in a prominent family in Yarmouth, and is now in possession of Mr. Henry C. Thacher. Anthony Thacher came to New England in 1635, with a wife and several children, and with a young nephew, who became the ancestor of the judges George and Peter Oxenbridge Thacher. He landed at Newbury, and, to continue his journey, took passage by sea; but the nephew, having a presentiment of danger, could not be persuaded to go by water, and made his way by land. The vessel was wrecked off Cape Ann on what is known as Thacher’s Island, and Mr. Thacher and his wife alone were saved, their children being drowned before their eyes. This cradle, which had held the youngest, was washed ashore, with a worked broadcloth covering, which has also been preserved.

[Illustration: THE THACHER CRADLE.]

The records of Brewster give a striking illustration of the exposed situation of Cape Cod in case of war. During the war of 1812, a British man-of-war, the _Spencer_, appeared there, and exacted four thousand dollars as the condition of sparing the town and the valuable salt-works.

The feeling at Boston and Philadelphia as to tea, in 1775, ran high upon Cape Cod. A vessel loaded with tea went ashore at Provincetown, and for some service or other a Wellfleet man received and undertook to sell a chest or two of tea, saying that, as it had not paid duty, there was no harm in his accepting it. Public spirit has always been strong upon Cape Cod, and the general indignation rose to such a pitch that he finally felt obliged to present a written apology in town-meeting. “I had no intention,” he says, “to injure the liberties of my country.”

In February, 1774, Truro discussed, at a town-meeting, the conduct of some of its citizens who had bought small quantities of teas from what had been cast ashore at Provincetown, and on their making acknowledgment they were “excused” on account of extenuating circumstances. “And though we have the mortification,” say the resolutions, passed unanimously, “to own that some persons among us have been weak enough to be led astray by noted rescinders from all good resolutions, we cannot, in justice to ourselves, omit making public the fact that no person in this town could be prevailed upon to accept the infamous employment of transporting the tea saved out of the Messrs. Clarks’ brigantine from Cape Cod to the vessel, but that the repeated solicitations of the owners were refused, notwithstanding liberal promises of a large reward, and notwithstanding we had several vessels here unemployed.” Somebody in Truro knew how to write vigorous English.

The little town which showed such spirit on the tea question, displayed an ingenuity equal to it on another occasion, during the Revolution. A British fleet appeared off-shore; the town was defenseless, except for a few militia, and the enemy seemed about to land. So the Cape Cod Yankees hit upon a device. There were sand-hills then, as now, along the coast; and the handful of militia-men, taking position behind an inner one, kept marching over it, and, hidden by a hill in front, back again, around and over the first elevation again, thus making a procession of theatrical length. The enemy seem to have been fairly cheated, for they sailed away without attempting to land.

[Illustration: CENTRAL WHARF, PROVINCETOWN.]

The first glance at the map suggests the question of cutting a ship-canal across the Cape. The “back of Cape Cod” is full of terrors in bad weather, and the circuit, with head-winds, is always tedious. In fact, the narrowness of the Cape at the head of Buzzard’s Bay has afforded food for speculation from early times. The Plymouth colonists utilized this strip of land for a portage or carry when they set up their trading-post at Manomet. It was put to this use again in the war of 1812.

More than a hundred years ago the project of a ship-canal was seriously discussed. Very recently a corporation, not composed, we ought to state, of Cape Cod men, undertook the work. The route surveyed was about seven miles in length. An army of Italian laborers was brought on from New York, and digging was begun; but the enterprise suddenly collapsed, and the sons of Rome were left there, penniless, to shake their fists and utter Italian threats, and the town of Sandwich found itself obliged to feed the unfortunate men and send them back to New York. The project has lately been revived.

Long ago, the tempting narrowness of the isthmus gave rise in the mind of some local genius to a singular proposition. In those days, wolves made serious havoc. It would seem that Cape Cod was subject to visitations from the main-land. And so, in 1717, it was proposed to build a high fence from “Picket Cliff,” on the north side of the Cape, to Wareham, to keep wolves from coming into the county; but the lower towns, finding, perhaps, in the activity of the Sandwich farmers already a sufficient bulwark, were lukewarm, and the scheme fell through. The discussion of it, however, disclosed a certain lack of a spirit of self-denial in some of the outside towns. They objected to the fence, not wishing, they said, “all the wolves to be shut out of the county upon their limits.” So, in one way and another, by the project of a ship-canal or a wolf-fence, the main-land has, from the earliest time, trembled under a perpetual menace of being cut off from Cape Cod.

The question of cutting the Cape at Eastham was once debated. It was thought, however, that the channel would be likely to be closed by the action of the sea, which often shows a mind of its own with regard to geography. The ocean, in fact, is constantly making changes in the shores of the Cape. Stage Harbor is entered by a narrow opening in a long tongue of sand. This opening has been changing its location. It was formerly in Eastham; but being of a roving disposition, as befits a Cape Cod institution, it has gradually moved to the south, and is now in the town of Orleans.

[Illustration: MAP OF CAPE COD. Struthers, Servoss & Co., Engs:, N.Y.]

In many places on the more exposed coast-line, the shores are slowly washing away. Where there are woods immediately on the bluff, trees are often seen lying along the beach, with their uptorn roots exposed in the bank where they were undermined in a winter’s gale. Sometimes, on the other hand, a storm makes beach, by throwing thousands of tons of sand upon a low stretch of coast and burying out of sight the marsh-bank.

In Eastham, large stumps may be discovered nearly a mile from land, and ancient peat-meadows now lie under water. At another place in that town is a peat-meadow which was buried in remote times by sand, but has been washed out again by the waves, and fuel has been taken from it.

While there is much barren country on Cape Cod, there are in tillage, including hay lands of all kinds, eleven thousand acres, and of woodland there are some thirty thousand acres. There is good land in almost every section, and in many places there is productive soil. Even in Truro there is good farming, and in the upper towns fine crops are often raised. On the inner side of the Cape, the soil is generally better than on the outer; but there are some marked instances of profitable farming on the outer shore. The lighter soil is warm, and being free from stones it is easily worked, and there are many crops which flourish in it. The yield of English hay, by the last State census, was four thousand one hundred and seventy tons from three thousand eight hundred and fifteen acres.

It has been proposed, at different times, to dike-in the vast salt-marshes and convert them into dry land. The soil is deep and rich, and there is little doubt that, if they could be so protected, heavy crops of English hay or of grain could be raised upon them, and, as they are level and of great extent, they could, by coöperation, be tilled by machinery, like prairie farms of the West. If other avenues of activity were not freely open, it is more than likely that these meadows would be reclaimed.