Drake Samuel Adams
Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast
CHAPTER XIX.
PROVINCETOWN
"A man may stand there and put all America behind him." – Thoreau
As it was already dark when I arrived in Provincetown, I saw only the glare from the lantern of Highland Light in passing through Truro, and the gleaming from those at Long Point and Wood End, before the train drew up at the station. It having been a rather busy day with me (I had embarked at Nantucket in the morning, idled away a few hours at Vineyard Haven, and rested as many at Cohasset Narrows), it will be easily understood why I left the investigation of my whereabouts to the morrow. My wants were at this moment reduced to a bed, a pair of clean sheets, and plenty of blankets; for though the almanac said it was July in Provincetown, the night breeze blowing freshly was strongly suggestive of November.
It was Swift, I think, who said he never knew a man reach eminence who was not an early riser. Doubtless the good doctor was right. But, then, if he had lodged as I lodged, and had risen as I did, two mortal hours before breakfast-time, he might have allowed his precept to have its exceptions. I devoted these hours to rambling about the town.
Though not more than half a hundred miles from Boston, as the crow flies, Cape Cod is regarded as a sort of terra incognita by fully half of New England. It has always been considered a good place to emigrate from, rather than as offering inducements for its young men and women to remain at home; though no class of New Englanders, I should add, are more warmly attached to the place of their nativity. The ride throughout the Cape affords the most impressive example of the tenacity with which a population clings to locality that has ever come under my observation. To one accustomed to the fertile shores of Narraganset Bay or the valley of the Connecticut, the region between Sandwich, where you enter upon the Cape, and Orleans, where you reach the bend of the fore-arm, is bad enough, though no desert. Beyond this is simply a wilderness of sand.
The surface of the country about Brewster and Orleans is rolling prairie, barren, yet thinly covered with an appearance of soil. Stone walls divide the fields, but from here down the Cape you will seldom see a stone of any size in going thirty miles. My faith in Pilgrim testimony began to diminish as I looked on all sides, and in vain, for a "spit's-depth of excellent black earth," such as they tell of. It has, perchance, been blown away, or buried out of sight in the shiftings constantly going on here. Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro grow more and more forbidding, as you approach the Ultima Thule, or land's end.211
Mr. Thoreau, who has embodied the results of several excursions to the Cape in some admirable sketches, calls it the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. Mr. Everett had already used the same figure. To me it looks like a skinny, attenuated arm thrust within a stocking for mending – the bony elbow at Chatham, the wrist at Truro, and the half-closed fingers at Provincetown. It seems quite down at the heel about Orleans, and as if much darning would be needed to make it as good as new. It was something to conceive, and more to execute, such a tramp as Thoreau's, for no one ought to attempt it who can not rise superior to his surroundings, and shake off the gloom the weird and wide-spread desolateness of the landscape inspires. I would as lief have marched with Napoleon from Acre, by Mount Carmel, through the moving sands of Tentoura.
The resemblance of the Cape to a hook appears to have struck navigators quite early. On old Dutch maps it is delineated with tolerable accuracy, and named "Staaten Hoeck," and the bay inclosed within the bend of it "Staaten Bay." Massachusetts Bay is "Noord Zee," and Cape Malabar "Vlacke Hoeck." Milford Haven appears about where Eastham is now located. On the earliest map of Champlain the extremity of the Cape is called "C. Blanc," or the White Cape.212 Mather says of Cape Cod, he supposes it will never lose the name "till swarms of cod-fish be seen swimming on the highest hills."
This hook, though a sandy one, caught many a school of migratory fish, and even whales found themselves often embayed in the bight of it, on their way south, until, from being so long hunted down, they learned to keep a good offing. It also caught all the southerly drift along shore, such as stray ships from France and England. Bartholomew Gosnold and John Brereton were the first white men to land on it. De Monts, Champlain, De Poutrincourt, Smith, and finally the Forefathers, were brought up and turned back by it.
Bradford, under date of 1620, writes thus in his journal: "A word or two by ye way of this Cape: it was thus first named (Cape Cod) by Captain Gosnold and his company, Ano:1602, and after by Capten Smith was caled Cape James; but it retains ye former name amongst seamen. Also yt pointe which first shewed those dangerous shoulds unto them, they called Point Care, and Tucker's Terrour;213 but ye French and Dutch, to this day, call it Malabarr, by reason of those perilous shoulds, and ye losses they have suffered their."
Notwithstanding what Bradford says, the name of Mallebarre is affixed to the extreme point of Cape Cod on early French maps. In Smith's "New England" is the following description:
"Cape Cod is the next presents itselfe, which is onely a headland of high hills of sand, overgrowne with shrubbie pines, hurts, and such trash, but an excellent harbor for all weathers. The Cape is made by the maine sea on the one side and a great Bay on the other, in forme of a sickle; on it doth inhabit the people of Pawmet; and in the bottome of the Bay, the people of Chawum. Towards the south and south-west of this Cape is found a long and dangerous shoale of sands and rocks. But so farre as I encircled it, I found thirtie fadom water aboard the shore and a strong current, which makes mee thinke there is a channel about this Shoale, where is the best and greatest fish to be had, Winter and Summer, in all that Countrie. But the Salvages say there is no channel, but that the shoales beginne from the maine at Pawmet to the ile of Nausit, and so extends beyond their knowledge into the sea."
The historical outcome of the Cape is in the early navigations, and in the fact that Provincetown was the harbor entered by the Forefathers. The first land they saw, after Devon and Cornwall had sunk in the sea, was this sand-bar, for it is nothing else. It appeared to their eager eyes, as it will probably never again be seen, wooded down to the shore. Whales, that they had not the means of taking, disported around them. They dropped anchor three-quarters of a mile from shore, and, in order to land, were forced to wade a "bow shoot," by which many coughs and colds were caught, and a foundation for the winter's sickness laid. The first landing was probably on Long Point. The men set about discovery; for the master had told them, with a sailor's bluntness, he would be rid of them as soon as possible. The women went also to shore to wash, thus initiating on Monday, November 23d, the great New England washing-day.
Were there to be a day of general observance in New England commemorative of the landing of the Pilgrims, it should be that on which they first set foot on her soil at Cape Cod; the day, too, on which the compact was signed.214 Whatever of sentiment attached to the event should, it would seem, be consecrated to the very spot their feet first pressed. There is yet time to rescue the day from unaccountable and unmerited neglect.
On the map of Cyprian Southack a thoroughfare is delineated from Massachusetts Bay to the ocean at Eastham, near Sandy Point. His words are: "The place where I came through with a whale-boat, April 26th, 1717, to look after Bellame the pirate." I have never seen this map, which Douglass pronounces "a false and pernicious sea-chart."
From its barring their farther progress, Cape Cod was well known to the discoverers of the early part of the seventeenth century. According to Lescarbot, Poutrincourt spent fifteen days in a port on the south side. It had been formally taken possession of in the name of the French king. The first conflict between the whites and natives occurred there; and in its sands were interred the remains of the first Christian who died within the ancient limits of New England.215
The assault of the natives on De Poutrincourt is believed to have occurred at Chatham, ironically named by the French Port Fortuné, in remembrance of their mishaps there. It was the very first collision recorded between Europeans and savages in New England. Five of De Poutrincourt's men having slept on shore contrary to orders, and without keeping any watch, the Indians fell on them at day-break, October 15th, 1606, killing two outright. The rest, who were shot through and through with arrows, ran down to the shore, crying out, "Help! they are murdering us!" the savages pursuing with frightful whoopings.
Hearing these outcries and the appeal for help, the sentinel on board the bark gave the alarm: "Aux armes! they are killing our people!" Roused by the signal, those on board seized their arms, and ran on deck, without taking time to dress themselves. Fifteen or sixteen threw themselves into the shallop, without stopping to light their matches, and pushed for the shore. Finding they could not reach it on account of an intervening sand-bank, they leaped into the water and waded a musket-shot to land. De Poutrincourt, Champlain, Daniel Hay, Robert Gravé the younger, son of Du Pont Gravé, and the younger Poutrincourt, with their trumpeter and apothecary, were of the party that rushed pell-mell, almost stark naked, upon the savages.
The Indians, perceiving the rescuing band within a bow-shot of them, took to flight. It was idle to pursue those nimble-footed savages; so the Frenchmen brought their dead companions to the foot of the cross they had erected on the preceding day, and there buried them. While chanting the funeral prayers and orisons of the Church, the natives, from a safe distance, shouted derisively and danced to celebrate their treason. After their funeral rites were ended the French voyagers silently returned on board.
In a few hours, the tide being so low as to prevent the whites from landing, the natives again appeared on the shore. They threw down the cross, disinterred the bodies of the slain Frenchmen, and stripped them before the eyes of their exasperated comrades. Several shots were fired at them from the bronze gun on board, the natives at every discharge throwing themselves flat on their faces. As soon as the French could land, they again set up the cross, and reinterred the dead. The natives, for the second time, fled to a distance.216
Provincetown was originally part of Truro. Its etymology explains that its territory belonged to the province of Massachusetts. The earliest inhabitants had no other title than possession, and their conveyance is by quit-claim. For many years the place experienced the alternations of thrift and decay, being at times well-nigh deserted. In 1749, says Douglass, in his "Summary," the town consisted of only two or three settled families, two or three cows, and six to ten sheep. The houses formerly stood in one range, without regularity, along the beach, with the drying-flakes around them. Fishing vessels were run upon the soft sand, and their cargoes thrown into the water, where, after being washed free from salt, the fish were taken up and carried to the flakes in hand-barrows. Cape Cod Harbor, by which name it is also familiar to the readers of Pilgrim chronicles, was the earliest name of Provincetown.
The place has now lost the peculiar character it owed to the windmills on the sandy heights above the town and the salt-works on the beach before it. The streets, described by former writers as impassable, by reason of the deep sand, I found no difficulty in traversing. What with an admixture of clay, and a top-dressing of oyster-shells and pebble, brought from a distance, they have managed to make their principal thoroughfares solid enough. Step aside from these, if you would know what Provincetown was like in the past.
If the streets were better than I had thought, the houses were far better. The great number of them were of wood, looking as most New England houses look – ready for the torch. They usually had underpinnings of brick, instead of being, as formerly, built on posts, in order that the sand might blow underneath them. There were willows, poplars, locusts, and balm of Gilead, standing about in odd corners, and of good size. I saw a few sickly fruit-trees that appeared dying for lack of moisture; and some enterprising citizens were able to make a show of lilacs, syringas, pinks, and geraniums in their front yards. I talked with them, and saw that the unremitting struggle for life that attended the growth of these few simple flowers seemed to increase their love for them, and enlarge their feeling for what was beautiful. All the earth they have is imported. I called to mind those Spanish vineyards, where the peasant carries a hamper of soil up the sunny slopes of the mountain-sides, and in some crevice of the rocks plants his vine.
There are two principal streets in Provincetown. One of them, I should imagine, more than a mile in length, runs along the harbor; the other follows an elevated ridge of the sand-hills, and is parallel with the first. A plank-walk is laid on one side of the avenue by the shore, the other side being occupied by stores, fish-houses, and wharves. No sinister meaning is attached to walking the plank in Provincetown; for what is the whole Cape if not a gang-plank pushed out over the side of the continent?
Where the street on the ridge is carried across gaps among the hills, the retaining walls were of bog-peat, which was also laid on the sides of those hills exposed to the force of the wind. Whortleberry, bayberry, and wild rose were growing out of the interstices. They flourish as well as when the Pilgrims were here, though all the primitive forest disappeared long ago. I ascended the hill on which the town-hall building stands. You must go up the town road, or break the law, as I saw, by the straggling foot-paths, the youngsters were in the habit of doing. Read sand for scoriæ, and the fate of Herculaneum seems impending over Provincetown. The safeguards taken to prevent the hills blowing down upon it impresses the stranger with a sense of insecurity, though the inhabitants do not seem much to mind it. I have heard that in exposed situations on the Cape window-glass becomes opaque by reason of the frequent sand-blasts rattling against the panes.
On the hill was formerly a windmill, having the flyers inside, so resembling, say the town annalists, a lofty tower. It was a famous landmark for vessels making the port. The chart-makers have now replaced it with the town hall, and every mariner steering for Provincetown has an eye to it.
The harbor is completely landlocked. There is good anchorage for vessels of the largest class. Ofttimes it is crowded with shipping seeking a haven of refuge. This morning there were perhaps fifty sail, of every kind of craft. An inward-bound vessel must steer around every point of the compass before the anchor is let go in safety. In the Revolution the port was made use of by the British squadrons, to refit, and procure water.217 The tide flows on the bay side of the Cape about twenty feet, while at the back of it there is a flow of only five or six feet.
The town is of extreme length, compared with its breadth, being contracted between the range of high sand-hills behind it and the beach. It lies fronting the south-east, bordering the curve of the shore, which sweeps grandly around half the circumference of a circle on the bay side. In one direction extends the long line of shore. If Boston be your starting-point, you must travel a hundred and twenty miles to get fifty; and, by the time you arrive at the extremity of the Cape, should be able to box the compass. Looking south, Long Point terminates the land view. Following with the eye the outline of the hook, it rests an instant on the shaft of the light-house at Wood End, the extreme southerly point of the Cape. Thence the coast trends north-west as far as Race Point, which is shut out from view by intervening hills. Race Point is the outermost land of the Cape. All these names are well known to mariners, the world over.
The shores are bordered with dangerous bars and shallows. As shipping could not get up to the town, the town has gone off to it, in the shape of a wharf of great length. Our Pilgrim ancestors had to wade a "bow shoot" to get on dry land. A resident told me that with fishing-boots on I could cross to the head of Herring Cove at low tide. Assuredly, it is one of the most wonderful of havens, and little likely to be dispensed with, even if the vexed question of
"A way for ships to shape,
Instead of winding round the Cape
A short-cut through the collar,"
be answered by a ship-canal from Barnstable to Buzzard's Bay.218
On the summit of Town Hill you are almost astride the Cape, having the Atlantic on one side, and Massachusetts Bay in full view on the other. The port is not what it was when some storm-tossed bark, in accepting its shelter, was the town talk for months. Ships come and go by scores and hundreds, folding their wings and settling down on the water like weary sea-gulls.
With an outward appearance of prosperity, I found the people bemoaning the hard times. Taxes, they said, were twenty dollars in the thousand, and only ten at Wareham; fish were scarce, and prices low, too, though as to the last item consumers think otherwise. The fishermen I saw were burly, athletic fellows, apparently not more thrifty than their class everywhere. They are averse to doing any thing else than fish, and, if the times are bad, are content to potter about their boats and fishing-gear till better days, much as they would wait for wind and tide. If they can not go fishing they had as lief do nothing, though want threatens.
The boys take to the water by instinct. I saw one adrift in a boat without oars, making his way to land by tilting the side of the dory. They go to the fishing-banks with their fathers, and can hand, reef, and steer with an old salt. One traveler tells of a Provincetown cow-boy who captured and killed a blackfish he descried near the shore. As soon as they had strength to pull in a fish, they were put on board a boat.
I noticed the familiar names that have been transplanted and thriven everywhere. Those of Atwood, Nickerson, Newcomb, Rich, Ryder, Snow, and Doane have the Cape ring about them. In general they are "likely" men, as the phrase here is, getting on as might be expected of a people who literally cast their bread upon the waters, and live on a naked crust of earth that the sea is forever gnawing and growling at. The girls are pretty. I say it on the authority of an expert in such matters who accompanied me. Not all are sandy-haired.
There is a strong dash of humor about these people. They are piquant Capers, dry and sharp as the sand. One of them was relating that he had once watched for so long a time that he finally fell asleep while crossing the street to his boarding-house, and on going to bed had not waked for twenty-four hours. "Wa'al," said an old fellow, removing a short pipe from between his lips, "you was jest a-cannin' on it up, warn't ye?"
There is quite a colony of Portuguese in Provincetown. In my rambles I met with a band of them returning from the swamp region back of the town. They looked gypsy-like with their swarthy faces and gleaming eyes. The younger women had clear olive complexions, black eyes, and the elongated Madonna faces of their race; the older ones were grisly and witch-like, with shriveled bodies and wrinkled faces. All of them bore bundles of fagots on their heads that our tender women would have sunk under, yet they did not seem in the least to mind them. They chattered merrily as they passed by me, and I watched them until out of sight; for, picturesque objects anywhere, here they were doubly so. They had all gaudy handkerchiefs tied about their heads, and shawls worn sash-wise, and knotted at the hip, the bright bits of warm color contrasting kindly with the dead white of the sand. There were shapely figures among them, but the men's boots they of necessity wore subtracted a little from the symmetry of outline and my admiration.
They number about fifty families – these Portuguese – and are increasing. One citizen expressed a vague apprehension lest they should exclude, eventually, the whites, as the whites had expelled the Indians. And why not? They believe in large families, while we believe in small ones or none at all. The Pilgrims were fewer than they when they came to Cape Cod, though they did believe in large families. Besides, Gaspard Cortereal, a "Portingale," fell in with the land hereabouts before any of our English. The Portuguese are reported to have stocked Sable Island with domestic animals thirty years before Gilbert's coming to Newfoundland.219 Assuredly, Cortereal had as good a mortgage on the country as Cabot, who did not land, but only beheld it in sailing by. I had found the town effervescent. The killing of a Portuguese by his captain, in a quarrel on board a fishing vessel, had set the whole town talking. Coming from the city, where we average a murder a week, I was quite startled at the measure of horror and indignation the deed excited here. Subsequently I learned that such crimes were rare, and that in this out-of-the-way corner of the land people had quite old-fashioned notions about the value of human life and limb.
The cod and mackerel fisheries have been the making of Provincetown, though they complained of dull times when I was there, the fleet not numbering more than fifty or sixty sail. Some schooners go whaling to the Gulf of Mexico, Western Islands, or far up the north coast; but the fares there are poor, they say, and growing poorer. The first mackerel exhibited in the spring in Boston market are taken in Provincetown Harbor.
Former travelers have observed that the art as well as the name of hay-making was applied to the curing of the cod here, the fish, when made, being stacked in the same manner. Cattle are reported to have sometimes eaten them in lieu of salt hay. When the fishing season was at its height, it must have been something to have seen – the length and breadth of the town over-spread with cod-fish, occupying the front yards and intervals between the houses. A good wife then, instead of going to the garden for vegetables, would bring in a cod-fish from the flakes. Then the hook was well baited.
I suppose the phrase "cod-fish aristocracy" did not originate on the Cape, but may have a more ancient beginning than is generally believed, as the Dutch were, in the year 1347, engaged in a civil war which lasted many years, the rival parties being called "Hooks" and "Cod-fish," respectively. The former supported Margaret, Countess of Holland; the latter, William, her son.
Champlain relates that the Indians, in this bay, fished for cod with lines made of bark, to which a bone hook was attached, the bone being fashioned like a harpoon, and fastened to a piece of wood with what he believed to be hemp, such as they had in France. Bass, blue-fish, and sturgeon were taken by spearing.
A fish dinner is eaten at least once a week by every family in New England. In Catholic countries the supply of dried fish is usually exhausted by the end of Lent. We have seen that Bradford received a Jesuit at his own table, and regaled him with a fish dinner because it was Friday, a piece of old-time courtesy some would have us think the Pilgrims incapable of. Somewhat later they had a law in Massachusetts banishing Jesuits or other Roman Catholic ecclesiastics out of their jurisdiction on pain of death.
In effect, the cod-fish is to New England what roast beef is to old Albion. The likeness of one is hanging in the State-house at Boston, as the symbol of a leading Massachusetts industry. Down East the girls carry bits of it in their pockets, and it is set on the bar-room counters for luncheon. A Yankee can fatten on it where an Englishman would starve. The statement is fortified by what we call the truth of history.
In 1714 her Majesty of England concluded a peace with her restless neighbor across the Channel; or, as Pope rhymes it,
"At length great Anna said, 'Let discord cease;'
She said, the world obey'd, and all was peace."
This was the famous treaty that Matthew Prior, the negotiator-poet, calls "the d – d Peace of Utrecht." Prior went to Paris with Bolingbroke. Having arrived there during Lent, he was, by an edict, permitted to have roast beef as a mark of royal favor, and on, I presume, his own application. I rescue this morceau from the abyss of state archives:
"Nous Baron de Breteuil et de Preuilly, premier Baron de Touraine, Conr du Roy en ses Conseils, Introducteur des Ambassadeurs et Princes Etrangères pres de Sa Matie; Enjoignons au Boucher de l'Hôtel de Dieu de fournir pendant le Carême au prix ordinaire, suivant l'ordre du Roy, toute la viande de Boucherie, et Rotisserie qui sera necessaire pour la subsistance de la maison de plenipotentiaire de la Reyne de la Grande Bretagne, M. Prior."220
If the great staple of New England is so firmly associated with the Cape, its claims in another direction deserve also to be remembered. The whale-fishery of New England had its beginning here. The hook caught those leviathans as the Penobscot weirs catch salmon. It was long afterward that Nantucket bristled with harpoons. That sea-girt isle borrowed her art of the Cape, and induced a professor in whale-craft, Ichabod Paddock by name, to come over and teach it to her. The Pilgrims would have begun on the instant, but they had not the gear. The Indians followed it in their primitive way, and the exploring parties saw them stripping blubber from a stranded blackfish exactly as now practiced.
During the years the whales swam along the shore by Cape Cod there was good fishing in boats. Watchmen stationed on the hills gave notice by signals when one was in sight. After some time they passed farther off on the banks, and sloops carrying whale-boats were used. Cotton Mather refers to the fishery here. Douglass notes a whale struck on the back of Cape Cod that yielded one hundred and thirty-four barrels of oil. In 1739 six small whales were taken in Provincetown Harbor. In 1746 not more than three or four whales were taken on the Cape.
The first whaling adventure to the Falkland Islands is referred to the enterprise of two inhabitants of Truro, who received the hint from Admiral Montague, of the British navy, in 1774.221
This admiral, commonly called "Mad Montague," was a character. There is an anecdote of his causing his coxswain to put the hands of some drowned Dutch sailors in their pockets, and then betting fifty guineas to five they died thus. The only reminiscence of whaling that I saw in Provincetown was a gate-way formed of the ribs of a whale before the door of a cottage. Over the house-door was a gilded eagle, of wood, that had decorated some luckless craft. At the tavern the door was kept ajar by a curiously carved whale's tooth wedged underneath. My landlord, gray-haired, but still straight and sinewy, remarked, as he saw me examining it, "I struck that fellow."
But what I came to see here was the desert, and I had not yet seen it. Turning my back upon the town, I set out for Race Point, three miles distant. The last house I passed – and this was a slaughter-house – had the sign-board of a ship, the Plymouth Rock, nailed above the lintel. For a certain distance the path was easy to follow; it then became obscure, and I finally lost it altogether; but the sea on the Atlantic side was always roaring a hoarse halloo.
It was never before my fortune to thread so curious and at the same time so desolate a way as this. It filled up the pictures of my reading of the coasts of Barbary or of Lower Egypt. I first crossed a range of sand-hills thinly grown with beach-plum, whortleberry, brake, and sheep laurel, or wild rhododendron.222 Now and then there was a grove of stunted pitch-pines on the hill-sides, and upon descending I found the hollows occupied by swamps more or less extensive, where the growth was denser and the stagnant water dotted with white blossoming lilies. There were also clumps of the fragrant white laurel in full bloom. In such places the bushes grew thickly, and I had to force my way through them.
The largest of these sunken ponds is named Shank Painter. Seeing what a share they have in preserving Provincetown, I shall always respect a bog or a morass. Over on the shore, between Race Point and Wood End, they have Shank Painter Bar. Here and there in the swamp were clearings of an acre or two planted with cranberry-vines, which yield a handsome return. It was blossoming-time, and the ground was starred with their delicate white flowers, having the corolla rolled back, as seen in the tiger-lily. I found ripe blueberries growing close to the sand, and wild strawberries, of excellent flavor, on the borders of cranberry meadows. An account says, cows might once be seen "wading, and even swimming, in these ponds, plunging their heads into the water up to their horns, picking up a scanty subsistence from the roots and herbs produced in the water." I saw birch, maple, and a few other forest trees of stinted growth in the swamp, and stumps of very large pines that had been, perhaps, many times covered and uncovered by sand.223
Cranberry culture, already briefly alluded to, has become an important industry on Cape Cod. It is pleasant to see the pickers busily gathering the fruit for market, a labor performed almost wholly by females. An instrument called a cranberry-rake was formerly used; but as it bruised the fruit, it has been discarded for hand-picking. Very little outlay is necessary in the preparation of a cranberry-bed, and much less labor than is usual with ordinary farm crops, while the return is much greater. Here the visitor is astonished at seeing the vine producing abundantly in what appears to be pure white sand. These cranberry plantations are very profitable. Captain Henry Hull, of Barnstable, was one of the earliest cultivators on the Cape.
