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Cape Cod

by Henry David Thoreau · English · Gutenberg #34392 · 452,959 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Cape Cod

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Illustrator: Clifton Johnson


        
Release date: November 21, 2010 [eBook #34392]
                Most recently updated: December 10, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34392

Credits: Steve Mattern


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPE COD ***

[Illustration]

[Illustration]




Cape Cod

by Henry David Thoreau

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

ILLUSTRATED BY
CLIFTON JOHNSON

[Illustration]

NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS

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

Contents

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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




INTRODUCTION


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clifton Johnson.

Hadley, Mass.




I
THE SHIPWRECK


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not a quarter of them,” said he.

“Where are the rest?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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



II
STAGE COACH VIEWS


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

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

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


[Illustration: An old windmill]

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: A street in Sandwich]

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

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

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

[Illustration: The old Higgins tavern at Orleans]

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

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




III
THE PLAINS OF NAUSET


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

[Illustration: A Nauset lane]

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Nauset Bay]

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

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

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

[Illustration: A scarecrow]

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

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

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

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

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

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


*    *    *    *    *


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

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


*    *    *    *    *


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


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

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

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

[Illustration: Millennium Grove camp-meeting grounds]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 [2] Lib. v. Fab. 5.




IV
THE BEACH


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

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

ποταμοῖο μέγα σθένος Ὠκεανοῖο.


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

[Illustration: A Cape Cod citizen]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Wreckage under the sand-bluff]

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

[Illustration: Herring River at Wellfleet]

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




V
THE WELLFLEET OYSTERMAN


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

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

[Illustration: A characteristic gable with many windows]

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

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

“Twenty miles by railroad.”

“Twenty miles by railroad,” he repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“May I ask your name?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can the oysters move?”

“Just as much as my shoe.”

[Illustration: A Welfleet oysterman]

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

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

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

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

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

“Then why fence your fields?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Welfleet]

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Quid loquar?_ Why repeat what he told us?

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


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

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

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

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

“Well, how do you spell it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Hunting for a Leak]

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

“O, I belong to the Universal Brotherhood.”

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

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

“There,” said I, “he has got a fish.”

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

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

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

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




VI
THE BEACH AGAIN


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

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

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


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

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

[Illustration: Truro—Starting on a voyage]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Astarte castanea_.

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

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

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

_Cancellaria Couthouyi_ (?), and

Periwinkles (?) (_Fusus decemcostatus_).

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

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

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

There was also at least one species of Sponge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

[Illustration: Unloading the day’s catch]

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is generally supposed that they who have long been conversant with
the Ocean can foretell by certain indications, such as its roar and the
notes of sea-fowl, when it will change from calm to storm; but probably
no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists; they know no more, at
least, than the older sailors do about this voyage of life on which we
are all embarked. Nevertheless, we love to hear the sayings of old
sailors, and their accounts of natural phenomena, which totally ignore,
and are ignored by, science; and possibly they have not always looked
over the gunwale so long in vain. Kalm repeats a story which was told
him in Philadelphia b

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