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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Cape Cod, by Henry David Thoreau
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Cape Cod
+
+Author: Henry D. Thoreau
+
+Illustrator: Clifton Johnson
+
+Release Date: November 21, 2010 [eBook #34392]
+[Most recently updated: December 10, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: 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 by a Mr. Cock, who was one day sailing to the West
+Indies in a small yacht, with an old man on board who was well
+acquainted with those seas. “The old man sounding the depth, called to
+the mate to tell Mr. Cock to launch the boats immediately, and to put a
+sufficient number of men into them, in order to tow the yacht during
+the calm, that they might reach the island before them as soon as
+possible, as within twenty-four hours there would be a strong
+hurricane. Mr. Cock asked him what reasons he had to think so; the old
+man replied that, on sounding, he saw the lead in the water at a
+distance of many fathoms more than he had seen it before; that
+therefore the water was become clear all of a sudden, which he looked
+upon as a certain sign of an impending hurricane in the sea.” The
+sequel of the story is that, by good fortune and by dint of rowing they
+managed to gain a safe harbor before the hurricane had reached its
+height; but it finally raged with so much violence that not only many
+ships were lost and houses unroofed, but even their own vessel in
+harbor was washed so far on shore that several weeks elapsed before it
+could be got off.
+
+The Greeks would not have called the ocean ἀτρύγετος, or unfruitful,
+though it does not produce wheat, if they had viewed it by the light of
+modern science; for naturalists now assert that “the sea, and not the
+land, is the principal seat of life,”—though not of vegetable life.
+Darwin affirms that “our most thickly inhabited forests appear almost
+as deserts when we come to compare them with the corresponding regions
+of the ocean.” Agassiz and Gould tell us that “the sea teems with
+animals of all classes, far beyond the extreme point of flowering
+plants”; but they add that “experiments of dredging in very deep water
+have also taught us that the abyss of the ocean is nearly a
+desert”;—“so that modern investigations,” to quote the words of Desor,
+“merely go to confirm the great idea which was vaguely anticipated by
+the ancient poets and philosophers, that the Ocean is the origin of all
+things.” Yet marine animals and plants hold a lower rank in the scale
+of being than land animals and plants. “There is no instance known,”
+says Desor, “of an animal becoming aquatic in its perfect state, after
+having lived in its lower stage on dry land.” but as in the case of the
+tadpole, “the progress invariably points towards the dry land.” In
+short, the dry land itself came through and out of the water in its way
+to the heavens, for, “in going back through the geological ages, we
+come to an epoch when, according to all appearances, the dry land did
+not exist, and when the surface of our globe was entirely covered with
+water.” We looked on the sea, then, once more, not as ἀτρύγετος, or
+unfruitful, but as it has been more truly called, the “laboratory of
+continents.”
+
+Though we have indulged in some placid reflections of late, the reader
+must not forget that the dash and roar of the waves were incessant.
+Indeed, it would be well if he were to read with a large conch-shell at
+his ear. But notwithstanding that it was very cold and windy to-day, it
+was such a cold as we thought would not cause one to take cold who was
+exposed to it, owing to the saltness of the air and the dryness of the
+soil. Yet the author of the old Description of Wellfleet says: “The
+atmosphere is very much impregnated with saline particles, which,
+perhaps, with the great use of fish, and the neglect of cider and
+spruce-beer, may be a reason why the people are more subject to sore
+mouths and throats than in other places.”
+
+
+
+
+VII
+ACROSS THE CAPE
+
+
+When we have returned from the seaside, we sometimes ask ourselves why
+we did not spend more time in gazing at the sea; but very soon the
+traveller does not look as the sea more than at the heavens. As for the
+interior, if the elevated sand-bar in the midst of the ocean can be
+said to have any interior, it was an exceedingly desolate landscape,
+with rarely a cultivated or cultivable field in sight. We saw no
+villages, and seldom a house, for these are generally on the Bay side.
+It was a succession of shrubby hills and valleys, now wearing an
+autumnal tint. You would frequently think, from the character of the
+surface, the dwarfish trees, and the bearberries around, that you were
+on the top of a mountain. The only wood in Eastham was on the edge of
+Wellfleet. The pitch-pines were not commonly more than fifteen or
+eighteen feet high. The larger ones covered with lichens,—often hung
+with the long gray _Usnea_. There is scarcely a white-pine on the
+forearm of the Cape. Yet in the northwest part of Eastham, near the
+Camp Ground, we saw, the next summer, some quite rural, and even sylvan
+retreats, for the Cape, where small rustling groves of oaks and locusts
+and whispering pines, on perfectly level ground, made a little
+paradise. The locusts, both transplanted and growing naturally about
+the houses there, appeared to flourish better than any other tree.
+There were thin belts of wood in Wellfleet and Truro, a mile or more
+from the Atlantic, but, for the most part, we could see the horizon
+through them, or, if extensive, the trees were not large. Both oaks and
+pines had often the same flat look with the apple-trees. Commonly, the
+oak woods twenty-five years old were a mere scraggy shrubbery nine or
+ten feet high, and we could frequently reach to their topmost leaf.
+Much that is called “woods” was about half as high as this,—only
+patches of shrub-oak, bayberry, beach-plum, and wild roses, overrun
+with woodbine. When the roses were in bloom, these patches in the midst
+of the sand displayed such a profusion of blossoms, mingled with the
+aroma of the bayberry, that no Italian or other artificial rose-garden
+could equal them. They were perfectly Elysian, and realized my idea of
+an oasis in the desert. Huckleberry-bushes were very abundant, and the
+next summer they bore a remarkable quantity of that kind of gall called
+Huckleberry-apple, forming quite handsome though monstrous blossoms.
+But it must be added, that this shrubbery swarmed with wood-ticks,
+sometimes very troublesome parasites, and which it takes very horny
+fingers to crack.
+
+[Illustration: A Truro footpath]
+
+The inhabitants of these towns have a great regard for a tree, though
+their standard for one is necessarily neither large nor high; and when
+they tell you of the large trees that once grew here, you must think of
+them, not as absolutely large, but large compared with the present
+generation. Their “brave old oaks,” of which they speak with so much
+respect, and which they will point out to you as relics of the
+primitive forest, one hundred or one hundred and fifty, ay, for aught
+they know, two hundred years old, have a ridiculously dwarfish
+appearance, which excites a smile in the beholder. The largest and most
+venerable which they will show you in such a case are, perhaps, not
+more than twenty or twenty-five feet high. I was especially amused by
+the Liliputian old oaks in the south part of Truro. To the
+inexperienced eye, which appreciated their proportions only, they might
+appear vast as the tree which saved his royal majesty, but measured,
+they were dwarfed at once almost into lichens which a deer might eat up
+in a morning. Yet they will tell you that large schooners were once
+built of timber which grew in Wellfleet. The old houses also are built
+of the timber of the Cape; but instead of the forests in the midst of
+which they originally stood, barren heaths, with poverty-grass for
+heather, now stretch away on every side. The modern houses are built of
+what is called “dimension timber,” _imported_ from Maine, all ready to
+be set up, so that commonly they do not touch it again with an axe.
+Almost all the wood used for fuel is imported by vessels or currents,
+and of course all the coal. I was told that probably a quarter of the
+fuel and a considerable part of the lumber used in North Truro was
+drift-wood. Many get _all_ their fuel from the beach.
+
+Of birds not found in the interior of the State,—at least in my
+neighborhood,—I heard, in the summer, the Black-throated Bunting
+(_Fringilla Americana_) amid the shrubbery, and in the open land the
+Upland Plover (_Totanus Bartramius_), whose quivering notes were ever
+and anon prolonged into a clear, somewhat plaintive, yet hawk-like
+scream, which sounded at a very indefinite distance. The bird may have
+been in the next field, though it sounded a mile off.
+
+To-day we were walking through Truro, a town of about eighteen hundred
+inhabitants. We had already come to Pamet River, which empties into the
+Bay. This was the limit of the Pilgrims’ journey up the Cape from
+Provincetown, when seeking a place for settlement. It rises in a hollow
+within a few rods of the Atlantic, and one who lives near its source
+told us that in high tides the sea leaked through, yet the wind and
+waves preserve intact the barrier between them, and thus the whole
+river is steadily driven westward butt-end foremost,—fountain-head,
+channel, and light-house at the mouth, all together.
+
+Early in the afternoon we reached the Highland Light, whose white tower
+we had seen rising out of the bank in front of us for the last mile or
+two. It is fourteen miles from the Nauset Lights, on what is called the
+Clay Pounds, an immense bed of clay abutting on the Atlantic, and, as
+the keeper told us, stretching quite across the Cape, which is here
+only about two miles wide. We perceived at once a difference in the
+soil, for there was an interruption of the desert, and a slight
+appearance of a sod under our feet, such as we had not seen for the
+last two days.
+
+After arranging to lodge at the light-house, we rambled across the Cape
+to the Bay, over a singularly bleak and barren-looking country,
+consisting of rounded hills and hollows, called by geologists diluvial
+elevations and depressions,—a kind of scenery which has been compared
+to a chopped sea, though this suggests too sudden a transition. There
+is a delineation of this very landscape in Hitchcock’s Report on the
+Geology of Massachusetts, a work which, by its size at least, reminds
+one of a diluvial elevation itself. Looking southward from the
+light-house, the Cape appeared like an elevated plateau, sloping very
+regularly, though slightly, downward from the edge of the bank on the
+Atlantic side, about one hundred and fifty feet above the ocean, to
+that on the Bay side. On traversing this we found it to be interrupted
+by broad valleys or gullies, which become the hollows in the bank when
+the sea has worn up to them. They are commonly at right angles with the
+shore, and often extend quite across the Cape. Some of the valleys,
+however, are circular, a hundred feet deep without any outlet, as if
+the Cape had sunk in those places, or its sands had run out. The few
+scattered houses which we passed, being placed at the bottom of the
+hollows for shelter and fertility, were, for the most part, concealed
+entirely, as much as if they had been swallowed up in the earth. Even a
+village with its meeting-house, which we had left little more than a
+stone’s throw behind, had sunk into the earth, spire and all, and we
+saw only the surface of the upland and the sea on either hand. When
+approaching it, we had mistaken the belfry for a summer-house on the
+plain. We began to think that we might tumble into a village before we
+were aware of it, as into an ant-lion’s hole, and be drawn into the
+sand irrecoverably. The most conspicuous objects on the land were a
+distant windmill, or a meeting-house standing alone, for only they
+could afford to occupy an exposed place. A great part of the township,
+however, is a barren, heath-like plain, and perhaps one third of it
+lies in common, though the property of individuals. The author of the
+old “Description of Truro,” speaking of the soil, says: “The snow,
+which would be of essential service to it provided it lay level and
+covered the ground, is blown into drifts and into the sea.” This
+peculiar open country, with here and there a patch of shrubbery,
+extends as much as seven miles, or from Pamet River on the south to
+High Head on the north, and from Ocean to Bay. To walk over it makes on
+a stranger such an impression as being at sea, and he finds it
+impossible to estimate distances in any weather. A windmill or a herd
+of cows may seem to be far away in the horizon, yet, after going a few
+rods, he will be close upon them. He is also deluded by other kinds of
+mirage. When, in the summer, I saw a family a-blueberrying a mile off,
+walking about amid the dwarfish bushes which did not come up higher
+than their ankles, they seemed to me to be a race of giants, twenty
+feet high at least.
+
+The highest and sandiest portion next the Atlantic was thinly covered
+with Beach-grass and Indigo-weed. Next to this the surface of the
+upland generally consisted of white sand and gravel, like coarse salt,
+through which a scanty vegetation found its way up. It will give an
+ornithologist some idea of its barrenness if I mention that the next
+June, the month of grass, I found a night-hawk’s eggs there, and that
+almost any square rod thereabouts, taken at random, would be an
+eligible site for such a deposit. The kildeer-plover, which loves a
+similar locality, also drops its eggs there, and fills the air above
+with its din. This upland also produced _Cladonia_ lichens,
+poverty-grass, savory-leaved aster (_Diplopappus linariifolius_),
+mouse-ear, bear-berry, &c. On a few hillsides the savory-leaved aster
+and mouse-ear alone made quite a dense sward, said to be very pretty
+when the aster is in bloom. In some parts the two species of
+poverty-grass (_Hudsonia tomentosa_ and _ericoides_), which deserve a
+better name, reign for miles in littli hemispherical tufts or islets,
+like moss, scattered over the waste. They linger in bloom there till
+the middle of July. Occasionally near the beach these rounded beds, as
+also those of the sea-sandwort (_Honkenya peploides_), were filled with
+sand within an inch of their tops, and were hard, like large ant-hills,
+while the surrounding sand was soft. In summer, if the poverty-grass
+grows at the head of a Hollow looking toward the sea, in a bleak
+position where the wind rushes up, the northern or exposed half of the
+tuft is sometimes all black and dead like an oven-broom, while the
+opposite half is yellow with blossoms, the whole hillside thus
+presenting a remarkable contrast when seen from the poverty-stricken
+and the flourishing side. This plant, which in many places would be
+esteemed an ornament, is here despised by many on account of its being
+associated with barrenness. It might well be adopted for the Barnstable
+coat-of-arms, in a field _sableux_. I should be proud of it. Here and
+there were tracts of Beach-grass mingled with the Sea-side Goldenrod
+and Beach-pea, which reminded us still more forcibly of the ocean.
+
+[Illustration: Truro meeting-house on the hill]
+
+We read that there was not a brook in Truro. Yet there were deer here
+once, which must often have panted in vain; but I am pretty sure that I
+afterward saw a small fresh-water brook emptying into the south side of
+Pamet River, though I was so heedless as not to taste it. At any rate,
+a little boy near by told me that he drank at it. There was not a tree
+as far as we could see, and that was many miles each way, the general
+level of the upland being about the same everywhere. Even from the
+Atlantic side we overlooked the Bay, and saw to Manomet Point in
+Plymouth, and better from that side because it was the highest. The
+almost universal bareness and smoothness of the landscape were as
+agreeable as novel, making it so much the more like the deck of a
+vessel. We saw vessels sailing south into the Bay, on the one hand, and
+north along the Atlantic shore, on the other, all with an aft wind.
+
+The single road which runs lengthwise the Cape, now winding over the
+plain, now through the shrubbery which scrapes the wheels of the stage,
+was a mere cart-track in the sand, commonly without any fences to
+confine it, and continually changing from this side to that, to harder
+ground, or sometimes to avoid the tide. But the inhabitants travel the
+waste here and there pilgrim-wise and staff in hand, by narrow
+footpaths, through which the sand flows out and reveals the nakedness
+of the land. We shuddered at the thought of living there and taking our
+afternoon walks over those barren swells, where we could overlook every
+step of our walk before taking it, and would have to pray for a fog or
+a snow-storm to conceal our destiny. The walker there must soon eat his
+heart.
+
+In the north part of the town there is no house from shore to shore for
+several miles, and it is as wild and solitary as the Western
+Prairies—used to be. Indeed, one who has seen every house in Truro will
+be surprised to hear of the number of the inhabitants, but perhaps five
+hundred of the men and boys of this small town were then abroad on
+their fishing grounds. Only a few men stay at home to till the sand or
+watch for blackfish. The farmers are fishermen-farmers and understand
+better ploughing the sea than the land. They do not disturb their sands
+much, though there is a plenty of sea-weed in the creeks, to say
+nothing of blackfish occasionally rotting the shore. Between the Pond
+and East Harbor Village there was an interesting plantation of
+pitch-pines, twenty or thirty acres in extent, like those which we had
+already seen from the stage. One who lived near said that the land was
+purchased by two men for a shilling or twenty-five cents an acre. Some
+is not considered worth writing a deed for. This soil or sand, which
+was partially covered with poverty and beach grass, sorrel, &c., was
+furrowed at intervals of about four feet and the seed dropped by a
+machine. The pines had come up admirably and grown the first year three
+or four inches, and the second six inches and more. Where the seed had
+been lately planted the white sand was freshly exposed in an endless
+furrow winding round and round the sides of the deep hollows, in a
+vertical spiral manner, which produced a very singular effect, as if
+you were looking into the reverse side of a vast banded shield. This
+experiment, so important to the Cape, appeared very successful, and
+perhaps the time will come when the greater part of this kind of land
+in Barnstable County will be thus covered with an artificial pine
+forest, as has been done in some parts of France. In that country
+12,500 acres of downs had been thus covered in 1811 near Bayonne. They
+are called _pignadas_, and according to Loudon “constitute the
+principal riches of the inhabitants, where there was a drifting desert
+before.” It seemed a nobler kind of grain to raise than corn even.
+
+[Illustration: A herd of cows]
+
+A few years ago Truro was remarkable among the Cape towns for the
+number of sheep raised in it; but I was told that at this time only two
+men kept sheep in the town, and in 1855, a Truro boy ten years old told
+me that he had never seen one. They were formerly pastured on the
+unfenced lands or general fields, but now the owners were more
+particular to assert their rights, and it cost too much for fencing.
+The rails are cedar from Maine, and two rails will answer for ordinary
+purposes, but four are required for sheep. This was the reason assigned
+by one who had formerly kept them for not keeping them any longer.
+Fencing stuff is so expensive that I saw fences made with only one
+rail, and very often the rail when split was carefully tied with a
+string. In one of the villages I saw the next summer a cow tethered by
+a rope six rods long, the rope long in proportion as the feed was short
+and thin. Sixty rods, ay, all the cables of the Cape, would have been
+no more than fair. Tethered in the desert for fear that she would get
+into Arabia Felix! I helped a man weigh a bundle of hay which he was
+selling to his neighbor, holding one end of a pole from which it swung
+by a steel-yard hook, and this was just half his whole crop. In short,
+the country looked so barren that I several times refrained from asking
+the inhabitants for a string or a piece of wrapping-paper, for fear I
+should rob them, for they plainly were obliged to import these things
+as well as rails, and where there were no newsboys, I did not see what
+they would do for waste paper.
+
+The objects around us, the make-shifts of fishermen ashore, often made
+us look down to see if we were standing on terra firma. In the wells
+everywhere a block and tackle were used to raise the bucket, instead of
+a windlass, and by almost every house was laid up a spar or a plank or
+two full of auger-holes, saved from a wreck. The windmills were partly
+built of these, and they were worked into the public bridges. The
+light-house keeper, who was having his barn shingled, told me casually
+that he had made three thousand good shingles for that purpose out of a
+mast. You would sometimes see an old oar used for a rail. Frequently
+also some fair-weather finery ripped off a vessel by a storm near the
+coast was nailed up against an outhouse. I saw fastened to a shed near
+the lighthouse a long new sign with the words “ANGLO SAXON” on it in
+large gilt letters, as if it were a useless part which the ship could
+afford to lose, or which the sailors had discharged at the same time
+with the pilot. But it interested somewhat as if it had been a part of
+the Argo, clipped off in passing through the Symplegades.
+
+To the fisherman, the Cape itself is a sort of store-ship laden with
+supplies,—a safer and larger craft which carries the women and
+children, the old men and the sick; and indeed sea-phrases are as
+common on it as on board a vessel. Thus is it ever with a sea-going
+people. The old Northmen used to speak of the “keel-ridge” of the
+country, that is, the ridge of the Doffrafield Mountains, as if the
+land were a boat turned bottom up. I was frequently reminded of the
+Northmen here. The inhabitants of the Cape are often at once farmers
+and sea-rovers; they are more than vikings or kings of the bays, for
+their sway extends over the open sea also. A farmer in Wellfleet, at
+whose house I afterward spent a night, who had raised fifty bushels of
+potatoes the previous year, which is a large crop for the Cape, and had
+extensive salt-works, pointed to his schooner, which lay in sight, in
+which he and his man and boy occasionally ran down the coast a-trading
+as far as the Capes of Virginia. This was his market-cart, and his
+hired man knew how to steer her. Thus he drove two teams a-field,
+
+“ere the high _seas_ appeared
+Under the opening eyelids of the morn.”
+
+
+Though probably he would not hear much of the “gray fly” on his way to
+Virginia.
+
+A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus
+abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the
+history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic
+expedition into the shade. I have just heard of a Cape Cod captain who
+was expected home in the beginning of the winter from the West Indies,
+but was long since given up for lost, till his relations at length have
+heard with joy, that, after getting within forty miles of Cape Cod
+light, he was driven back by nine successive gales to Key West, between
+Florida and Cuba, and was once again shaping his course for home. Thus
+he spent his winter. In ancient times the adventures of these two or
+three men and boys would have been made the basis of a myth, but now
+such tales are crowded into a line of shorthand signs, like an
+algebraic formula in the shipping news. “Wherever over the world,” said
+Palfrey in his oration at Barnstable, “you see the stars and stripes
+floating, you may have good hope that beneath them some one will be
+found who can tell you the soundings of Barnstable, or Wellfleet, or
+Chatham Harbor.”
+
+I passed by the home of somebody’s (or everybody’s) Uncle Bill, one day
+over on the Plymouth shore. It was a schooner half keeled-up on the
+mud: we aroused the master out of a sound sleep at noonday, by thumping
+on the bottom of his vessel till he presented himself at the hatchway,
+for we wanted to borrow his clam-digger. Meaning to make him a call, I
+looked out the next morning, and lo! he had run over to “the Pines” the
+evening before, fearing an easterly storm. He outrode the _great_ gale
+in the spring of 1851, dashing about alone in Plymouth Bay. He goes
+after rockweed, lighters vessels, and saves wrecks. I still saw him
+lying in the mud over at “the Pines” in the horizon, which place he
+could not leave if he would till flood tide. But he would not then
+probably. This waiting for the tide is a singular feature in life by
+the sea-shore. A frequent answer is, “Well! you can’t start for two
+hours yet.” It is something new to a landsman, and at first he is not
+disposed to wait. History says that “two inhabitants of Truro were the
+first who adventured to the Falkland Isles in pursuit of whales. This
+voyage was undertaken in the year 1774, by the advice of Admiral
+Montague of the British navy, and was crowned with success.”
+
+At the Pond Village we saw a pond three eighths of a mile long densely
+filled with cat-tail flags, seven feet high,—enough for all the coopers
+in New England.
+
+[Illustration: Pond Village]
+
+The western shore was nearly as sandy as the eastern, but the water was
+much smoother, and the bottom was partially covered with the slender
+grass-like seaweed (_Zostera_), which we had not seen on the Atlantic
+side; there were also a few rude sheds for trying fish on the beach
+there, which made it appear less wild. In the few marshes on this side
+we afterward saw Samphire, Rosemary, and other plants new to us
+inlanders.
+
+In the summer and fall sometimes, hundreds of blackfish (the Social
+Whale, _Globicephalus Melas_ of De Kay; called also Black Whale-fish,
+Howling Whale, Bottlehead, etc.), fifteen feet or more in length, are
+driven ashore in a single school here. I witnessed such a scene in
+July, 1855. A carpenter who was working at the lighthouse arriving
+early in the morning remarked that he did not know but he had lost
+fifty dollars by coming to his work; for as he came along the Bay side
+he heard them driving a school of blackfish ashore, and he had debated
+with himself whether he should not go and join them and take his share,
+but had concluded to come to his work. After breakfast I came over to
+this place, about two miles distant, and near the beach met some of the
+fishermen returning from their chase. Looking up and down the shore, I
+could see about a mile south some large black masses on the sand, which
+I knew must be blackfish, and a man or two about them. As I walked
+along towards them I soon came to a huge carcass whose head was gone
+and whose blubber had been stripped off some weeks before; the tide was
+just beginning to move it, and the stench compelled me to go a long way
+round. When I came to Great Hollow I found a fisherman and some boys on
+the watch, and counted about thirty blackfish, just killed, with many
+lance wounds, and the water was more or less bloody around. They were
+partly on shore and partly in the water, held by a rope round their
+tails till the tide should leave them. A boat had been somewhat stove
+by the tail of one. They were a smooth shining black, like
+India-rubber, and had remarkably simple and lumpish forms for animated
+creatures, with a blunt round snout or head, whale-like, and simple
+stiff-looking flippers. The largest were about fifteen feet long, but
+one or two were only five feet long, and still without teeth. The
+fisherman slashed one with his jackknife, to show me how thick the
+blubber was,—about three inches; and as I passed my finger through the
+cut it was covered thick with oil. The blubber looked like pork, and
+this man said that when they were trying it the boys would sometimes
+come round with a piece of bread in one hand, and take a piece of
+blubber in the other to eat with it, preferring it to pork scraps. He
+also cut into the flesh beneath, which was firm and red like beef, and
+he said that for his part he preferred it when fresh to beef. It is
+stated that in 1812 blackfish were used as food by the poor of
+Bretagne. They were waiting for the tide to leave these fishes high and
+dry, that they might strip off the blubber and carry it to their
+try-works in their boats, where they try it on the beach. They get
+commonly a barrel of oil, worth fifteen or twenty dollars, to a fish.
+There were many lances and harpoons in the boats,—much slenderer
+instruments than I had expected. An old man came along the beach with a
+horse and wagon distributing the dinners of the fishermen, which their
+wives had put up in little pails and jugs, and which he had collected
+in the Pond Village, and for this service, I suppose, he received a
+share of the oil. If one could not tell his own pail, he took the first
+he came to.
+
+As I stood there they raised the cry of “another school,” and we could
+see their black backs and their blowing about a mile northward, as they
+went leaping over the sea like horses. Some boats were already in
+pursuit there, driving them toward the beach. Other fishermen and boys
+running up began to jump into the boats and push them off from where I
+stood, and I might have gone too had I chosen. Soon there were
+twenty-five or thirty boats in pursuit, some large ones under sail, and
+others rowing with might and main, keeping outside of the school, those
+nearest to the fishes striking on the sides of their boats and blowing
+horns to drive them on to the beach. It was an exciting race. If they
+succeed in driving them ashore each boat takes one share, and then each
+man, but if they are compelled to strike them off shore each boat’s
+company take what they strike. I walked rapidly along the shore toward
+the north, while the fishermen were rowing still more swiftly to join
+their companions, and a little boy who walked by my side was
+congratulating himself that his father’s boat was beating another one.
+An old blind fisherman whom we met, inquired, “Where are they? I can’t
+see. Have they got them?” In the mean while the fishes had turned and
+were escaping northward toward Provincetown, only occasionally the back
+of one being seen. So the nearest crews were compelled to strike them,
+and we saw several boats soon made fast, each to its fish, which, four
+or five rods ahead, was drawing it like a race-horse straight toward
+the beach, leaping half out of water, blowing blood and water from its
+hole, and leaving a streak of foam behind. But they went ashore too far
+north for us, though we could see the fishermen leap out and lance them
+on the sand. It was just like pictures of whaling which I have seen,
+and a fisherman told me that it was nearly as dangerous. In his first
+trial he had been much excited, and in his haste had used a lance with
+its scabbard on, but nevertheless had thrust it quite through his fish.
+
+I learned that a few days before this one hundred and eighty blackfish
+had been driven ashore in one school at Eastham, a little farther
+south, and that the keeper of Billingsgate Point light went out one
+morning about the same time and cut his initials on the backs of a
+large school which had run ashore in the night, and sold his right to
+them to Provincetown for one thousand dollars, and probably
+Provincetown made as much more. Another fisherman told me that nineteen
+years ago three hundred and eighty were driven ashore in one school at
+Great Hollow. In the Naturalists’ Library, it is said that, in the
+winter of 1809-10, one thousand one hundred and ten “approached the
+shore of Hralfiord, Iceland, and were captured.” De Kay says it is not
+known why they are stranded. But one fisherman declared to me that they
+ran ashore in pursuit of squid, and that they generally came on the
+coast about the last of July.
+
+About a week afterward, when I came to this shore, it was strewn, as
+far as I could see with a glass, with the carcasses of blackfish
+stripped of their blubber and their heads cut off; the latter lying
+higher up. Walking on the beach was out of the question on account of
+the stench. Between Provincetown and Truro they lay in the very path of
+the stage. Yet no steps were taken to abate the nuisance, and men were
+catching lobsters as usual just off the shore. I was told that they did
+sometimes tow them out and sink them; yet I wondered where they got the
+stones to sink them with. Of course they might be made into guano, and
+Cape Cod is not so fertile that her inhabitants can afford to do
+without this manure,—to say nothing of the diseases they may produce.
+
+After my return home, wishing to learn what was known about the
+Blackfish, I had recourse to the reports of the zoological surveys of
+the State, and I found that Storer had rightfully omitted it in his
+Report on the Fishes, since it is not a fish; so I turned to Emmons’s
+Report of the Mammalia, but was surprised to find that the seals and
+whales were omitted by him, because he had had no opportunity to
+observe them. Considering how this State has risen and thriven by its
+fisheries,—that the legislature which authorized the Zoological Survey
+sat under the emblem of a codfish,—that Nantucket and New Bedford are
+within our limits,—that an early riser may find a thousand or fifteen
+hundred dollars’ worth of blackfish on the shore in a morning,—that the
+Pilgrims saw the Indians cutting up a blackfish on the shore at
+Eastham, and called a part of that shore “Grampus Bay,” from the number
+of blackfish they found there, before they got to Plymouth,—and that
+from that time to this these fishes have continued to enrich one or two
+counties almost annually, and that their decaying carcasses were now
+poisoning the air of one county for more than thirty miles,—I thought
+it remarkable that neither the popular nor scientific name was to be
+found in a report on our mammalia,—a catalogue of the productions of
+our land and water.
+
+We had here, as well as all across the Cape, a fair view of
+Provincetown, five or six miles distant over the water toward the west,
+under its shrubby sand-hills, with its harbor now full of vessels whose
+masts mingled with the spires of its churches, and gave it the
+appearance of a quite large seaport town.
+
+The inhabitants of all the lower Cape towns enjoy thus the prospect of
+two seas. Standing on the western or larboard shore, and looking
+across to where the distant mainland looms, they can say, This is
+Massachusetts Bay; and then, after an hour’s sauntering walk, they may
+stand on the starboard side, beyond which no land is seen to loom, and
+say, This is the Atlantic Ocean.
+
+On our way back to the lighthouse, by whose white-washed tower we
+steered as securely as the mariner by its light at night, we passed
+through a graveyard, which apparently was saved from being blown away
+by its slates, for they had enabled a thick bed of huckleberry-bushes
+to root themselves amid the graves. We thought it would be worth the
+while to read the epitaphs where so many were lost at sea; however, as
+not only their lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lost or not
+identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we expected,
+though there were not a few. Their graveyard is the ocean. Near the
+eastern side we started up a fox in a hollow, the only kind of wild
+quadruped, if I except a skunk in a salt-marsh, that we saw in all our
+walk (unless painted and box tortoises may be called quadrupeds). He
+was a large, plump, shaggy fellow, like a yellow dog, with, as usual, a
+white tip to his tail, and looked as if he fared well on the Cape. He
+cantered away into the shrub-oaks and bayberry-bushes which chanced to
+grow there, but were hardly high enough to conceal him. I saw another
+the next summer leaping over the top of a beach-plum a little farther
+north, a small arc of his course (which I trust is not yet run), from
+which I endeavored in vain to calculate his whole orbit: there were too
+many unknown attractions to be allowed for. I also saw the exuviae of a
+third fast sinking into the sand, and added the skull to my collection.
+Hence I concluded that they must be plenty thereabouts; but a traveller
+may meet with more than an inhabitant, since he is more likely to take
+an unfrequented route across the country. They told me that in some
+years they died off in great numbers by a kind of madness, under the
+effect of which they were seen whirling round and round as if in
+pursuit of their tails. In Crantz’s account of Greenland, he says:
+“They (the foxes) live upon birds and their eggs, and, when they can’t
+get them, upon crowberries, mussels, crabs, and what the sea casts
+out.”
+
+Just before reaching the light-house, we saw the sun set in the
+Bay,—for standing on that narrow Cape was, as I have said, like being
+on the deck of a vessel, or rather at the masthead of a man-of-war,
+thirty miles at sea, though we knew that at the same moment the sun was
+setting behind our native hills, which were just below the horizon in
+that direction. This sight drove everything else quite out of our
+heads, and Homer and the Ocean came in again with a rush,—
+
+Ἐν δ’ ἔπεσ’ Ὠκεανῷ λαμπρὸν φάος ἠελίοιο,
+
+
+the shining torch of the sun fell into the ocean.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+THE HIGHLAND LIGHT
+
+
+This light-house, known to mariners as the Cape Cod or Highland Light,
+is one of our “primary sea-coast lights,” and is usually the first seen
+by those approaching the entrance of Massachusetts Bay from Europe. It
+is forty-three miles from Cape Ann Light, and forty-one from Boston
+Light. It stands about twenty rods from the edge of the bank, which is
+here formed of clay. I borrowed the plane and square, level and
+dividers, of a carpenter who was shingling a barn near by, and using
+one of those shingles made of a mast, contrived a rude sort of
+quadrant, with pins for sights and pivots, and got the angle of
+elevation of the Bank opposite the light-house, and with a couple of
+cod-lines the length of its slope, and so measured its height on the
+shingle. It rises one hundred and ten feet above its immediate base, or
+about one hundred and twenty-three feet above mean low water. Graham,
+who has carefully surveyed the extremity of the Cape, makes it one
+hundred and thirty feet. The mixed sand and clay lay at an angle of
+forty degrees with the horizon, where I measured it, but the clay is
+generally much steeper. No cow nor hen ever gets down it. Half a mile
+farther south the bank is fifteen or twenty-five feet higher, and that
+appeared to be the highest land in North Truro. Even this vast clay
+bank is fast wearing away. Small streams of water trickling down it at
+intervals of two or three rods, have left the intermediate clay in the
+form of steep Gothic roofs fifty feet high or more, the ridges as sharp
+and rugged-looking as rocks; and in one place the bank is curiously
+eaten out in the form of a large semicircular crater.
+
+[Illustration: Dragging a dory up on the beach]
+
+According to the light-house keeper, the Cape is wasting here on both
+sides, though most on the eastern. In some places it had lost many rods
+within the last year, and, erelong, the light-house must be moved. We
+calculated, _from his data_, how soon the Cape would be quite worn away
+at this point, “for,” said he, “I can remember sixty years back.” We
+were even more surprised at this last announcement,—that is, at the
+slow waste of life and energy in our informant, for we had taken him to
+be not more than forty,—than at the rapid wasting of the Cape, and we
+thought that he stood a fair chance to outlive the former.
+
+Between this October and June of the next year I found that the bank
+had lost about forty feet in one place, opposite the light-house, and
+it was cracked more than forty feet farther from the edge at the last
+date, the shore being strewn with the recent rubbish. But I judged that
+generally it was not wearing away here at the rate of more than six
+feet annually. Any conclusions drawn from the observations of a few
+years or one generation only are likely to prove false, and the Cape
+may balk expectation by its durability. In some places even a wrecker’s
+foot-path down the bank lasts several years. One old inhabitant told us
+that when the light-house was built, in 1798, it was calculated that it
+would stand forty-five years, allowing the bank to waste one length of
+fence each year, “but,” said he, “there it is” (or rather another near
+the same site, about twenty rods from the edge of the bank).
+
+The sea is not gaining on the Cape everywhere, for one man told me of a
+vessel wrecked long ago on the north of Provincetown whose “bones”
+(this was his word) are still visible many rods within the present line
+of the beach, half buried in sand. Perchance they lie alongside the
+timbers of a whale. The general statement of the inhabitants is that
+the Cape is wasting on both sides, but extending itself on particular
+points on the south and west, as at Chatham and Monomoy Beaches, and at
+Billingsgate, Long, and Race Points. James Freeman stated in his day
+that above three miles had been added to Monomoy Beach during the
+previous fifty years, and it is said to be still extending as fast as
+ever. A writer in the Massachusetts Magazine, in the last century,
+tells us that “when the English first settled upon the Cape, there was
+an island off Chatham, at three leagues’ distance, called Webbs’
+Island, containing twenty acres, covered with red-cedar or savin. The
+inhabitants of Nantucket used to carry wood from it”; but he adds that
+in his day a large rock alone marked the spot, and the water was six
+fathoms deep there. The entrance to Nauset Harbor, which was once in
+Eastham, has now travelled south into Orleans. The islands in Wellfleet
+Harbor once formed a continuous beach, though now small vessels pass
+between them. And so of many other parts of this coast.
+
+Perhaps what the Ocean takes from one part of the Cape it gives to
+another,—robs Peter to pay Paul. On the eastern side the sea appears to
+be everywhere encroaching on the land. Not only the land is undermined,
+and its ruins carried off by currents, but the sand is blown from the
+beach directly up the steep bank where it is one hundred and fifty feet
+high, and covers the original surface there many feet deep. If you sit
+on the edge you will have ocular demonstration of this by soon getting
+your eyes full. Thus the bank preserves its height as fast as it is
+worn away. This sand is steadily travelling westward at a rapid rate,
+“more than a hundred yards,” says one writer, within the memory of
+inhabitants now living; so that in some places peat-meadows are buried
+deep under the sand, and the peat is cut through it; and in one place a
+large peat-meadow has made its appearance on the shore in the bank
+covered many feet deep, and peat has been cut there. This accounts for
+that great pebble of peat which we saw in the surf. The old oysterman
+had told us that many years ago he lost a “crittur” by her being mired
+in a swamp near the Atlantic side east of his house, and twenty years
+ago he lost the swamp itself entirely, but has since seen signs of it
+appearing on the beach. He also said that he had seen cedar stumps “as
+big as cart-wheels”(!) on the bottom of the Bay, three miles off
+Billingsate Point, when leaning over the side of his boat in pleasant
+weather, and that that was dry land not long ago. Another told us that
+a log canoe known to have been buried many years before on the Bay side
+at East Harbor in Truro, where the Cape is extremely narrow, appeared
+at length on the Atlantic side, the Cape having rolled over it, and an
+old woman said,—“Now, you see, it is true what I told you, that the
+Cape is moving.”
+
+The bars along the coast shift with every storm, and in many places
+there is occasionally none at all. We ourselves observed the effect of
+a single storm with a high tide in the night, in July, 1855. It moved
+the sand on the beach opposite the light-house to the depth of six
+feet, and three rods in width as far as we could see north and south,
+and carried it bodily off no one knows exactly where, laying bare in
+one place a large rock five feet high which was invisible before, and
+narrowing the beach to that extent. There is usually, as I have said,
+no bathing on the back-side of the Cape, on account of the undertow,
+but when we were there last, the sea had, three months before, cast up
+a bar near this lighthouse, two miles long and ten rods wide, over
+which the tide did not flow, leaving a narrow cove, then a quarter of a
+mile long, between it and the shore, which afforded excellent bathing.
+This cove had from time to time been closed up as the bar travelled
+northward, in one instance imprisoning four or five hundred whiting and
+cod, which died there, and the water as often turned fresh, and finally
+gave place to sand. This bar, the inhabitants assured us, might be
+wholly removed, and the water six feet deep there in two or three days.
+
+The light-house keeper said that when the wind blowed strong on to the
+shore, the waves ate fast into the bank, but when it blowed off they
+took no sand away; for in the former case the wind heaped up the
+surface of the water next to the beach, and to preserve its equilibrium
+a strong undertow immediately set back again into the sea which carried
+with it the sand and whatever else was in the way, and left the beach
+hard to walk on; but in the latter case the undertow set on and carried
+the sand with it, so that it was particularly difficult for shipwrecked
+men to get to land when the wind blowed on to the shore, but easier
+when it blowed off. This undertow, meeting the next surface wave on the
+bar which itself has made, forms part of the dam over which the latter
+breaks, as over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land
+holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat
+plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at last. The
+sea sends its rapacious east wind to rob the land, but before the
+former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west wind
+to recover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the
+forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally
+determined, not by winds and waves but by tides.
+
+Our host said that you would be surprised if you were on the beach when
+the wind blew a hurricane directly on to it, to see that none of the
+drift-wood came ashore, but all was carried directly northward and
+parallel with the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the inshore
+current, which sets strongly in that direction at flood tide. The
+strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, and never gain an
+inch toward the beach. Even a large rock has been moved half a mile
+northward along-the beach. He assured us that the sea was never still
+on the back-side of the Cape, but ran commonly as high as your head, so
+that a great part of the time you could not launch a boat there, and
+even in the calmest weather the waves run six or eight feet up the
+beach, though then you could get off on a plank. Champlain and
+Pourtrincourt could not land here in 1606, on account of the swell (_la
+houlle_), yet the savages came off to them in a canoe. In the Sieur de
+la Borde’s “Relation des Caraibes,” my edition of which was published
+at Amsterdam in 1711, at page 530 he says:—
+
+“Couroumon a Caraibe, also a star [_i.e._ a god], makes the great
+_lames à la mer_, and overturns canoes. _Lames à la mer_ are the long
+_vagues_ which are not broken (_entrecoupées_), and such as one sees
+come to land all in one piece, from one end of a beach to another, so
+that, however little wind there may be, a shallop or a canoe could
+hardly land (_aborder terre_) without turning over, or being filled
+with water.”
+
+But on the Bay side the water even at its edge is often as smooth and
+still as in a pond. Commonly there are no boats used along this beach.
+There was a boat belonging to the Highland Light which the next keeper
+after he had been there a year had not launched, though he said that
+there was good fishing just off the shore. Generally the Life Boats
+cannot be used when needed. When the waves run very high it is
+impossible to get a boat off, however skilfully you steer it, for it
+will often be completely covered by the curving edge of the approaching
+breaker as by an arch, and so filled with water, or it will be lifted
+up by its bows, turned directly over backwards, and all the contents
+spilled out. A spar thirty feet long is served in the same way.
+
+I heard of a party who went off fishing back of Wellfleet some years
+ago, in two boats, in calm weather, who, when they had laden their
+boats with fish, and approached the land again, found such a swell
+breaking on it, though there was no wind, that they were afraid to
+enter it. At first they thought to pull for Provincetown, but night was
+coming on, and that was many miles distant. Their case seemed a
+desperate one. As often as they approached the shore and saw the
+terrible breakers that intervened, they were deterred. In short, they
+were thoroughly frightened. Finally, having thrown their fish
+overboard, those in one boat chose a favorable opportunity, and
+succeeded, by skill and good luck, in reaching the land, but they were
+unwilling to take the responsibility of telling the others when to come
+in, and as the other helmsman was inexperienced, their boat was swamped
+at once, yet all managed to save themselves.
+
+Much smaller waves soon make a boat “nail-sick,” as the phrase is. The
+keeper said that after a long and strong blow there would be three
+large waves, each successively larger than the last, and then no large
+ones for some time, and that, when they wished to land in a boat, they
+came in on the last and largest wave. Sir Thomas Browne (as quoted in
+Brand’s Popular Antiquities, p. 372), on the subject of the tenth wave
+being “greater or more dangerous than any other,” after quoting Ovid,—
+
+“Qui venit hic fluctus, fluctus supereminet omnes
+Posterior nono est, undecimo que prior,”—
+
+
+says, “Which, notwithstanding, is evidently false; nor can it be made
+out either by observation either upon the shore or the ocean, as we
+have with diligence explored in both. And surely in vain we expect
+regularity in the waves of the sea, or in the particular motions
+thereof, as we may in its general reciprocations, whose causes are
+constant, and effects therefore correspondent; whereas its fluctuations
+are but motions subservient, which winds, storms, shores, shelves, and
+every interjacency, irregulates.”
+
+We read that the Clay Pounds, were so called “because vessels have had
+the misfortune to be pounded against it in gales of wind,” which we
+regard as a doubtful derivation. There are small ponds here, upheld by
+the clay, which were formerly called the Clay Pits. Perhaps this, or
+Clay Ponds, is the origin of the name. Water is found in the clay quite
+near the surface; but we heard of one man who had sunk a well in the
+sand close by, “till he could see stars at noonday,” without finding
+any. Over this bare Highland the wind has full sweep. Even in July it
+blows the wings over the heads of the young turkeys, which do not know
+enough to head against it; and in gales the doors and windows are blown
+in, and you must hold on to the lighthouse to prevent being blown into
+the Atlantic. They who merely keep out on the beach in a storm in the
+winter are sometimes rewarded by the Humane Society. If you would feel
+the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount
+Washington, or at the Highland Light, in Truro.
+
+It was said in 1794 that more vessels were cast away on the east shore
+of Truro than anywhere in Barnstable County. Notwithstanding that this
+light-house has since been erected, after almost every storm we read of
+one or more vessels wrecked here, and sometimes more than a dozen
+wrecks are visible from this point at one time. The inhabitants hear
+the crash of vessels going to pieces as they sit round their hearths,
+and they commonly date from some memorable shipwreck. If the history of
+this beach could be written from beginning to end, it would be a
+thrilling page in the history of commerce.
+
+Truro was settled in the year 1700 as _Dangerfield_. This was a very
+appropriate name, for I afterward read on a monument in the graveyard,
+near Pamet River, the following inscription:—
+
+Sacred
+to the memory of
+57 citizens of Truro,
+who were lost in seven
+vessels, which
+foundered at sea in
+the memorable gale
+of Oct. 3d, 1841.
+
+
+Their names and ages by families were recorded on different sides of
+the stone. They are said to have been lost on George’s Bank, and I was
+told that only one vessel drifted ashore on the backside of the Cape,
+with the boys locked into the cabin and drowned. It is said that the
+homes of all were “within a circuit of two miles.” Twenty-eight
+inhabitants of Dennis were lost in the same gale; and I read that “in
+one day, immediately after this storm, nearly or quite one hundred
+bodies were taken up and buried on Cape Cod.” The Truro Insurance
+Company failed for want of skippers to take charge of its vessels. But
+the surviving inhabitants went a-fishing again the next year as usual.
+I found that it would not do to speak of shipwrecks there, for almost
+every family has lost some of its members at sea. “Who lives in that
+house?” I inquired. “Three widows,” was the reply. The stranger and the
+inhabitant view the shore with very different eyes. The former may have
+come to see and admire the ocean in a storm; but the latter looks on it
+as the scene where his nearest relatives were wrecked. When I remarked
+to an old wrecker partially blind, who was sitting on the edge of the
+bank smoking a pipe, which he had just lit with a match of dried
+beach-grass, that I supposed he liked to hear the sound of the surf, he
+answered: “No, I do not like to hear the sound of the surf.” He had
+lost at least one son in “the memorable gale,” and could tell many a
+tale of the shipwrecks which he had witnessed there.
+
+In the year 1717, a noted pirate named Bellamy was led on to the bar
+off Wellfleet by the captain of a _snow_ which he had taken, to whom he
+had offered his vessel again if he would pilot him into Provincetown
+Harbor. Tradition says that the latter threw over a burning tar-barrel
+in the night, which drifted ashore, and the pirates followed it. A
+storm coming on, their whole fleet was wrecked, and more than a hundred
+dead bodies lay along the shore. Six who escaped shipwreck were
+executed. “At times to this day” (1793), says the historian of
+Wellfleet, “there are King William and Queen Mary’s coppers picked up,
+and pieces of silver called cob-money. The violence of the seas moves
+the sands on the outer bar, so that at times the iron caboose of the
+ship [that is, Bellamy’s] at low ebbs has been seen.” Another tells us
+that, “For many years after this shipwreck, a man of a very singular
+and frightful aspect used every spring and autumn to be seen travelling
+on the Cape, who was supposed to have been one of Bellamy’s crew. The
+presumption is that he went to some place where money had been secreted
+by the pirates, to get such a supply as his exigencies required. When
+he died, many pieces of gold were found in a girdle which he constantly
+wore.”
+
+[Illustration: An old wrecker at home]
+
+As I was walking on the beach here in my last visit, looking for shells
+and pebbles, just after that storm, which I have mentioned as moving
+the sand to a great depth, not knowing but I might find some cob-money,
+I did actually pick up a French crown piece, worth about a dollar and
+six cents, near high-water mark, on the still moist sand, just under
+the abrupt, caving base of the bank. It was of a dark slate color, and
+looked like a flat pebble, but still bore a very distinct and handsome
+head of Louis XV., and the usual legend on the reverse. _Sit Nomen
+Domini Benedictum_ (Blessed be the Name of the Lord), a pleasing
+sentiment to read in the sands of the sea-shore, whatever it might be
+stamped on, and I also made out the date, 1741. Of course, I thought at
+first that it was that same old button which I have found so many
+times, but my knife soon showed the silver. Afterward, rambling on the
+bars at low tide, I cheated my companion by holding up round shells
+(_Scutellæ_) between my fingers, whereupon he quickly stripped and came
+off to me.
+
+In the Revolution, a British ship of war called the Somerset was
+wrecked near the Clay Pounds, and all on board, some hundreds in
+number, were taken prisoners. My informant said that he had never seen
+any mention of this in the histories, but that at any rate he knew of a
+silver watch, which one of those prisoners by accident left there,
+which was still going to tell the story. But this event is noticed by
+some writers.
+
+The next summer I saw a sloop from Chatham dragging for anchors and
+chains just off this shore. She had her boats out at the work while
+she shuffled about on various tacks, and, when anything was found, drew
+up to hoist it on board. It is a singular employment, at which men are
+regularly hired and paid for their industry, to hunt to-day in pleasant
+weather for anchors which have been lost,—the sunken faith and hope of
+mariners, to which they trusted in vain; now, perchance, it is the
+rusty one of some old pirate’s ship or Norman fisherman, whose cable
+parted here two hundred years ago; and now the best bower anchor of a
+Canton or a California ship, which has gone about her business. If the
+roadsteads of the spiritual ocean could be thus dragged, what rusty
+flukes of hope deceived and parted chain-cables of faith might again be
+windlassed aboard! enough to sink the finder’s craft, or stock new
+navies to the end of time. The bottom of the sea is strewn with
+anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and
+uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable
+still attached,—to which where is the other end? So many unconcluded
+tales to be continued another time. So, if we had diving-bells adapted
+to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables
+attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward
+their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man
+has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or
+can find,—not be Chatham men, dragging for anchors.
+
+The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it
+were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only
+in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which
+their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a
+single strand has witnessed. The ancients would have represented it as
+a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.
+An inhabitant of Truro told me that about a fortnight after the _St.
+John_ was wrecked at Cohasset he found two bodies on the shore at the
+Clay Pounds. They were those of a man, and a corpulent woman. The man
+had thick boots on, though his head was off, but “it was alongside.” It
+took the finder some weeks to get over the sight. Perhaps they were man
+and wife, and whom God had joined the ocean currents had not put
+asunder. Yet by what slight accidents at first may they have been
+associated in their drifting. Some of the bodies of those passengers
+were picked up far out at sea, boxed up and sunk; some brought ashore
+and buried. There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the
+underwriters notice. The Gulf Stream may return some to their native
+shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of Ocean, where time
+and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.—But to return
+to land again.
+
+In this bank, above the clay, I counted in the summer, two hundred
+holes of the Bank Swallow within a space six rods long, and there were
+at least one thousand old birds within three times that distance,
+twittering over the surf. I had never associated them in my thoughts
+with the beach before. One little boy who had been a-birds-nesting had
+got eighty swallows’ eggs for his share! Tell it not to the Humane
+Society. There were many young birds on the clay beneath, which had
+tumbled out and died. Also there were many Crow-blackbirds hopping
+about in the dry fields, and the Upland Plover were breeding close by
+the light-house. The keeper had once cut off one’s wing while mowing,
+as she sat on her eggs there. This is also a favorite resort for
+gunners in the fall to shoot the Golden Plover. As around the shores of
+a pond are seen devil’s-needles, butterflies, etc., so here, to my
+surprise, I saw at the same season great devil’s-needles of a size
+proportionably larger, or nearly as big as my finger, incessantly
+coasting up and down the edge of the bank, and butterflies also were
+hovering over it, and I never saw so many dorr-bugs and beetles of
+various kinds as strewed the beach. They had apparently flown over the
+bank in the night, and could not get up again, and some had perhaps
+fallen into the sea and were washed ashore. They may have been in part
+attracted by the light-house lamps.
+
+The Clay Pounds are a more fertile tract than usual. We saw some fine
+patches of roots and corn here. As generally on the Cape, the plants
+had little stalk or leaf, but ran remarkably to seed. The corn was
+hardly more than half as high as in the interior, yet the ears were
+large and full, and one farmer told us that he could raise forty
+bushels on an acre without manure, and sixty with it. The heads of the
+rye also were remarkably large. The Shadbush (_Amelanchier_), Beach
+Plums, and Blueberries (_Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum_), like the
+apple-trees and oaks, were very dwarfish, spreading over the sand, but
+at the same time very fruitful. The blueberry was but an inch or two
+high, and its fruit often rested on the ground, so that you did not
+suspect the presence of the bushes, even on those bare hills, until you
+were treading on them. I thought that this fertility must be owing
+mainly to the abundance of moisture in the atmosphere, for I observed
+that what little grass there was was remarkably laden with dew in the
+morning, and in summer dense imprisoning fogs frequently last till
+midday, turning one’s beard into a wet napkin about his throat, and the
+oldest inhabitant may lose his way within a stone’s throw of his house
+or be obliged to follow the beach for a guide. The brick house attached
+to the light-house was exceedingly damp at that season, and,
+writing-paper lost all its stiffness in it. It was impossible to dry
+your towel after bathing, or to press flowers without their mildewing.
+The air was so moist that we rarely wished to drink, though we could at
+all times taste the salt on our lips. Salt was rarely used at table,
+and our host told us that his cattle invariably refused it when it was
+offered them, they got so much with their grass and at every breath,
+but he said that a sick horse or one just from the country would
+sometimes take a hearty draught of salt water, and seemed to like it
+and be the better for it.
+
+It was surprising to see how much water was contained in the terminal
+bud of the sea-side golden-rod, standing in the sand early in July, and
+also how turnips, beets, carrots, etc., flourished even in pure sand. A
+man travelling by the shore near there not long before us noticed
+something green growing in the pure sand of the beach, just at
+high-water mark, and on approaching found it to be a bed of beets
+flourishing vigorously, probably from seed washed out of the
+_Franklin_. Also beets and turnips came up in the sea-weed used for
+manure in many parts of the Cape. This suggests how various plants may
+have been dispersed over the world to distant islands and continents.
+Vessels, with seeds in their cargoes, destined for particular ports,
+where perhaps they were not needed, have been cast away on desolate
+islands, and though their crews perished, some of their seeds have been
+preserved. Out of many kinds a few would find a soil and climate
+adapted to them, become naturalized, and perhaps drive out the native
+plants at last, and so fit the land for the habitation of man. It is an
+ill wind that blows nobody any good, and for the time lamentable
+shipwrecks may thus contribute a new vegetable to a continent’s stock,
+and prove on the whole a lasting blessing to its inhabitants. Or winds
+and currents might effect the same without the intervention of man.
+What indeed are the various succulent plants which grow on the beach
+but such beds of beets and turnips, sprung originally from seeds which
+perhaps were cast on the waters for this end, though we do not know the
+_Franklin_ which they came out of? In ancient times some Mr. Bell (?)
+was sailing this way in his ark with seeds of rocket, salt-wort,
+sandwort, beachgrass, samphire, bayberry, poverty-grass, etc., all
+nicely labelled with directions, intending to establish a nursery
+somewhere; and did not a nursery get established, though he thought
+that he had failed?
+
+About the light-house I observed in the summer the pretty _Polygala
+polygama_, spreading ray-wise flat on the ground, white pasture
+thistles (_Cirsium pumilum_), and amid the shrubbery the _Smilax
+glauca_, which is commonly said not to grow so far north; near the edge
+of the banks about half a mile southward, the broom crow-berry
+(_Empetrum Conradii_), for which Plymouth is the only locality in
+Massachusetts usually named, forms pretty green mounds four or five
+feet in diameter by one foot high,—soft, springy beds for the wayfarer.
+I saw it afterward in Provincetown, but prettiest of all the scarlet
+pimpernel, or poor-man’s weather-glass (_Anagallis-arvensis_), greets
+you in fair weather on almost every square yard of sand. From Yarmouth,
+I have received the _Chrysopsis falcata_ (golden aster), and _Vaccinium
+stamineum_ (Deerberry or Squaw Huckleberry), with fruit not edible,
+sometimes as large as a cranberry (Sept. 7).
+
+[Illustration: The Highland Light]
+
+The Highland Light-house,[1] where we were staying, is a
+substantial-looking building of brick, painted white, and surmounted by
+an iron cap. Attached to it is the dwelling of the keeper, one story
+high, also of brick, and built by government. As we were going to spend
+the night in a light-house, we wished to make the most of so novel an
+experience, and therefore told our host that we would like to accompany
+him when he went to light up. At rather early candle-light he lighted a
+small Japan lamp, allowing it to smoke rather more than we like on
+ordinary occasions, and told us to follow him. He led the way first
+through his bedroom, which was placed nearest to the light-house, and
+then through a long, narrow, covered passage-way, between whitewashed
+walls like a prison entry, into the lower part of the light-house,
+where many great butts of oil were arranged around; thence we ascended
+by a winding and open iron stairway, with a steadily increasing scent
+of oil and lamp-smoke, to a trap-door in an iron floor, and through
+this into the lantern. It was a neat building, with everything in
+apple-pie order, and no danger of anything rusting there for want of
+oil. The light consisted of fifteen argand lamps, placed within smooth
+concave reflectors twenty-one inches in diameter, and arranged in two
+horizontal circles one above the other, facing every way excepting
+directly down the Cape. These were surrounded, at a distance of two or
+three feet, by large plate-glass windows, which defied the storms, with
+iron sashes, on which rested the iron cap. All the iron work, except
+the floor, was painted white. And thus the light-house was completed.
+We walked slowly round in that narrow space as the keeper lighted each
+lamp in succession, conversing with him at the same moment that many a
+sailor on the deep witnessed the lighting of the Highland Light. His
+duty was to fill and trim and light his lamps, and keep bright the
+reflectors. He filled them every morning, and trimmed them commonly
+once in the course of the night. He complained of the quality of the
+oil which was furnished. This house consumes about eight hundred
+gallons in a year, which cost not far from one dollar a gallon; but
+perhaps a few lives would be saved if better oil were provided. Another
+light-house keeper said that the same proportion of winter-strained oil
+was sent to the southernmost light-house in the Union as to the most
+northern. Formerly, when this light-house had windows with small and
+thin panes, a severe storm would sometimes break the glass, and then
+they were obliged to put up a wooden shutter in haste to save their
+lights and reflectors,—and sometimes in tempests, when the mariner
+stood most in need of their guidance, they had thus nearly converted
+the light-house into a dark lantern, which emitted only a few feeble
+rays, and those commonly on the land or lee side. He spoke of the
+anxiety and sense of responsibility which he felt in cold and stormy
+nights in the winter; when he knew that many a poor fellow was
+depending on him, and his lamps burned dimly, the oil being chilled.
+Sometimes he was obliged to warm the oil in a kettle in his house at
+midnight, and fill his lamps over again,—for he could not have a fire
+in the light-house, it produced such a sweat on the windows. His
+successor told me that he could not keep too hot a fire in such a case.
+All this because the oil was poor. The government lighting the mariners
+on its wintry coast with summer-strained oil, to save expense! That
+were surely a summer-strained mercy.
+
+This keeper’s successor, who kindly entertained me the next year stated
+that one extremely cold night, when this and all the neighboring lights
+were burning summer oil, but he had been provident enough to reserve a
+little winter oil against emergencies, he was waked up with anxiety,
+and found that his oil was congealed, and his lights almost
+extinguished; and when, after many hours’ exertion, he had succeeded in
+replenishing his reservoirs with winter oil at the wick end, and with
+difficulty had made them burn, he looked out and found that the other
+lights in the neighborhood, which were usually visible to him, had gone
+out, and he heard afterward that the Pamet River and Billingsgate
+Lights also had been extinguished.
+
+Our host said that the frost, too, on the windows caused him much
+trouble, and in sultry summer nights the moths covered them and dimmed
+his lights; sometimes even small birds flew against the thick plate
+glass, and were found on the ground beneath in the morning with their
+necks broken. In the spring of 1855 he found nineteen small
+yellow-birds, perhaps goldfinches or myrtle-birds, thus lying dead
+around the light-house; and sometimes in the fall he had seen where a
+golden plover had struck the glass in the night, and left the down and
+the fatty part of its breast on it.
+
+Thus he struggled, by every method, to keep his light shining before
+men. Surely the light-house keeper has a responsible, if an easy,
+office. When his lamp goes out, he goes out; or, at most, only one such
+accident is pardoned.
+
+I thought it a pity that some poor student did not live there, to
+profit by all that light, since he would not rob the mariner. “Well,”
+he said, “I do sometimes come up here and read the newspaper when they
+are noisy down below.” Think of fifteen argand lamps to read the
+newspaper by! Government oil!—light, enough, perchance, to read the
+Constitution by! I thought that he should read nothing less than his
+Bible by that light. I had a classmate who fitted for college by the
+lamps of a light-house, which was more light, we think, than the
+University afforded.
+
+When we had come down and walked a dozen rods from the light-house, we
+found that we could not get the full strength of its light on the
+narrow strip of land between it and the shore, being too low for the
+focus, and we saw only so many feeble and rayless stars; but at forty
+rods inland we could see to read, though we were still indebted to only
+one lamp. Each reflector sent forth a separate “fan” of light,—one
+shone on the windmill, and one in the hollow, while the intervening
+spaces were in shadow. This light is said to be visible twenty nautical
+miles and more from an observer fifteen feet above the level of the
+sea. We could see the revolving light at Race Point, the end of the
+Cape, about nine miles distant, and also the light on Long Point, at
+the entrance of Provincetown Harbor, and one of the distant Plymouth
+Harbor Lights, across the Bay, nearly in a range with the last, like a
+star in the horizon. The keeper thought that the other Plymouth Light
+was concealed by being exactly in a range with the Long Point Light. He
+told us that the mariner was sometimes led astray by a mackerel
+fisher’s lantern, who was afraid of being run down in the night, or
+even by a cottager’s light, mistaking them for some well-known light on
+the coast, and, when he discovered his mistake, was wont to curse the
+prudent fisher or the wakeful cottager without reason.
+
+Though it was once declared that Providence placed this mass of clay
+here on purpose to erect a light-house on, the keeper said that the
+light-house should have been erected half a mile farther south, where
+the coast begins to bend, and where the light could be seen at the same
+time with the Nauset Lights, and distinguished from them. They now talk
+of building one there. It happens that the present one is the more
+useless now, so near the extremity of the Cape, because other
+light-houses have since been erected there.
+
+Among the many regulations of the Light-house Board, hanging against
+the wall here, many of them excellent, perhaps, if there were a
+regiment stationed here to attend to them, there is one requiring the
+keeper to keep an account of the number of vessels which pass his light
+during the day. But there are a hundred vessels in sight at once,
+steering in all directions, many on the very verge of the horizon, and
+he must have more eyes than Argus, and be a good deal farther-sighted,
+to tell which are passing his light. It is an employment in some
+respects best suited to the habits of the gulls which coast up and down
+here, and circle over the sea.
+
+I was told by the next keeper, that on the 8th of June following, a
+particularly clear and beautiful morning, he rose about half an hour
+before sunrise, and having a little time to spare, for his custom was
+to extinguish his lights at sunrise, walked down toward the shore to
+see what he might find. When he got to the edge of the bank he looked
+up, and, to his astonishment, saw the sun rising, and already part way
+above the horizon. Thinking that his clock was wrong, he made haste
+back, and though it was still too early by the clock, extinguished his
+lamps, and when he had got through and come down, he looked out the
+window, and, to his still greater astonishment, saw the sun just where
+it was before, two-thirds above the horizon. He showed me where its
+rays fell on the wall across the room. He proceeded to make a fire, and
+when he had done, there was the sun still at the same height.
+Whereupon, not trusting to his own eyes any longer, he called up his
+wife to look at it, and she saw it also. There were vessels in sight on
+the ocean, and their crews, too, he said, must have seen it, for its
+rays fell on them. It remained at that height for about fifteen minutes
+by the clock, and then rose as usual, and nothing else extraordinary
+happened during that day. Though accustomed to the coast, he had never
+witnessed nor heard of such a phenomenon before. I suggested that there
+might have been a cloud in the horizon invisible to him, which rose
+with the sun, and his clock was only as accurate as the average; or
+perhaps, as he denied the possibility of this, it was such a looming of
+the sun as is said to occur at Lake Superior and elsewhere. Sir John
+Franklin, for instance, says in his Narrative, that when he was on the
+shore of the Polar Sea, the horizontal refraction varied so much one
+morning that “the upper limb of the sun twice appeared at the horizon
+before it finally rose.”
+
+He certainly must be a son of Aurora to whom the sun looms, when there
+are so many millions to whom it _glooms_ rather, or who never see it
+till an hour _after_ it has risen. But it behooves us old stagers to
+keep our lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to the
+sun’s looming.
+
+This keeper remarked that the centre of the flame should be exactly
+opposite the centre of the reflectors, and that accordingly, if he was
+not careful to turn down his wicks in the morning, the sun falling on
+the reflectors on the south side of the building would set fire to
+them, like a burning-glass, in the coldest day, and he would look up at
+noon and see them all lighted! When your light is ready to give light,
+it is readiest to receive it, and the sun will light it. His successor
+said that he had never known them to blaze in such a case, but merely
+to smoke.
+
+I saw that this was a place of wonders. In a sea turn or shallow fog
+while I was there the next summer, it being clear overhead, the edge of
+the bank twenty rods distant, appeared like a mountain pasture in the
+horizon. I was completely deceived by it, and I could then understand
+why mariners sometimes ran ashore in such cases, especially in the
+night, supposing it to be far away, though they could see the land.
+Once since this, being in a large oyster boat two or three hundred
+miles from here, in a dark night, when there was a thin veil of mist on
+land and water, we came so near to running on to the land before our
+skipper was aware of it, that the first warning was my hearing the
+sound of the surf under my elbow. I could almost have jumped ashore,
+and we were obliged to go about very suddenly to prevent striking. The
+distant light for which we were steering, supposing it a light-house
+five or six miles off, came through the cracks of a fisherman’s bunk
+not more than six rods distant.
+
+The keeper entertained us handsomely in his solitary little ocean
+house. He was a man of singular patience and intelligence, who, when
+our queries struck him, rung as clear as a bell in response. The
+light-house lamps a few feet distant shone full into my chamber, and
+made it as bright as day, so I knew exactly how the Highland Light bore
+all that night, and I was in no danger of being wrecked. Unlike the
+last, this was as still as a summer night. I thought, as I lay there,
+half awake and half asleep, looking upward through the window at the
+lights above my head, how many sleepless eyes from far out on the Ocean
+stream—mariners of all nations spinning their yarns through the various
+watches of the night—were directed toward my couch.
+
+ [1] The light-house has since been rebuilt, and shows a _Fresnel_
+ light.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+THE SEA AND THE DESERT
+
+
+The light-house lamps were still burning, though now with a silvery
+lustre, when I rose to see the sun come out of the Ocean; for he still
+rose eastward of us; but I was convinced that he must have come out of
+a dry bed beyond that stream, though he seemed to come out of the
+water.
+
+“The sun once more touched the fields,
+Mounting to heaven from the fair flowing
+Deep-running Ocean.”
+
+
+Now we saw countless sails of mackerel fishers abroad on the deep, one
+fleet in the north just pouring round the Cape, another standing down
+toward Chatham, and our host’s son went off to join some lagging member
+of the first which had not yet left the Bay.
+
+Before we left the light-house we were obliged to anoint our shoes
+faithfully with tallow, for walking on the beach, in the salt water and
+the sand, had turned them red and crisp. To counterbalance this, I have
+remarked that the seashore, even where muddy, as it is not here, is
+singularly clean; for notwithstanding the spattering of the water and
+mud and squirting of the clams while walking to and from the boat, your
+best black pants retain no stain nor dirt, such as they would acquire
+from walking in the country.
+
+We have heard that a few days after this, when the Provincetown Bank
+was robbed, speedy emissaries from Provincetown made particular
+inquiries concerning us at this light-house. Indeed, they traced us all
+the way down the Cape, and concluded that we came by this unusual route
+down the back-side and on foot, in order that we might discover a way
+to get off with our booty when we had committed the robbery. The Cape
+is so long and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is wellnigh
+impossible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge of its
+inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to it in the night. So,
+when this robbery occurred, all their suspicions seem to have at once
+centred on us two travellers who had just passed down it. If we had not
+chanced to leave the Cape so soon, we should probably have been
+arrested. The real robbers were two young men from Worcester County who
+travelled with a centre-bit, and are said to have done their work very
+neatly. But the only bank that we pried into was the great Cape Cod
+sand-bank, and we robbed it only of an old French crown piece, some
+shells and pebbles, and the materials of this story.
+
+Again we took to the beach for another day (October 13), walking along
+the shore of the resounding sea, determined to get it into us. We
+wished to associate with the Ocean until it lost the pond-like look
+which it wears to a country-man. We still thought that we could see the
+other side. Its surface was still more sparkling than the day before,
+and we beheld “the countless smilings of the ocean waves”; though some
+of them were pretty broad grins, for still the wind blew and the
+billows broke in foam along the beach. The nearest beach to us on the
+other side, whither we looked, due east, was on the coast of Galicia,
+in Spain, whose capital is Santiago, though by old poets’ reckoning it
+should have been Atlantis or the Hesperides; but heaven is found to be
+farther west now. At first we were abreast of that part of Portugal
+_entre Douro e Mino_, and then Galicia and the port of Pontevedra
+opened to us as we walked along; but we did not enter, the breakers ran
+so high. The bold headland of Cape Finisterre, a little north of east,
+jutted toward us next, with its vain brag, for we flung back,—“Here is
+Cape Cod,—Cape Land’s-Beginning.” A little indentation toward the
+north,—for the land loomed to our imaginations by a common mirage,—we
+knew was the Bay of Biscay, and we sang:—
+
+“There we lay, till next day.
+    In the Bay of Biscay O!”
+
+
+A little south of east was Palos, where Columbus weighed anchor, and
+farther yet the pillars which Hercules set up; concerning which when we
+inquired at the top of our voices what was written on them,—for we had
+the morning sun in our faces, and could not see distinctly,—the
+inhabitants shouted _Ne plus ultra_ (no more beyond), but the wind bore
+to us the truth only, _plus ultra_ (more beyond), and over the Bay
+westward was echoed _ultra_ (beyond). We spoke to them through the surf
+about the Far West, the true Hesperia, ἕω πέρας or end of the day, the
+This Side Sundown, where the sun was extinguished in the _Pacific_, and
+we advised them to pull up stakes and plant those pillars of theirs on
+the shore of California, whither all our folks were gone,—the only _ne_
+plus ultra now. Whereat they looked crestfallen on their cliffs, for we
+had taken the wind out of all their sails.
+
+We could not perceive that any of their leavings washed up here, though
+we picked up a child’s toy, a small dismantled boat, which may have
+been lost at Pontevedra.
+
+The Cape became narrower and narrower as we approached its wrist
+between Truro and Provincetown, and the shore inclined more decidedly
+to the west. At the head of East Harbor Creek, the Atlantic is
+separated but by half a dozen rods of sand from the tide-waters of the
+Bay. From the Clay Pounds the bank flatted off for the last ten miles
+to the extremity at Race Point, though the highest parts, which are
+called “islands” from their appearance at a distance on the sea, were
+still seventy or eighty feet above the Atlantic, and afforded a good
+view of the latter, as well as a constant view of the Bay, there being
+no trees nor a hill sufficient to interrupt it. Also the sands began to
+invade the land more and more, until finally they had entire possession
+from sea to sea, at the narrowest part. For three or four miles between
+Truro and Provincetown there were no inhabitants from shore to shore,
+and there were but three or four houses for twice that distance.
+
+As we plodded along, either by the edge of the ocean, where the sand
+was rapidly drinking up the last wave that wet it, or over the
+sand-hills of the bank, the mackerel fleet continued to pour round the
+Cape north of us, ten or fifteen miles distant, in countless numbers,
+schooner after schooner, till they made a city on the water. They were
+so thick that many appeared to be afoul of one another; now all
+standing on this tack, now on that. We saw how well the New-Englanders
+had followed up Captain John Smith’s suggestions with regard to the
+fisheries, made in 1616,—to what a pitch they had carried “this
+contemptible trade of fish,” as he significantly styles it, and were
+now equal to the Hollanders whose example he holds up for the English
+to emulate; notwithstanding that “in this faculty,” as he says, “the
+former are so naturalized, and of their vents so certainly acquainted,
+as there is no likelihood they will ever be paralleled, having two or
+three thousand busses, flat-bottoms, sword-pinks, todes, and such like,
+that breeds them sailors, mariners, soldiers, and merchants, never to
+be wrought out of that trade and fit for any other.” We thought that it
+would take all these names and more to describe the numerous craft
+which we saw. Even then, some years before our “renowned sires” with
+their “peerless dames” stepped on Plymouth Rock, he wrote,
+“Newfoundland doth yearly freight neir eight hundred sail of ships with
+a silly, lean, skinny, poor-john, and cor fish,” though all their
+supplies must be annually transported from Europe. Why not plant a
+colony here then, and raise those supplies on the spot? “Of all the
+four parts of the world,” says he, “that I have yet seen, not
+inhabited, could I have but means to transport a colony, I would rather
+live here than anywhere. And if it did not maintain itself, were we but
+once indifferently well fitted, let us starve.” Then “fishing before
+your doors,” you “may every night sleep quietly ashore, with good cheer
+and what fires you will, or, when you please, with your wives and
+family.” Already he anticipates “the new towns in New England in memory
+of their old,”—and who knows what may be discovered in the “heart and
+entrails” of the land, “seeing even the very edges,” etc., etc.
+
+[Illustration: Towing along shore]
+
+All this has been accomplished, and more, and where is Holland now?
+Verily the Dutch have taken it. There was no long interval between the
+suggestion of Smith and the eulogy of Burke.
+
+Still one after another the mackerel schooners hove in sight round the
+head of the Cape, “whitening all the sea road,” and we watched each one
+for a moment with an undivided interest. It seemed a pretty sport. Here
+in the country it is only a few idle boys or loafers that go a-fishing
+on a rainy day; but there it appeared as if every able-bodied man and
+helpful boy in the Bay had gone out on a pleasure excursion in their
+yachts, and all would at last land and have a chowder on the Cape. The
+gazetteer tells you gravely how many of the men and boys of these towns
+are engaged in the whale, cod, and mackerel fishery, how many go to the
+banks of Newfoundland, or the coast of Labrador, the Straits of Belle
+Isle or the Bay of Chaleurs (Shalore the sailors call it); as if I were
+to reckon up the number of boys in Concord who are engaged during the
+summer in the perch, pickerel, bream, hornpout, and shiner fishery, of
+which no one keeps the statistics,—though I think that it is pursued
+with as much profit to the moral and intellectual man (or boy), and
+certainly with less danger to the physical one.
+
+One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat
+of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and
+his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he
+said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type
+again as if only an afternoon had intervened.
+
+I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole
+day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a
+serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally
+shiftlessness and a grovelling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like
+industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus
+everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, _viewed from
+the shore_, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less
+frivolous.
+
+I once sailed three miles on a mackerel cruise myself. It was a Sunday
+evening after a very warm day in which there had been frequent
+thunder-showers, and I had walked along the shore from Cohasset to
+Duxbury. I wished to get over from the last place to Clark’s Island,
+but no boat could stir, they said, at that stage of the tide, they
+being left high on the mud. At length I learned that the tavern-keeper,
+Winsor, was going out mackerelling with seven men that evening, and
+would take me. When there had been due delay, we one after another
+straggled down to the shore in a leisurely manner, as if waiting for
+the tide still, and in India-rubber boots, or carrying our shoes in our
+hands, waded to the boats, each of the crew bearing an armful of wood,
+and one a bucket of new potatoes besides. Then they resolved that each
+should bring one more armful of wood, and that would be enough. They
+had already got a barrel of water, and had some more in the schooner.
+We shoved the boats a dozen rods over the mud and water till they
+floated, then rowing half a mile to the vessel climbed aboard, and
+there we were in a mackerel schooner, a fine stout vessel of
+forty-three tons, whose name I forget. The baits were not dry on the
+hooks. There was the mill in which they ground the mackerel, and the
+trough to hold it, and the long-handled dipper to cast it overboard
+with; and already in the harbor we saw the surface rippled with schools
+of small mackerel, the real _Scomber vernalis_. The crew proceeded
+leisurely to weigh anchor and raise their two sails, there being a fair
+but very slight wind;—and the sun now setting clear and shining on the
+vessel after the thundershowers, I thought that I could not have
+commenced the voyage under more favorable auspices. They had four
+dories and commonly fished in them, else they fished on the starboard
+side aft where their fines hung ready, two to a man. The boom swung
+round once or twice, and Winsor cast overboard the foul juice of
+mackerel mixed with rain-water which remained in his trough, and then
+we gathered about the helmsman and told stories. I remember that the
+compass was affected by iron in its neighborhood and varied a few
+degrees. There was one among us just returned from California, who was
+now going as passenger for his health and amusement. They expected to
+be gone about a week, to begin fishing the next morning, and to carry
+their fish fresh to Boston. They landed me at Clark’s Island, where the
+Pilgrims landed, for my companions wished to get some milk for the
+voyage. But I had seen the whole of it. The rest was only going to sea
+and catching the mackerel. Moreover, it was as well that I did not
+remain with them, considering the small quantity of supplies they had
+taken.
+
+Now I saw the mackerel fleet _on its fishing-ground_, though I was not
+at first aware of it. So my experience was complete.
+
+It was even more cold and windy to-day than before, and we were
+frequently glad to take shelter behind a sand-hill. None of the
+elements were resting. On the beach there is a ceaseless activity,
+always something going on, in storm and in calm, winter and summer,
+night and day. Even the sedentary man here enjoys a breadth of view
+which is almost equivalent to motion. In clear weather the laziest may
+look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the
+Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or
+if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the
+ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any
+moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the
+reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report
+the news it brings. No creature could move slowly where there was so
+much life around. The few wreckers were either going or coming, and the
+ships and the sand-pipers, and the screaming gulls overhead; nothing
+stood still but the shore. The little beach-birds trotted past close to
+the water’s edge, or paused but an instant to swallow their food,
+keeping time with the elements. I wondered how they ever got used to
+the sea, that they ventured so near the waves. Such tiny inhabitants
+the land brought forth! except one fox. And what could a fox do,
+looking on the Atlantic from that high bank? What is the sea to a fox?
+Sometimes we met a wrecker with his cart and dog,—and his dog’s faint
+bark at us wayfarers, heard through the roaring of the surf, sounded
+ridiculously faint. To see a little trembling dainty-footed cur stand
+on the margin of the ocean, and ineffectually bark at a beach-bird,
+amid the roar of the Atlantic! Come with design to bark at a whale,
+perchance! That sound will do for farmyards. All the dogs looked out of
+place there, naked and as if shuddering at the vastness; and I thought
+that they would not have been there had it not been for the countenance
+of their masters. Still less could you think of a cat bending her steps
+that way, and shaking her wet foot over the Atlantic; yet even this
+happens sometimes, they tell me. In summer I saw the tender young of
+the Piping Plover, like chickens just hatched, mere pinches of down on
+two legs, running in troops, with a faint peep, along the edge of the
+waves. I used to see packs of half-wild dogs haunting the lonely beach
+on the south shore of Staten Island, in New York Bay, for the sake of
+the carrion there cast up; and I remember that once, when for a long
+time I had heard a furious barking in the tall grass of the marsh, a
+pack of half a dozen large dogs burst forth on to the beach, pursuing a
+little one which ran straight to me for protection, and I afforded it
+with some stones, though at some risk to myself; but the next day the
+little one was the first to bark at me. under these circumstances I
+could not but remember the words of the poet:—
+
+“Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
+Thou art not so unkind
+    As _his_ ingratitude;
+Thy tooth is not so keen,
+Because thou art not seen,
+    Although thy breath be rude.
+
+“Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
+Thou dost not bite so nigh
+    As benefits forgot;
+Though thou the waters warp,
+Thy sting is not so sharp
+    As friend remembered not.”
+
+
+Sometimes, when I was approaching the carcass of a horse or ox which
+lay on the beach there, where there was no living creature in sight, a
+dog would unexpectedly emerge from it and slink away with a mouthful of
+offal.
+
+The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point
+from which to contemplate this world. It is even a trivial place. The
+waves forever rolling to the land are too far-travelled and untamable
+to be familiar. Creeping along the endless beach amid the sun-squall
+and the foam, it occurs to us that we, too, are the product of
+sea-slime.
+
+It is a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it. Strewn with
+crabs, horse-shoes, and razor-clams, and whatever the sea casts up,—a
+vast _morgue_, where famished dogs may range in packs, and crows come
+daily to glean the pittance which the tide leaves them. The carcasses
+of men and beasts together lie stately up upon its shelf, rotting and
+bleaching in the sun and waves, and each tide turns them in their beds,
+and tucks fresh sand under them. There is naked Nature, inhumanly
+sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where
+gulls wheel amid the spray.
+
+We saw this forenoon what, at a distance, looked like a bleached log
+with a branch still left on it. It proved to be one of the principal
+bones of a whale, whose carcass, having been stripped of blubber at sea
+and cut adrift, had been washed up some months before. It chanced that
+this was the most conclusive evidence which we met with to prove, what
+the Copenhagen antiquaries assert, that these shores were the
+_Furdustrandas_ which Thorhall, the companion of Thorfinn during his
+expedition to Vinland in 1007. sailed past in disgust. It appears that
+after they had left the Cape and explored the country about
+Straum-Fiordr (Buzzards’ Bay!), Thorhall, who was disappointed at not
+getting any wine to drink there, determined to sail north again in
+search of Vinland. Though the antiquaries have given us the original
+Icelandic. I prefer to quote their translation, since theirs is the
+only Latin which I know to have been aimed at Cape Cod.
+
+“Cum parati erant, sublato
+velo, cecinit Thorhallus:
+Eò redeamus, ubi conterranei
+sunt nostri! faciamus aliter,
+expansi arenosi peritum,
+lata navis explorare curricula:
+dum procellam incitantes gladii
+moræ impatientes, qui terram
+collaudant, Furdustrandas
+inhabitant et coquunt balænas.”
+
+
+In other words: “When they were ready and their sail hoisted, Thorhall
+sang: Let us return thither where our fellow-countrymen are. Let us
+make a bird[1] skilful to fly through the heaven of sand,[2] to explore
+the broad track of ships; while warriors who impel to the tempest of
+swords,[3] who praise the land, inhabit Wonder-Strands, _and cook
+whales_.’” And so he sailed north past Cape Cod, as the antiquaries
+say, “and was shipwrecked on to Ireland.”
+
+Though once there were more whales cast up here, I think that it was
+never more wild than now. We do not associate the idea of antiquity
+with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do
+of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always. The
+Indians have left no traces on its surface, but it is the same to the
+civilized man and the savage. The aspect of the shore only has changed.
+The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a
+Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our
+cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears,
+hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most
+populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.
+It is no further advanced than Singapore, with its tigers, in this
+respect. The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in
+the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other
+outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you
+may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to
+me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail
+over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of
+Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.
+
+We saw no fences as we walked the beach, no birchen _riders_, highest
+of rails, projecting into the sea to keep the cows from wading round,
+nothing to remind us that man was proprietor of the shore. Yet a Truro
+man did tell us that owners of land on the east side of that town were
+regarded as owning the beach, in order that they might have the control
+of it so far as to defend themselves against the encroachments of the
+sand and the beach-grass,—for even this friend is sometimes regarded as
+a foe; but he said that this was not the case on the Bay side. Also I
+have seen in sheltered parts of the Bay temporary fences running to
+low-water mark, the posts being set in sills or sleepers placed
+transversely.
+
+After we had been walking many hours, the mackerel fleet still hovered
+in the northern horizon nearly in the same direction, but farther off,
+hull down. Though their sails were set they never sailed away, nor yet
+came to anchor, but stood on various tacks as close together as vessels
+in a haven, and we in our ignorance thought that they were contending
+patiently with adverse winds, beating eastward; but we learned
+afterward that they were even then on their fishing-ground, and that
+they caught mackerel without taking in their mainsails or coming to
+anchor, “a smart breeze” (thence called a mackerel breeze) “being,” as
+one says, “considered most favorable” for this purpose. We counted
+about two hundred sail of mackerel fishers within one small arc of the
+horizon, and a nearly equal number had disappeared southward. Thus they
+hovered about the extremity of the Cape, like moths round a candle; the
+lights at Race Point and Long Point being bright candles for them at
+night,—and at this distance they looked fair and white, as if they had
+not yet flown into the light, but nearer at hand afterward, we saw how
+some had formerly singed their wings and bodies.
+
+A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all ploughing the
+ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls
+may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are
+harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with
+hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’
+wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field.
+But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.
+
+Having passed the narrowest part of the waist of the Cape, though still
+in Truro, for this township is about twelve miles long on the shore, we
+crossed over to the Bay side, not half a mile distant, in order to
+spend the noon on the nearest shrubby sand-hill in Provincetown, called
+Mount Ararat, which rises one hundred feet above the ocean. On our way
+thither we had occasion to admire the various beautiful forms and
+colors of the sand, and we noticed an interesting mirage, which I have
+since found that Hitchcock also observed on the sands of the Cape. We
+were crossing a shallow valley in the Desert, where the smooth and
+spotless sand sloped upward by a small angle to the horizon on every
+side, and at the lowest part was a long chain of clear but shallow
+pools. As we were approaching these for a drink in a diagonal direction
+across the valley, they appeared inclined at a slight but decided angle
+to the horizon, though they were plainly and broadly connected with one
+another, and there was not the least ripple to suggest a current; so
+that by the time we had reached a convenient part of one we seemed to
+have ascended several feet. They appeared to lie by magic on the side
+of the vale, like a mirror left in a slanting position. It was a very
+pretty mirage for a Provincetown desert, but not amounting to what, in
+Sanscrit, is called “the thirst of the gazelle,” as there was real
+water here for a base, and we were able to quench our thirst after all.
+
+Professor Rafn, of Copenhagen, thinks that the mirage which I noticed,
+but which an old inhabitant of Provincetown, to whom I mentioned it,
+had never seen nor heard of, had something to do with the name
+“Furdustrandas,” i.e. Wonder-Strands, given, as I have said, in the old
+Icelandic account of Thorfinn’s expedition to Vinland in the year 1007,
+to a part of the coast on which he landed. But these sands are more
+remarkable for their length than for their mirage, which is common to
+all deserts, and the reason for the name which the Northmen themselves
+give,—“because it took a long time to sail by them,”—is sufficient and
+more applicable to these shores. However, if you should sail all the
+way from Greenland to Buzzards’ Bay along the coast, you would get
+sight of a good many sandy beaches. But whether Thorfinn saw the mirage
+here or not, Thor-eau, one of the same family, did; and perchance it
+was because Lief the Lucky had, in a previous voyage, taken Thor-er and
+his people off the rock in the middle of the sea, that Thor-eau was
+born to see it.
+
+This was not the only mirage which I saw on the Cape. That half of the
+beach next the bank is commonly level, or nearly so, while the other
+slopes downward to the water. As I was walking upon the edge of the
+bank in Wellfleet at sundown, it seemed to me that the inside half of
+the beach sloped upward toward the water to meet the other, forming a
+ridge ten or twelve feet high the whole length of the shore, but higher
+always opposite to where I stood; and I was not convinced of the
+contrary till I descended the bank, though the shaded outlines left by
+the waves of a previous tide but half-way down the apparent declivity
+might have taught me better. A stranger may easily detect what is
+strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province. The
+old oysterman, speaking of gull-shooting, had said that you must aim
+under, when firing down the bank.
+
+A neighbor tells me that one August, looking through a glass from
+Naushon to some vessels which were sailing along near Martha’s
+Vineyard, the water about them appeared perfectly smooth, so that they
+were reflected in it, and yet their full sails proved that it must be
+rippled, and they who were with him thought that it was mirage, _i.e._
+a reflection from a haze.
+
+From the above-mentioned sand-hill we over-looked Provincetown and its
+harbor, now emptied of vessels, and also a wide expanse of ocean. As we
+did not wish to enter Provincetown before night, though it was cold and
+windy, we returned across the Deserts to the Atlantic side, and walked
+along the beach again nearly to Race Point, being still greedy of the
+sea influence. All the while it was not so calm as the reader may
+suppose, but it was blow, blow, blow,—roar, roar, roar,—tramp, tramp,
+tramp,—without interruption. The shore now trended nearly east and
+west.
+
+Before sunset, having already seen the mackerel fleet returning into
+the Bay, we left the sea-shore on the north of Provincetown, and made
+our way across the Desert to the eastern extremity of the town. From
+the first high sand-hill, covered with beach-grass and bushes to its
+top, on the edge of the desert, we overlooked the shrubby hill and
+swamp country which surrounds Provincetown on the north, and protects
+it, in some measure, from the invading sand. Notwithstanding the
+universal barrenness, and the contiguity of the desert, I never saw an
+autumnal landscape so beautifully painted as this was. It was like the
+richest rug imaginable spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor
+velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever
+match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and
+the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living
+green of small Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry,
+Boxberry, and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub-oaks, and the
+various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple
+and Aspen,—each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few
+yellow sand-slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white
+floor seen through rents in the rug. Coming from the country as I did,
+and many autumnal woods as I had seen, this was perhaps the most novel
+and remarkable sight that I saw on the Cape. Probably the brightness of
+the tints was enhanced by contrast with the sand which surrounded this
+tract. This was a part of the furniture of Cape Cod. We had for days
+walked up the long and bleak piazza which runs along her Atlantic side,
+then over the sanded floor of her halls, and now we were being
+introduced into her boudoir. The hundred white sails crowding round
+Long Point into Provincetown Harbor, seen over the painted hills in
+front, looked like toy ships upon a mantel-piece.
+
+The peculiarity of this autumnal landscape consisted in the lowness and
+thickness of the shrubbery, no less than in the brightness of the
+tints. It was like a thick stuff of worsted or a fleece, and looked as
+if a giant could take it up by the hem, or rather the tasselled fringe
+which trailed out on the sand, and shake it, though it needed not to be
+shaken. But no doubt the dust would fly in that case, for not a little
+has accumulated underneath it. Was it not such an autumnal landscape as
+this which suggested our high-colored rugs and carpets? Hereafter when
+I look on a richer rug than usual, and study its figures, I shall
+think, there are the huckleberry hills, and there the denser swamps of
+boxberry and blueberry: there the shrub-oak patches and the bayberries,
+there the maples and the birches and the pines. What other dyes are to
+be compared to these? They were warmer colors than I had associated
+with the New England coast.
+
+After threading a swamp full of boxberry, and climbing several hills
+covered with shrub-oaks, without a path, where shipwrecked men would be
+in danger of perishing in the night, we came down upon the eastern
+extremity of the four planks which run the whole length of Provincetown
+street. This, which is the last town on the Cape, lies mainly in one
+street along the curving beach fronting the southeast. The sand-hills,
+covered with shrubbery and interposed with swamps and ponds, rose
+immediately behind it in the form of a crescent, which is from half a
+mile to a mile or more wide in the middle, and beyond these is the
+desert, which is the greater part of its territory, stretching to the
+sea on the east and west and north. The town is compactly built in the
+narrow space, from ten to fifty rods deep, between the harbor and the
+sand-hills, and contained at that time about twenty-six hundred
+inhabitants. The houses, in which a more modern and pretending style
+has at length prevailed over the fisherman’s hut, stand on the inner or
+plank side of the street, and the fish and store houses, with the
+picturesque-looking windmills of the Salt-works, on the water side. The
+narrow portion of the beach between, forming the street, about eighteen
+feet wide, the only one where one carriage could pass another, if there
+was more than one carriage in the town, looked much “heavier” than any
+portion of the beach or the desert which we had walked on, it being
+above the reach of the highest tide, and the sand being kept loose by
+the occasional passage of a traveller. We learned that the four planks
+on which we were walking had been bought by the town’s share of the
+Surplus Revenue, the disposition of which was a bone of contention
+between the inhabitants, till they wisely resolved thus to put it under
+foot. Yet some, it was said, were so provoked because they did not
+receive their particular share in money, that they persisted in walking
+in the sand a long time after the sidewalk was built. This is the only
+instance which I happen to know in which the surplus revenue proved a
+blessing to any town. A surplus revenue of dollars from the treasury to
+stem the greater evil of a surplus revenue of sand from the ocean. They
+expected to make a hard road by the time these planks were worn out.
+Indeed, they have already done so since we were there, and have almost
+forgotten their sandy baptism.
+
+As we passed along we observed the inhabitants engaged in curing either
+fish or the coarse salt hay which they had brought home and spread on
+the beach before their doors, looking as yellow as if they had raked it
+out of the sea. The front-yard plots appeared like what indeed they
+were, portions of the beach fenced in, with Beach-grass growing in
+them, as if they were sometimes covered by the tide. You might still
+pick up shells and pebbles there. There were a few trees among the
+houses, especially silver abeles, willows, and balm-of-Gileads; and one
+man showed me a young oak which he had transplanted from behind the
+town, thinking it an apple-tree. But every man to his trade. Though he
+had little woodcraft, he was not the less weatherwise, and gave us one
+piece of information; viz., he had observed that when a thunder-cloud
+came up with a flood-tide it did not rain. This was the most completely
+maritime town that we were ever in. It was merely a good harbor,
+surrounded by land dry, if not firm,—an inhabited beach, whereon
+fishermen cured and stored their fish, without any back country. When
+ashore the inhabitants still walk on planks. A few small patches have
+been reclaimed from the swamps, containing commonly half a dozen square
+rods only each. We saw one which was fenced with four lengths of rail;
+also a fence made wholly of hogshead-staves stuck in the ground. These,
+and such as these, were all the cultivated and cultivable land in
+Provincetown. We were told that there were thirty or forty acres in
+all, but we did not discover a quarter part so much, and that was well
+dusted with sand, and looked as if the desert was claiming it. They are
+now turning some of their swamps into Cranberry Meadows on quite an
+extensive scale.
+
+[Illustration: A cranberry meadow]
+
+Yet far from being out of the way, Provincetown is directly in the way
+of the navigator, and he is lucky who does not run afoul of it in the
+dark. It is situated on one of the highways of commerce, and men from
+all parts of the globe touch there in the course of a year.
+
+The mackerel fleet had nearly all got in before us, it being Saturday
+night, excepting that division which had stood down towards Chatham in
+the morning; and from a hill where we went to see the sun set in the
+Bay we counted two hundred goodly looking schooners at anchor in the
+harbor at various distances from the shore, and more were yet coming
+round the Cape. As each came to anchor, it took in sail and swung round
+in the wind, and lowered its boat. They belonged chiefly to Wellfleet,
+Truro, and Cape Ann. This was that city of canvas which we had seen
+hull down in the horizon. Near at hand, and under bare poles, they were
+unexpectedly black-looking vessels, μέλαιναι νῆες. A fisherman told us
+that there were fifteen hundred vessels in the mackerel fleet, and that
+he had counted three hundred and fifty in Provincetown Harbor at one
+time. Being obliged to anchor at a considerable distance from the shore
+on account of the shallowness of the water, they made the impression of
+a larger fleet than the vessels at the wharves of a large city. As they
+had been manœuvring out there all day seemingly for our entertainment,
+while we were walking north-westward along the Atlantic, so now we
+found them flocking into Provincetown Harbor at night, just as we
+arrived, as if to meet us, and exhibit themselves close at hand.
+Standing by Race Point and Long Point with various speed, they reminded
+me of fowls coming home to roost.
+
+These were genuine New England vessels. It is stated in the Journal of
+Moses Prince, a brother of the annalist, under date of 1721, at which
+time he visited Gloucester, that the first vessel of the class called
+schooner was built at Gloucester about eight years before, by Andrew
+Robinson; and late in the same century one Cotton Tufts gives us the
+tradition with some particulars, which he learned on a visit to the
+same place. According to the latter, Robinson having constructed a
+vessel which he masted and rigged in a peculiar manner, on her going
+off the stocks a bystander cried out, “_O, how she scoons!_” whereat
+Robinson replied, “_A schooner let her be!_” “From which time,” says
+Tufts, “vessels thus masted and rigged have gone by the name of
+schooners; before which, vessels of this description were not known in
+Europe.” (See Mass. Hist. Coll., Vol. IX., 1st Series, and Vol. I., 4th
+Series.) Yet I can hardly believe this, for a schooner has always
+seemed to me—the typical vessel.
+
+According to C. E. Potter of Manchester, New Hampshire, the very word
+_schooner_ is of New England origin, being from the Indian _schoon_ or
+_scoot_, meaning to rush, as Schoodic, from _scoot_ and _anke_, a place
+where water rushes. N. B. Somebody of Gloucester was to read a paper on
+this matter before a genealogical society, in Boston, March 3, 1859,
+according to the _Boston Journal_, q. v.
+
+Nearly all who come out must walk on the four planks which I have
+mentioned, so that you are pretty sure to meet all the inhabitants of
+Provincetown who come out in the course of a day, provided you keep out
+yourself. This evening the planks were crowded with mackerel fishers,
+to whom we gave and from whom we took the wall, as we returned to our
+hotel. This hotel was kept by a tailor, his shop on the one side of the
+door, his hotel on the other, and his day seemed to be divided between
+carving meat and carving broadcloth.
+
+The next morning, though it was still more cold and blustering than the
+day before, we took to the Deserts again, for we spent our days wholly
+out of doors, in the sun when there was any, and in the wind which
+never failed. After threading the shrubby hill country at the southwest
+end of the town, west of the Shank-Painter Swamp, whose expressive
+name—for we understood it at first as a landsman naturally would—gave
+it importance in our eyes, we crossed the sands to the shore south of
+Race Point and three miles distant, and thence roamed round eastward
+through the desert to where we had left the sea the evening before. We
+travelled five or six miles after we got out there, on a curving line,
+and might have gone nine or ten, over vast platters of pure sand, from
+the midst of which we could not see a particle of vegetation, excepting
+the distant thin fields of Beach-grass, which crowned and made the
+ridges toward which the sand sloped upward on each side;—all the while
+in the face of a cutting wind as cold as January; indeed, we
+experienced no weather so cold as this for nearly two months afterward.
+This desert extends from the extremity of the Cape, through
+Provincetown into Truro, and many a time as we were traversing it we
+were reminded of “Riley’s Narrative” of his captivity in the sands of
+Arabia, notwithstanding the cold. Our eyes magnified the patches of
+Beach-grass into cornfields in the horizon, and we probably exaggerated
+the height of the ridges on account of the mirage. I was pleased to
+learn afterward, from Kalm’s Travels in North America, that the
+inhabitants of the Lower St. Lawrence call this grass (_Calamagrostis
+arenaria_), and also Sea-lyme grass (_Elymus arenarius_), _seigle de
+me_; and he adds, “I have been assured that these plants grow in great
+plenty in Newfoundland, and on other North American shores; the places
+covered with them looking, at a distance, like cornfields; which might
+explain the passage in our northern accounts [he wrote in 1749] of the
+excellent wine land [_Vinland det goda_, Translator], which mentions
+that they had found whole fields of wheat growing wild.”
+
+The Beach-grass is “two to four feet high, of a seagreen color,” and it
+is said to be widely diffused over the world. In the Hebrides it is
+used for mats, pack-saddles, bags, hats, etc.; paper has been made of
+it at Dorchester in this State, and cattle eat it when tender. It has
+heads somewhat like rye, from six inches to a foot in length, and it is
+propagated both by roots and seeds. To express its love for sand, some
+botanists have called it _Psamma arenaria_, which is the Greek for
+sand, qualified by the Latin for sandy,—or sandy sand. As it is blown
+about by the wind, while it is held fast by its roots, it describes
+myriad circles in the sand as accurately as if they were made by
+compasses.
+
+It was the dreariest scenery imaginable. The only animals which we saw
+on the sand at that time were spiders, which are to be found almost
+everywhere whether on snow or ice-water or sand,—and a
+venomous-looking, long, narrow worm, one of the myriapods, or
+thousand-legs. We were surprised to see spider-holes in that flowing
+sand with an edge as firm as that of a stoned well.
+
+In June this sand was scored with the tracks of turtles both large and
+small, which had been out in the night, leading to and from the swamps.
+I was told by a _terræ filius_ who has a “farm” on the edge of the
+desert, and is familiar with the fame of Provincetown, that one man had
+caught twenty-five snapping-turtles there the previous spring. His own
+method of catching them was to put a toad on a mackerel-hook and cast
+it into a pond, tying the line to a stump or stake on shore. Invariably
+the turtle when hooked crawled up the line to the stump, and was found
+waiting there by his captor, however long afterward. He also said that
+minks, muskrats, foxes, coons, and wild mice were found there, but no
+squirrels. We heard of sea-turtle as large as a barrel being found on
+the beach and on East Harbor marsh, but whether they were native there,
+or had been lost out of some vessel, did not appear. Perhaps they were
+the Salt-water Terrapin, or else the Smooth Terrapin, found thus far
+north. Many toads were met with where there was nothing but sand and
+beach-grass. In Truro I had been surprised at the number of large
+light-colored toads everywhere hopping over the dry and sandy fields,
+their color corresponding to that of the sand. Snakes also are common
+on these pure sand beaches, and I have never been so much troubled by
+mosquitoes as in such localities. At the same season strawberries grew
+there abundantly in the little hollows on the edge of the desert
+standing amid the beach-grass in the sand, and the fruit of the
+shadbush or Amelanchier, which the inhabitants call Josh-pears (some
+think from juicy?), is very abundant on the hills. I fell in with an
+obliging man who conducted me to the best locality for strawberries. He
+said that he would not have shown me the place if he had not seen that
+I was a stranger, and could not anticipate him another year; I
+therefore feel bound in honor not to reveal it. When we came to a pond,
+he being the native did the honors and carried me over on his
+shoulders, like Sindbad. One good turn deserves another, and if he ever
+comes our way I will do as much for him.
+
+In one place we saw numerous dead tops of trees projecting through the
+otherwise uninterrupted desert, where, as we afterward learned, thirty
+or forty years before a flourishing forest had stood, and now, as the
+trees were laid bare from year to year, the inhabitants cut off their
+tops for fuel.
+
+We saw nobody that day outside of the town; it was too wintry for such
+as had seen the Back-side before, or for the greater number who never
+desire to see it, to venture out; and we saw hardly a track to show
+that any had ever crossed this desert. Yet I was told that some are
+always out on the Back-side night and day in severe weather, looking
+for wrecks, in order that they may get the job of discharging the
+cargo, or the like,—and thus shipwrecked men are succored. But,
+generally speaking, the inhabitants rarely visit these sands. One who
+had lived in Provincetown thirty years told me that he had not been
+through to the north side within that time. Sometimes the natives
+themselves come near perishing by losing their way in snow-storms
+behind the town.
+
+The wind was not a Sirocco or Simoon, such as we associate with the
+desert, but a New England northeaster,—and we sought shelter in vain
+under the sand-hills, for it blew all about them, rounding them into
+cones, and was sure to find us out on whichever side we sat. From time
+to time we lay down and drank at little pools in the sand, filled with
+pure fresh water, all that was left, probably, of a pond or swamp. The
+air was filled with dust like snow, and cutting sand which made the
+face tingle, and we saw what it must be to face it when the weather was
+drier, and, if possible, windier still,—to face a migrating sand-bar in
+the air, which has picked up its duds and is off,—to be whipped with a
+cat, not o’ nine-tails, but of a myriad of tails, and each one a sting
+to it. A Mr. Whitman, a former minister of Wellfleet, used to write to
+his inland friends that the blowing sand scratched the windows so that
+he was obliged to have one new pane set every week, that he might see
+out.
+
+On the edge of the shrubby woods the sand had the appearance of an
+inundation which was overwhelming them, terminating in an abrupt bank
+many feet higher than the surface on which they stood, and having
+partially buried the outside trees. The moving sand-hills of England,
+called Dunes or Downs, to which these have been likened, are either
+formed of sand cast up by the sea, or of sand taken from the land
+itself in the first place by the wind, and driven still farther inward.
+It is here a tide of sand impelled by waves and wind, slowly flowing
+from the sea toward the town. The northeast winds are said to be the
+strongest, but the northwest to move most sand, because they are the
+driest. On the shore of the Bay of Biscay many villages were formerly
+destroyed in this way. Some of the ridges of beach-grass which we saw
+were planted by government many years ago, to preserve the harbor of
+Provincetown and the extremity of the Cape. I talked with some who had
+been employed in the planting. In the “Description of the Eastern
+Coast,” which I have already referred to, it is said: “Beach-grass
+during the spring and summer grows about two feet and a half. If
+surrounded by naked beach, the storms of autumn and winter heap up the
+sand on all sides, and cause it to rise nearly to the top of the plant.
+In the ensuing spring the grass mounts anew; is again covered with sand
+in the winter; and thus a hill or ridge continues to ascend as long as
+there is a sufficient base to support it, or till the circumscribing
+sand, being also covered with beach-grass, will no longer yield to the
+force of the winds.” Sand-hills formed in this way are sometimes one
+hundred feet high and of every variety of form, like snow-drifts, or
+Arab tents, and are continually shifting. The grass roots itself very
+firmly. When I endeavored to pull it up, it usually broke off ten
+inches or a foot below the surface, at what had been the surface the
+year before, as appeared by the numerous offshoots there, it being a
+straight, hard, round shoot, showing by its length how much the sand
+had accumulated the last year; and sometimes the dead stubs of a
+previous season were pulled up with it from still deeper in the sand,
+with their own more decayed shoot attached,—so that the age of a
+sand-hill, and its rate of increase for several years, is pretty
+accurately recorded in this way.
+
+[Illustration: The sand dunes drifting in upon the trees]
+
+Old Gerard, the English herbalist, says, p. 1250: “I find mention in
+Stowe’s Chronicle, in Anno 1555, of a certain pulse or pease, as they
+term it, wherewith the poor people at that time, there being a great
+dearth, were miraculously helped: he thus mentions it. In the month of
+August (saith he), in Suffolke, at a place by the sea side all of hard
+stone and pibble, called in those parts a shelf, lying between the
+towns of Orford and Aldborough, where neither grew grass nor any earth
+was ever seen; it chanced in this barren place suddenly to spring up
+without any tillage or sowing, great abundance of peason, whereof the
+poor gathered (as men judged) above one hundred quarters, yet remained
+some ripe and some blossoming, as many as ever there were before: to
+the which place rode the Bishop of Norwich and the Lord Willoughby,
+with others in great number, who found nothing but hard, rocky stone
+the space of three yards under the roots of these peason, which roots
+were great and long, and very sweet.” He tells us also that Gesner
+learned from Dr. Cajus that there were enough there to supply thousands
+of men. He goes on to say that “they without doubt grew there many
+years before, but were not observed till hunger made them take notice
+of them, and quickened their invention, which commonly in our people is
+very dull, especially in finding out food of this nature. My worshipful
+friend Dr. Argent hath told me that many years ago he was in this
+place, and caused his man to pull among the beach with his hands, and
+follow the roots so long until he got some equal in length unto his
+height, yet could come to no ends of them.” Gerard never saw them, and
+is not certain what kind they were.
+
+In Dwight’s Travels in New England it is stated that the inhabitants of
+Truro were formerly regularly warned under the authority of law in the
+month of April yearly, to plant beachgrass, as elsewhere they are
+warned to repair the highways. They dug up the grass in bunches, which
+were afterward divided into several smaller ones, and set about three
+feet apart, in rows, so arranged as to break joints and obstruct the
+passage of the wind. It spread itself rapidly, the weight of the seeds
+when ripe bending the heads of the grass, and so dropping directly by
+its side and vegetating there. In this way, for instance, they built up
+again that part of the Cape between Truro and Provincetown where the
+sea broke over in the last century. They have now a public road near
+there, made by laying sods, which were full of roots, bottom upward and
+close together on the sand, double in the middle of the track, then
+spreading brush evenly over the sand on each side for half a dozen
+feet, planting beachgrass on the banks in regular rows, as above
+described, and sticking a fence of brush against the hollows.
+
+The attention of the general government was first attracted to the
+danger which threatened Cape Cod Harbor from the inroads of the sand,
+about thirty years ago, and commissioners were at that time appointed
+by Massachusetts, to examine the premises. They reported in June, 1825,
+that, owing to “the trees and brush having been cut down, and the
+beach-grass destroyed on the seaward side of the Cape, opposite the
+Harbor,” the original surface of the ground had been broken up and
+removed by the wind toward the Harbor,—during the previous fourteen
+years,—over an extent of “one half a mile in breadth, and about four
+and a half miles in length.”—“The space where a few years since were
+some of the highest lands on the Cape, covered with trees and bushes,”
+presenting “an extensive waste of undulating sand”;—and that, during
+the previous twelve months, the sand “had approached the Harbor an
+average distance of fifty rods, for an extent of four and a half
+miles!” and unless some measures were adopted to check its progress, it
+would in a few years destroy both the harbor and the town. They
+therefore recommended that beach-grass be set out on a curving line
+over a space ten rods wide and four and a half miles long, and that
+cattle, horses, and sheep be prohibited from going abroad, and the
+inhabitants from cutting the brush.
+
+I was told that about thirty thousand dollars in all had been
+appropriated to this object, though it was complained that a great part
+of this was spent foolishly, as the public money is wont to be. Some
+say that while the government is planting beach-grass behind the town
+for the protection of the harbor, the inhabitants are rolling the sand
+into the harbor in wheelbarrows, in order to make house-lots. The
+Patent-Office has recently imported the seed of this grass from
+Holland, and distributed it over the country, but probably we have as
+much as the Hollanders.
+
+Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad
+little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a
+total wreck, and erelong go to the bottom. Formerly, the cows were
+permitted to go at large, and they ate many strands of the cable by
+which the Cape is moored, and well-nigh set it adrift, as the bull did
+the boat which was moored with a grass rope; but now they are not
+permitted to wander.
+
+A portion of Truro which has considerable taxable property on it has
+lately been added to Provincetown, and I was told by a Truro man that
+his townsmen talked of petitioning the legislature to set off the next
+mile of their territory also to Provincetown, in order that she might
+have her share of the lean as well as the fat, and take care of the
+road through it; for its whole value is literally to hold the Cape
+together, and even this it has not always done. But Provincetown
+strenuously declines the gift.
+
+The wind blowed so hard from the northeast that, cold as it was, we
+resolved to see the breakers on the Atlantic side, whose din we had
+heard all the morning; so we kept on eastward through the Desert, till
+we struck the shore again northeast of Provincetown, and exposed
+ourselves to the full force of the piercing blast. There are extensive
+shoals there over which the sea broke with great force. For half a mile
+from the shore it was one mass of white breakers, which, with the wind,
+made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak. Of this part
+of the coast it is said: “A northeast storm, the most violent and fatal
+to seamen, as it is frequently accompanied with snow, blows directly on
+the land: a strong current sets along the shore; add to which that
+ships, during the operation of such a storm, endeavor to work
+northward, that they may get into the bay. Should they be unable to
+weather Race Point, the wind drives them on the shore, and a shipwreck
+is inevitable. Accordingly, the strand is everywhere covered with the
+fragments of vessels.” But since the Highland Light was erected, this
+part of the coast is less dangerous, and it is said that more
+shipwrecks occur south of that light, where they were scarcely known
+before.
+
+[Illustration: The white breakers on the Atlantic side]
+
+This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed,—more _tumultuous_, my
+companion affirmed, than the rapids of Niagara, and, of course, on a
+far greater scale. It was the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with
+only one sail in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously
+seeking a harbor. It was high tide when we reached the shore, and in
+one place, for a considerable distance, each wave dashed up so high
+that it was difficult to pass between it and the bank. Further south,
+where the bank was higher, it would have been dangerous to attempt it.
+A native of the Cape has told me that, many years ago, three boys, his
+playmates, having gone to this beach in Wellfleet to visit a wreck,
+when the sea receded ran down to the wreck, and when it came in ran
+before it to the bank, but the sea following fast at their heels,
+caused the bank to cave and bury them alive.
+
+It was the roaring sea, θάλασσα ἠχήεσσα,—
+
+ἀμφὶ δὲ τ’ ἄκραι
+Ἠϊόνες βοόωσιν, ἐρευγομένης ἁλὸς ἔξω.
+
+
+And the summits of the bank
+Around resound, the sea being vomited forth.
+
+
+As we stood looking on this scene we were gradually convinced that
+fishing here and in a pond were not, in all respects, the same, and
+that he who waits for fair weather and a calm sea may never see the
+glancing skin of a mackerel, and get no nearer to a cod than the wooden
+emblem in the State House.
+
+Having lingered on the shore till we were well-nigh chilled to death by
+the wind, and were ready to take shelter in a Charity-house, we turned
+our weather-beaten faces toward Provincetown and the Bay again, having
+now more than doubled the Cape.
+
+ [1] _I. e._ a vessel.
+
+
+ [2] The sea, which is arched over its sandy bottom like a heaven.
+
+
+ [3] Battle.
+
+
+
+
+X
+PROVINCETOWN
+
+
+Early the next morning I walked into a fish-house near our hotel, where
+three or four men were engaged in trundling out the pickled fish on
+barrows, and spreading them to dry. They told me that a vessel had
+lately come in from the Banks with forty-four thousand codfish. Timothy
+Dwight says that, just before he arrived at Provincetown, “a schooner
+come in from the Great Bank with fifty-six thousand fish, almost one
+thousand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage; the main deck
+being, on her return, eight inches under water in calm weather.” The
+cod in this fish-house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet
+deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching
+them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron
+point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly.
+Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to
+you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It reminded
+me of the figs of Smyrna. “How long does it take to cure these fish?” I
+asked.
+
+“Two good drying days, sir,” was the answer.
+
+I walked across the street again into the hotel to breakfast, and mine
+host inquired if I would take “hashed fish or beans.” I took beans,
+though they never were a favorite dish of mine. I found next summer
+that this was still the only alternative proposed here, and the
+landlord was still ringing the changes on these two words. In the
+former dish there was a remarkable proportion of fish. As you travel
+inland the potato predominates. It chanced that I did not taste fresh
+fish of any kind on the Cape, and I was assured that they were not so
+much used there as in the country. That is where they are cured, and
+where, sometimes, travellers are cured of eating them. No fresh meat
+was slaughtered in Provincetown, but the little that was used at the
+public houses was brought from Boston by the steamer.
+
+[Illustration: In Provincetown harbor]
+
+A great many of the houses here were surrounded by fish-flakes close up
+to the sills on all sides, with only a narrow passage two or three feet
+wide, to the front door; so that instead of looking out into a flower
+or grass plot, you looked on to so many square rods of cod turned wrong
+side outwards. These parterres were said to be least like a
+flower-garden in a good drying day in mid-summer. There were flakes of
+every age and pattern, and some so rusty and overgrown with lichens
+that they looked as if they might have served the founders of the
+fishery here. Some had broken down under the weight of successive
+harvests. The principal employment of the inhabitants at this time
+seemed to be to trundle out their fish and spread them in the morning,
+and bring them in at night. I saw how many a loafer who chanced to be
+out early enough got a job at wheeling out the fish of his neighbor who
+was anxious to improve the whole of a fair day. Now, then, I knew where
+salt fish were caught. They were everywhere lying on their backs, their
+collar-bones standing out like the lapels of a man-o’-war-man’s jacket,
+and inviting all things to come and rest in their bosoms; and all
+things, with a few exceptions, accepted the invitation. I think, by the
+way, that if you should wrap a large salt fish round a small boy, he
+would have a coat of such a fashion as I have seen many a one wear to
+muster. Salt fish were stacked up on the wharves, looking like corded
+wood, maple and yellow birch with the bark left on. I mistook them for
+this at first, and such in one sense they were,—fuel to maintain our
+vital fires,—an eastern wood which grew on the Grand Banks. Some were
+stacked in the form of huge flower-pots, being laid in small circles
+with the tails outwards, each circle successively larger than the
+preceding until the pile was three or four feet high, when the circles
+rapidly diminished, so as to form a conical roof. On the shores of New
+Brunswick this is covered with birch-bark, and stones are placed upon
+it, and being thus rendered impervious to the rain, it is left to
+season before being packed for exportation.
+
+It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes fed on
+cod’s-heads! The godlike part of the cod, which, like the human head,
+is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain
+in it,—coming to such an end I to be craunched by cows I I felt my own
+skull crack from sympathy. What if the heads of men were to be cut off
+to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands
+in the ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and
+instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal!—However, an inhabitant
+assured me that they did not make a practice of feeding cows on
+cod’s-heads; the cows merely would eat them sometimes; but I might live
+there all my days and never see it done. A cow wanting salt would also
+sometimes lick out all the soft part of a cod on the flakes. This he
+would have me believe was the foundation of this fish-story.
+
+It has been a constant traveller’s tale and perhaps slander, now for
+thousands of years, the Latins and Greeks have repeated it, that this
+or that nation feeds its cattle, or horses, or sheep, on fish, as may
+be seen in Ælian and Pliny, but in the Journal of Nearchus, who was
+Alexander’s admiral, and made a voyage from the Indus to the Euphrates
+three hundred and twenty-six years before Christ, it is said that the
+inhabitants of a portion of the intermediate coast, whom he called
+Ichthyophagi or Fish-eaters, not only ate fishes raw and also dried and
+pounded in a whale’s vertebra for a mortar and made into a paste, but
+gave them to their cattle, there being no grass on the coast; and
+several modern travellers—Braybosa, Niebuhr, and others—make the same
+report. Therefore in balancing the evidence I am still in doubt about
+the Provincetown cows. As for other domestic animals, Captain King in
+his continuation of Captain Cook’s Journal in 1779, says of the dogs of
+Kamtschatka, “Their food in the winter consists entirely of the heads,
+entrail, and backbones of salmon, which are put aside and dried for
+that purpose; and with this diet they are fed but sparingly.” (Cook’s
+Journal, Vol. VII., p. 315.)
+
+As we are treating of fishy matters, let me insert what Pliny says,
+that “the commanders of the fleets of Alexander the Great have related
+that the Gedrosi, who dwell on the banks of the river Arabis, are in
+the habit of making the doors of their houses with the jaw-bones of
+fishes, and raftering the roofs with their bones.” Strabo tells the
+same of the Ichthyophagi. “Hardouin remarks that the Basques of his day
+were in the habit of fencing their gardens with the ribs of the whale,
+which sometimes exceeded twenty feet in length; and Cuvier says that at
+the present time the jaw-bone of the whale is used in Norway for the
+purpose of making beams or posts for buildings.” (Bohn’s ed., trans, of
+Pliny, Vol. II., p. 361.) Herodotus says the inhabitants on Lake
+Prasias in Thrace (living on piles) “give fish for fodder to their
+horses and beasts of burden.”
+
+Provincetown was apparently what is called a flourishing town. Some of
+the inhabitants asked me if I did not think that they appeared to be
+well off generally. I said that I did, and asked how many there were in
+the almshouse. “O, only one or two, infirm or idiotic,” answered they.
+The outward aspect of the houses and shops frequently suggested a
+poverty which their interior comfort and even richness disproved. You
+might meet a lady daintily dressed in the Sabbath morning, wading in
+among the sandhills, from church, where there appeared no house fit to
+receive her, yet no doubt the interior of the house answered to the
+exterior of the lady. As for the interior of the inhabitants I am still
+in the dark about it. I had a little intercourse with some whom I met
+in the street, and was often agreeably disappointed by discovering the
+intelligence of rough, and what would be considered unpromising
+specimens. Nay, I ventured to call on one citizen the next summer, by
+special invitation. I found him sitting in his front doorway, that
+Sabbath evening, prepared for me to come in unto him; but unfortunately
+for his reputation for keeping open house, there was stretched across
+his gateway a circular cobweb of the largest kind and quite entire.
+This looked so ominous that I actually turned aside and went in the
+back way.
+
+This Monday morning was beautifully mild and calm, both on land and
+water, promising us a smooth passage across the Bay, and the fishermen
+feared that it would not be so good a drying day as the cold and windy
+one which preceded it. There could hardly have been a greater contrast.
+This was the first of the Indian summer days, though at a late hour in
+the morning we found the wells in the sand behind the town still
+covered with ice, which had formed in the night. What with wind and sun
+my most prominent feature fairly cast its slough. But I assure you it
+will take more than two good drying days to cure me of rambling. After
+making an excursion among the hills in the neighborhood of the
+Shank-Painter Swamp, and getting a little work done in its line, we
+took our seat upon the highest sand-hill overlooking the town, in
+mid-air, on a long plank stretched across between two hillocks of sand,
+where some boys were endeavoring in vain to fly their kite; and there
+we remained the rest of that forenoon looking out over the placid
+harbor, and watching for the first appearance of the steamer from
+Wellfleet, that we might be in readiness to go on board when we heard
+the whistle off Long Point.
+
+We got what we could out of the boys in the meanwhile. Provincetown
+boys are of course all sailors and have sailors’ eyes. When we were at
+the Highland Light the last summer, seven or eight miles from
+Provincetown Harbor, and wished to know one Sunday morning if the
+_Olata_, a well-known yacht, had got in from Boston, so that we could
+return in her, a Provincetown boy about ten years old, who chanced to
+be at the table, remarked that she had. I asked him how he knew. “I
+just saw her come in,” said he. When I expressed surprise that he could
+distinguish her from other vessels so far, he said that there were not
+so many of those two-topsail schooners about but that he could tell
+her. Palfrey said, in his oration at Barnstable, the duck does not take
+to the water with a surer instinct than the Barnstable boy. [He might
+have said the Cape Cod boy as well.] He leaps from his leading-strings
+into the shrouds, it is but a bound from the mother’s lap to the
+masthead. He boxes the compass in his infant soliloquies. He can hand,
+reef, and steer by the time he flies a kite.
+
+This was the very day one would have chosen to sit upon a hill
+overlooking sea and land, and muse there. The mackerel fleet was
+rapidly taking its departure, one schooner after another, and standing
+round the Cape, like fowls leaving their roosts in the morning to
+disperse themselves in distant fields. The turtle-like sheds of the
+salt-works were crowded into every nook in the hills, immediately
+behind the town, and their now idle windmills lined the shore. It was
+worth the while to see by what coarse and simple chemistry this almost
+necessary of life is obtained, with the sun for journeyman, and a
+single apprentice to do the chores for a large establishment. It is a
+sort of tropical labor, pursued too in the sunniest season; more
+interesting than gold or diamond-washing, which, I fancy, it somewhat
+resembles at a distance. In the production of the necessaries of life
+Nature is ready enough to assist man. So at the potash works which I
+have seen at Hull, where they burn the stems of the kelp and boil the
+ashes. Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got
+half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory. It is said, that owing to
+the reflection of the sun from the sand-hills, and there being
+absolutely no fresh water emptying into the harbor, the same number of
+superficial feet yields more salt here than in any other part of the
+county. A little rain is considered necessary to clear the air, and
+make salt fast and good, for as paint does not dry, so water does not
+evaporate in dog-day weather. But they were now, as elsewhere on the
+Cape, breaking up their salt-works and selling them for lumber.
+
+From that elevation we could overlook the operations of the inhabitants
+almost as completely as if the roofs had been taken off. They were
+busily covering the wicker-worked flakes about their houses with salted
+fish, and we now saw that the back yards were improved for this purpose
+as much as the front; where one man’s fish ended another’s began. In
+almost every yard we detected some little building from which these
+treasures were being trundled forth and systematically spread, and we
+saw that there was an art as well as a knack even in spreading fish,
+and that a division of labor was profitably practised. One man was
+withdrawing his fishes a few inches beyond the nose of his neighbor’s
+cow which had stretched her neck over a paling to get at them. It
+seemed a quite domestic employment, like drying clothes, and indeed in
+some parts of the county the women take part in it.
+
+I noticed in several places on the Cape a sort of clothes-_flakes_.
+They spread brush on the ground, and fence it round, and then lay their
+clothes on it, to keep them from the sand. This is a Cape Cod
+clothes-yard.
+
+The sand is the great enemy here. The tops of some of the hills were
+enclosed and a board put up, forbidding all persons entering the
+enclosure, lest their feet should disturb the sand, and set it
+a-blowing or a-sliding. The inhabitants are obliged to get leave from
+the authorities to cut wood behind the town for fish-flakes,
+bean-poles, pea-brush, and the like, though, as we were told, they may
+transplant trees from one part of the township to another without
+leave. The sand drifts like snow, and sometimes the lower story of a
+house is concealed by it, though it is kept off by a wall. The houses
+were formerly built on piles, in order that the driving sand might pass
+under them. We saw a few old ones here still standing on their piles,
+but they were boarded up now, being protected by their younger
+neighbors. There was a school-house, just under the hill on which we
+sat, filled with sand up to the tops of the desks, and of course the
+master and scholars had fled. Perhaps they had imprudently left the
+windows open one day, or neglected to mend a broken pane. Yet in one
+place was advertised “Fine sand for sale here,”—I could hardly believe
+my eyes,—probably some of the street sifted,—a good instance of the
+fact that a man confers a value on the most worthless thing by mixing
+himself with it, according to which rule we must have conferred a value
+on the whole back-side of Cape Cod;—but I thought that if they could
+have advertised “Fat Soil,” or perhaps “Fine sand got rid of,” ay, and
+“Shoes emptied here,” it would have been more alluring. As we looked
+down on the town, I thought that I saw one man, who probably lived
+beyond the extremity of the planking, steering and tacking for it in a
+sort of snow-shoes, but I may have been mistaken. In some pictures of
+Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the
+ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand. Nevertheless,
+natives of Provincetown assured me that they could walk in the middle
+of the road without trouble even in slippers, for they had learned how
+to put their feet down and lift them up without taking in any sand. One
+man said that he should be surprised if he found half a dozen grains of
+sand in his pumps at night, and stated, moreover, that the young ladies
+had a dexterous way of emptying their shoes at each step, which it
+would take a stranger a long time to learn. The tires of the
+stage-wheels were about five inches wide; and the wagon-tires generally
+on the Cape are an inch or two wider, as the sand is an inch or two
+deeper than elsewhere. I saw a baby’s wagon with tires six inches wide
+to keep it near the surface. The more tired the wheels, the less tired
+the horses. Yet all the time that we were in Provincetown, which was
+two days and nights, we saw only one horse and cart, and they were
+conveying a coffin. They did not try such experiments there on common
+occasions. The next summer I saw only the two-wheeled horse-cart which
+conveyed me thirty rods into the harbor on my way to the steamer. Yet
+we read that there were two horses and two yoke of oxen here in 1791,
+and we were told that there were several more when we were there,
+beside the stage team. In Barber’s Historical Collections, it is said,
+“So rarely are wheel-carriages seen in the place that they are a matter
+of some curiosity to the younger part of the community. A lad who
+understood navigating the ocean much better than land travel, on seeing
+a man driving a wagon in the street, expressed his surprise at his
+being able to drive so straight without the assistance of a rudder.”
+There was no rattle of carts, and there would have been no rattle if
+there had been any carts. Some saddle-horses that passed the hotel in
+the evening merely made the sand fly with a rustling sound like a
+writer sanding his paper copiously, but there was no sound of their
+tread. No doubt there are more horses and carts there at present. A
+sleigh is never seen, or at least is a great novelty on the Cape, the
+snow being either absorbed by the sand or blown into drifts.
+
+Nevertheless, the inhabitants of the Cape generally do not complain of
+their “soil,” but will tell you that it is good enough for them to dry
+their fish on.
+
+Notwithstanding all this sand, we counted three meeting-houses, and
+four school-houses nearly as large, on this street, though some had a
+tight board fence about them to preserve the plot within level and
+hard. Similar fences, even within a foot of many of the houses, gave
+the town a less cheerful and hospitable appearance than it would
+otherwise have had. They told us that, on the whole, the sand had made
+no progress for the last ten years, the cows being no longer permitted
+to go at large, and every means being taken to stop the sandy tide.
+
+In 1727 Provincetown was “invested with peculiar privileges,” for its
+encouragement. Once or twice it was nearly abandoned; but now lots on
+the street fetch a high price, though titles to them were first
+obtained by possession and improvement, and they are still transferred
+by quitclaim deeds merely, the township being the property of the
+State. But though lots were so valuable on the street, you might in
+many places throw a stone over them to where a man could still obtain
+land, or sand, by squatting on or improving it.
+
+[Illustration: Provincetown—A bit of the village from the wharf]
+
+Stones are very rare on the Cape. I saw a very few small stones used
+for pavements and for bank walls, in one or two places in my walk, but
+they are so scarce that, as I was informed, vessels have been forbidden
+to take them from the beach for ballast, and therefore their crews used
+to land at night and steal them. I did not hear of a rod of regular
+stone wall below Orleans. Yet I saw one man underpinning a new house in
+Eastham with some “rocks,” as he called them, which he said a neighbor
+had collected with great pains in the course of years, and finally made
+over to him. This I thought was a gift worthy of being recorded,—equal
+to a transfer of California “rocks,” almost. Another man who was
+assisting him, and who seemed to be a close observer of nature, hinted
+to me the locality of a rock in that neighborhood which was “forty-two
+paces in circumference and fifteen feet high,” for he saw that I was a
+stranger, and, probably, would not carry it off. Yet I suspect that the
+locality of the few large rocks on the forearm of the Cape is well
+known to the inhabitants generally. I even met with one man who had got
+a smattering of mineralogy, but where he picked it up I could not
+guess. I thought that he would meet with some interesting geological
+nuts for him to crack, if he should ever visit the mainland, Cohasset,
+or Marblehead for instance.
+
+The well stones at the Highland Light were brought from Hingham, but
+the wells and cellars of the Cape are generally built of brick, which
+also are imported. The cellars, as well as the wells, are made in a
+circular form, to prevent the sand from pressing in the wall. The
+former are only from nine to twelve feet in diameter, and are said to
+be very cheap, since a single tier of brick will suffice for a cellar
+of even larger dimensions. Of course, if you live in the sand, you will
+not require a large cellar to hold your roots. In Provincetown, when
+formerly they suffered the sand to drive under their houses,
+obliterating all rudiments of a cellar, they did not raise a vegetable
+to put into one. One farmer in Wellfleet, who raised fifty bushels of
+potatoes, showed me his cellar under a corner of his house, not more
+than nine feet in diameter, looking like a cistern: but he had another
+of the same size under his barn.
+
+You need dig only a few feet almost anywhere near the shore of the Cape
+to find fresh water. But that which we tasted was invariably poor.
+though the inhabitants called it good, as if they were comparing it
+with salt water. In the account of Truro, it is said. “Wells dug near
+the shore are dry at low water, or rather at what is called young
+flood, but are replenished with the flowing of the tide,”—- the salt
+water, which is lowest in the sand, apparently forcing the fresh up.
+When you express your surprise at the greenness of a Provincetown
+garden on the beach, in a dry season, they will sometimes tell you that
+the tide forces the moisture up to them. It is an interesting fact that
+low sand-bars in the midst of the ocean, perhaps even those which are
+laid bare only at low tide, are reservoirs of fresh water at which the
+thirsty mariner can supply himself. They appear, like huge sponges, to
+hold the rain and dew which fall on them, and which, by capillary
+attraction, are prevented from mingling with the surrounding brine.
+
+The Harbor of Provincetown—which, as well as the greater part of the
+Bay, and a wide expanse of ocean, we overlooked from our perch—is
+deservedly famous. It opens to the south, is free from rocks, and is
+never frozen over. It is said that the only ice seen in it drifts in
+sometimes from Barnstable or Plymouth. Dwight remarks that “The storms
+which prevail on the American coast generally come from the east; and
+there is no other harbor on a windward shore within two hundred miles.”
+J. D. Graham, who has made a very minute and thorough survey of this
+harbor and the adjacent waters, states that “its capacity, depth of
+water, excellent anchorage, and the complete shelter it affords from
+all winds, combine to render it one of the most valuable ship harbors
+on our coast.” It is _the_ harbor of the Cape and of the fishermen of
+Massachusetts generally. It was known to navigators several years at
+least before the settlement of Plymouth. In Captain John Smith’s map of
+New England, dated 1614, it bears the name of Milford Haven, and
+Massachusetts Bay that of Stuard’s Bay. His Highness, Prince Charles,
+changed the name of Cape Cod to Cape James; but even princes have not
+always power to change a name for the worse, and as Cotton Mather said,
+Cape Cod is “a name which I suppose it will never lose till shoals of
+codfish be seen swimming on its highest hills.”
+
+Many an early voyager was unexpectedly caught by this hook, and found
+himself embayed. On successive maps, Cape Cod appears sprinkled over
+with French, Dutch, and English names, as it made part of New France,
+New Holland, and New England. On one map Provincetown Harbor is called
+“Fuic (bownet?) Bay,” Barnstable Bay “Staten Bay,” and the sea north of
+it “Mare del Noort,” or the North Sea. On another, the extremity of the
+Cape is called “Staten Hoeck,” or the States Hook. On another, by
+Young, this has Noord Zee, Staten hoeck or Hit hoeck, but the copy at
+Cambridge has no date; the whole Cape is called “Niew Hollant,” (after
+Hudson); and on another still, the shore between Race Point and Wood
+End appears to be called “Bevechier.” In Champlain’s admirable Map of
+New France, including the oldest recognizable map of what is now the
+New England coast with which I am acquainted, Cape Cod is called C.
+Blan (i.e. Cape White), from the color of its sands, and Massachusetts
+Bay is Baye Blanche. It was visited by De Monts and Champlain in 1605,
+and the next year was further explored by Poitrincourt and Champlain.
+The latter has given a particular account of these explorations in his
+“Voyages,” together with separate charts and soundings of two of its
+harbors,—_Malle Barre_, the Bad Bar (Nauset Harbor?), a name now
+applied to what the French called _Cap Baturier_; and _Port Fortune_,
+apparently Chatham Harbor. Both these names are copied on the map of
+“Novi Belgii,” in Ogilvy’s America. He also describes minutely the
+manners and customs of the savages, and represents by a plate the
+savages surprising the French and killing five or six of them. The
+French afterward killed some of the natives, and wished, by way of
+revenge, to carry off some and make them grind in their hand-mill at
+Port Royal.
+
+It is remarkable that there is not in English any adequate or correct
+account of the French exploration of what is now the coast of New
+England, between 1604 and 1608, though it is conceded that they then
+made the first permanent European settlement on the continent of North
+America north of St. Augustine. If the lions had been the painters it
+would have been otherwise. This omission is probably to be accounted
+for partly by the fact that the _early edition_ of Champlain’s
+“Voyages” had not been consulted for this purpose. This contains by far
+the most particular, and, I think, the most interesting chapter of what
+we may call the Ante-Pilgrim history of New England, extending to one
+hundred and sixty pages quarto; but appears to be unknown equally to
+the historian and the orator on Plymouth Rock. Bancroft does not
+mention Champlain at all among the authorities for De Monts’s
+expedition, nor does he say that he ever visited the coast of New
+England. Though he bore the title of pilot to De Monts, he was, in
+_another sense_, the leading spirit, as well as the historian of the
+expedition. Holmes, Hildreth, and Barry, and apparently all our
+historians who mention Champlain, refer to the edition of 1632, in
+which all the separate charts of our harbors, etc., and about one-half
+the narrative, are omitted; for the author explored so many lands
+afterward that he could afford to forget a part of what he had done.
+Hildreth, speaking of De Monts’s expedition, says that “he looked into
+the Penobscot [in 1605], which Pring had discovered two years before,”
+saying nothing about Champlain’s extensive exploration of it for De
+Monts in 1604 (Holmes says 1608, and refers to Purchas); also that he
+followed in the track of Pring along the coast “to Cape Cod, which he
+called Malabarre.” (Haliburton had made the same statement before him
+in 1829. He called it Cap Blanc, and Malle Barre (the Bad Bar) was the
+name given to a harbor on the east side of the Cape). Pring says
+nothing about a river there. Belknap says that Weymouth discovered it
+in 1605. Sir F. Gorges, says, in his narration (Maine Hist. Coll., Vol.
+II., p. 19), 1658, that Pring in 1606 “made a perfect discovery of all
+the rivers and harbors.” This is the most I can find. Bancroft makes
+Champlain to have discovered more western rivers in Maine, not naming
+the Penobscot; he, however, must have been the discoverer of distances
+on this river (see Belknap, p. 147). Pring was absent from England only
+about six months, and sailed by this part of Cape Cod (Malabarre)
+because it yielded no sassafras, while the French, who probably had
+not heard of Pring, were patiently for years exploring the coast in
+search of a place of settlement, sounding and surveying its harbors.
+
+John Smith’s map, published in 1616, from observations in 1614-15, is
+by many regarded as the oldest map of New England. It is the first that
+was made after this country was called New England, for he so called
+it; but in Champlain’s “Voyages,” edition 1613 (and Lescarbot, in 1612,
+quotes a still earlier account of his voyage), there is a map of it
+made when it was known to Christendom as New France, called _Carte
+Géographique de la Nouvelle Franse faictte par le Sieur de Champlain
+Saint Tongois Cappitaine ordinaire pour le roi en la Marine,—faict l’en
+1612_, from his observations between 1604 and 1607; a map extending
+from Labrador to Cape Cod and westward _to the Great Lakes_, and
+crowded with information, geographical, ethnographical, zoölogical, and
+botanical. He even gives the variation of the compass as observed by
+himself at that date on many parts of the coast. This, taken together
+with the many _separate charts_ of harbors and their soundings on a
+large scale, which this volume contains,—among the rest. _Qui ni be
+quy_ (Kennebec), _Chouacoit R._ (Saco R.), _Le Beau port, Port St.
+Louis_ (near Cape Ann), and others on our coast,—but _which are not in
+the edition of 1632_, makes this a completer map of the New England and
+adjacent northern coast than was made for half a century afterward,
+almost, we might be allowed to say, till another Frenchman, Des Barres,
+made another for us, which only our late Coast Survey has superseded.
+Most of the maps of this coast made for a long time after betray their
+indebtedness to Champlain. He was a skilful navigator, a man of
+science, and geographer to the King of France. He crossed the Atlantic
+about twenty times, and made nothing of it; often in a small vessel in
+which few would dare to go to sea today; and on one occasion making the
+voyage from Tadoussac to St. Malo in eighteen days. He was in this
+neighborhood, that is, between Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and Cape Cod,
+observing the land and its inhabitants, and making a map of the coast,
+from May, 1604, to September, 1607, _or about three and a half years_,
+and he has described minutely his method of surveying harbors. By his
+own account, a part of his map was engraved in 1604 (?). When
+Pont-Gravé and others returned to France in 1606, he remained at Port
+Royal with Poitrincourt, “in order,” says he, “by the aid of God, to
+finish the chart of the coasts which I had begun”; and again in his
+volume, printed before John Smith visited this part of America, he
+says: “It seems to me that I have done my duty as far as I could, if I
+have not forgotten to put in my said chart whatever I saw, and give a
+particular knowledge to the public of what had never been described nor
+discovered so particularly as I have done it, although some other may
+have heretofore written of it; but it was a very small affair in
+comparison with what we have discovered within the last ten years.”
+
+It is not generally remembered, if known, by the descendants of the
+Pilgrims, that when their forefathers were spending their first
+memorable winter in the New World, they had for neighbors a colony of
+French no further off than Port Royal (Annapolis, Nova Scotia), three
+hundred miles distant (Prince seems to make it about five hundred
+miles); where, in spite of many vicissitudes, they had been for fifteen
+years. They built a grist-mill there as early as 1606; also made bricks
+and turpentine on a stream, Williamson says, in 1606. De Monts, who was
+a Protestant, brought his minister with him, who came to blows with the
+Catholic priest on the subject of religion. Though these founders of
+Acadie endured no less than the Pilgrims, and about the same proportion
+of them—thirty-five out of seventy-nine (Williamson’s Maine says
+thirty-six out of seventy)—died the first winter at St. Croix, 1604-5,
+sixteen years earlier, no orator, to my knowledge, has ever celebrated
+their enterprise (Williamson’s History of Maine does considerably),
+while the trials which their successors and descendants endured at the
+hands of the English have furnished a theme for both the historian and
+poet. (See Bancroft’s History and Longfellow’s Evangeline.) The remains
+at their fort at St. Croix were discovered at the end of the last
+century, and helped decide where the true St. Croix, our boundary, was.
+
+The very gravestones of those Frenchmen are probably older than the
+oldest English monument in New England north of the Elizabeth Islands,
+or perhaps anywhere in New England, for if there are any traces of
+Gosnold’s storehouse left, his strong works are gone. Bancroft says,
+advisedly, in 1834, “It requires a believing eye to discern the ruins
+of the fort”; and that there were no ruins of a fort in 1837. Dr.
+Charles T. Jackson tells me that, in the course of a geological survey
+in 1827, he discovered a gravestone, a slab of trap rock, on Goat
+Island, opposite Annapolis (Port Royal), in Nova Scotia, bearing a
+Masonic coat-of-arms and the date 1606, which is fourteen years earlier
+than the landing of the Pilgrims. This was left in the possession of
+Judge Haliburton, of Nova Scotia.
+
+There were Jesuit priests in what has since been called New England,
+converting the savages at Mount Desert, then St. Savior, in
+1613,—having come over to Port Royal in 1611, though they were almost
+immediately interrupted by the English, years before the Pilgrims came
+hither to enjoy their own religion. This according to Champlain.
+Charlevoix says the same; and after coming from France in 1611, went
+west from Port Royal along the coast as far as the Kennebec in 1612,
+and was often carried from Port Royal to Mount Desert.
+
+Indeed, the Englishman’s history of _New_ England commences only when
+it ceases to be _New_ France. Though Cabot was the first to discover
+the continent of North America, Champlain, in the edition of his
+“Voyages” printed in 1632, after the English had for a season got
+possession of Quebec and Port Royal, complains with no little justice:
+“The common consent of all Europe is to represent New France as
+extending at least to the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth degrees of
+latitude, as appears by the maps of the world printed in Spain, Italy,
+Holland, Flanders, Germany, and England, until they possessed
+themselves of the coasts of New France, where are Acadie, the Etchemins
+(Maine and New Brunswick), the Almouchicois (Massachusetts?), and the
+Great River St. Lawrence, where they have imposed, according to their
+fancy, such names as New England, Scotland, and others; but it is not
+easy to efface the memory of a thing which is known to all
+Christendom.”
+
+That Cabot merely landed on the uninhabitable shore of Labrador, gave
+the English no just title to New England, or to the United States,
+generally, any more than to Patagonia. His careful biographer (Biddle)
+is not certain in what voyage he ran down the coast of the United
+States as is reported, and no one tells us what he saw. Miller, in the
+New York Hist. Coll., Vol. I., p. 28, says he does not appear to have
+landed anywhere. Contrast with this Verrazzani’s tarrying fifteen days
+at one place on the New England coast, and making frequent excursions
+into the interior thence. It chances that the latter’s letter to
+Francis I., in 1524, contains “the earliest original account extant of
+the Atlantic coast of the United States”; and even from that time the
+northern part of it began to be called _La Terra Francese_, or French
+Land. A part of it was called New Holland before it was called New
+England. The English were very backward to explore and settle the
+continent which they had stumbled upon. The French preceded them both
+in their attempts to colonize the continent of North America (Carolina
+and Florida, 1562-4), and in their first permanent settlement (Port
+Royal, 1605); and the right of possession, naturally enough, was the
+one which England mainly respected and recognized in the case of Spain,
+of Portugal, and also of France, from the time of Henry VII.
+
+The explorations of the French gave to the world the first valuable
+maps of these coasts. Denys of Honfleur made a map of the Gulf of St.
+Lawrence in 1506. No sooner had Cartier explored the St. Lawrence, in
+1535, than there began to be published by his countrymen remarkably
+accurate charts of that river as far up as Montreal. It is almost all
+of the continent north of Florida that you recognize on charts for more
+than a generation afterward,—though Verrazzani’s rude plot (made under
+French auspices) was regarded by Hackluyt, more than fifty years after
+his voyage (in 1524), as the most accurate representation of our coast.
+The French trail is distinct. They went measuring and sounding, and
+when they got home had something to show for their voyages and
+explorations. There was no danger of their charts being lost, as
+Cabot’s have been.
+
+The most distinguished navigators of that day were Italians, or of
+Italian descent, and Portuguese. The French and Spaniards, though less
+advanced in the science of navigation than the former, possessed more
+imagination and spirit of adventure than the English, and were better
+fitted to be the explorers of a new continent even as late as 1751.
+
+This spirit it was which so early carried the French to the Great Lakes
+and the Mississippi on the north, and the Spaniard to the same river on
+the south. It was long before our frontiers reached their settlements
+in the west, and a _voyageur_ or _coureur de bois_ is still our
+conductor there. Prairie is a French word, as Sierra is a Spanish one.
+Augustine in Florida, and Santa Fé in New Mexico [1582], both built by
+the Spaniards, are considered the oldest towns in the United States.
+Within the memory of the oldest man, the Anglo-Americans were confined
+between the Appalachian Mountains and the sea, “a space not two hundred
+miles broad,” while the Mississippi was by treaty the eastern boundary
+of New France. (See the pamphlet on settling the Ohio, London, 1763,
+bound up with the travels of Sir John Bartram.) So far as inland
+discovery was concerned, the adventurous spirit of the English was that
+of sailors who land but for a day, and their enterprise the enterprise
+of traders. Cabot spoke like an Englishman, as he was, if he said, as
+one reports, in reference to the discovery of the American Continent,
+when he found it running toward the north, that it was a great
+disappointment to him, being in his way to India; but we would rather
+add to than detract from the fame of so great a discoverer.
+
+Samuel Penhallow, in his history (Boston, 1726), p. 51, speaking of
+“Port Royal and Nova Scotia,” says of the last that its “first seizure
+was by Sir Sebastian Cobbet for the crown of Great Britain, in the
+reign of King Henry VII.; but lay dormant till the year 1621,” when Sir
+William Alexander got a patent of it, and possessed it some years; and
+afterward Sir David Kirk was proprietor of it, but erelong, “to the
+surprise of all thinking men, it was given up unto the French.”
+
+Even as late as 1633 we find Winthrop, the first Governor of the
+Massachusetts Colony, who was not the most likely to be misinformed,
+who, moreover, has the _fame_, at least, of having discovered Wachusett
+Mountain (discerned it forty miles inland), talking about the “Great
+Lake” and the “hideous swamps about it,” near which the Connecticut and
+the “Potomack” took their rise; and among the memorable events of the
+year 1642 he chronicles Darby Field, an Irishman’s expedition to the
+“White hill,” from whose top he saw eastward what he “judged to be the
+Gulf of Canada,” and westward what he “judged to be the great lake
+which Canada River comes out of,” and where he found much “Muscovy
+glass,” and “could rive out pieces of forty feet long and seven or
+eight broad.” While the very inhabitants of New England were thus
+fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a _terra
+incognita_ to them,—or rather many years before the earliest date
+referred to,—Champlain, the _first Governor of Canada_, not to mention
+the inland discoveries of Cartier,[1] Roberval, and others, of the
+preceding century, and his own earlier voyage, had already gone to war
+against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great
+Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.
+
+In Champlain’s “Voyages,” printed in 1613, there is a plate
+representing a fight in which he aided the Canada Indians against the
+Iroquois, near the south end of Lake Champlain, in July, 1609, eleven
+years before the settlement of Plymouth. Bancroft says he joined the
+Algonquins in an expedition against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, in
+the northwest of New York. This is that “Great Lake,” which the
+English, hearing some rumor of from the French, long after, locate in
+an “Imaginary Province called Laconia, and spent several years about
+1630 in the vain attempt to discover.” (Sir Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine
+Hist. Coll., Vol. II., p. 68.) Thomas Morton has a chapter on this
+“Great Lake.” In the edition of Champlain’s map dated 1632, the Falls
+of Niagara appear; and in a great lake northwest of _Mer Douce_ (Lake
+Huron) there is an island represented, over which is written, “_Isle ou
+il y a une mine de cuivre_,”—“Island where there is a mine of copper.”
+This will do for an offset to our Governor’s “Muscovy Glass.” Of all
+these adventures and discoveries we have a minute and faithful account,
+giving facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all scientific
+and Frenchman-like, with scarcely one fable or traveller’s story.
+
+Probably Cape Cod was visited by Europeans long before the seventeenth
+century. It may be that Cabot himself beheld it. Verrazzani, in 1524,
+according to his own account, spent fifteen days on our coast, in
+latitude 41° 40 minutes (some suppose in the harbor of Newport), and
+often went five or six leagues into the interior there, and he says
+that he sailed thence at once one hundred and fifty leagues
+northeasterly, _always in sight of the coast_. There is a chart in
+Hackluyt’s “Divers Voyages,” made according to Verrazzani’s plot, which
+last is praised for its accuracy by Hackluyt, but I cannot distinguish
+Cape Cod on it, unless it is the “C. Arenas,” which is in the right
+latitude, though ten degrees west of “Claudia,” which is thought to be
+Block Island.
+
+The “Biographic Universelle” informs us that “An ancient manuscript
+chart drawn in 1529 by Diego Ribeiro, a Spanish cosmographer, has
+preserved the memory of the voyage of Gomez [a Portuguese sent out by
+Charles the Fifth]. One reads in it under (_au dessous_) the place
+occupied by the States of New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island,
+_Terre d’Etienne Gomez, qu’il découvrit en_ 1525 (Land of Etienne
+Gomez, which he discovered in 1525).” This chart, with a memoir, was
+published at Weimar in the last century.
+
+Jean Alphonse, Roberval’s pilot in Canada in 1642, one of the most
+skilful navigators of his time, and who has given remarkably minute and
+accurate direction for sailing up the St. Lawrence, showing that he
+knows what he is talking about, says in his “_Routier_” (it is in
+Hackluyt), “I have been at a bay as far as the forty-second degree,
+between Norimbegue [the Penobscot?] and Florida, but I have not
+explored the bottom of it, and I do not know whether it passes from one
+land to the other,” _i.e._ to Asia. (“ J’ai été à une Baye jusques par
+les 42e degres entre la Norimbegue et la Floride; mais je n’en ai pas
+cherché le fond, et ne sçais pas si elle passe d’une terre à l’autre.”)
+This may refer to Massachusetts Bay, if not possibly to the western
+inclination of the coast a little farther south. When he says, “I have
+no doubt that the Norimbegue enters into the river of Canada,” he is
+perhaps so interpreting some account which the Indians had given
+respecting the route from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic by the St.
+John, or Penobscot, or possibly even the Hudson River.
+
+We hear rumors of this country of “Norumbega” and its great city from
+many quarters. In a discourse by a great French sea-captain in
+Ramusio’s third volume (1556-65), this is said to be the name given to
+the land by its inhabitants, and Verrazzani is called the discoverer of
+it; another in 1607 makes the natives call it, or the river, Aguncia.
+It is represented as an island on an accompanying chart. It is
+frequently spoken of by old writers as a country of indefinite extent,
+between Canada and Florida, and it appears as a large island with Cape
+Breton at its eastern extremity, on the map made according to
+Verrazzani’s plot in Hackluyt’s “Divers Voyages.” These maps and rumors
+may have been the origin of the notion, common among the early
+settlers, that New England was an island. The country and city of
+Norumbega appear about where Maine now is on a map in Ortelius
+(“Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,” Antwerp, 1570), and the “R. Grande” is
+drawn where the Penobscot or St. John might be.
+
+In 1604, Champlain being sent by the Sieur de Monts to explore the
+coast of Norumbegue, sailed up the Penobscot twenty-two or twenty-three
+leagues from “Isle Haute,” or till he was stopped by the falls. He
+says: “I think that this river is that which many pilots and historians
+call Norumbegue, and which the greater part have described as great and
+spacious, with numerous islands; and its entrance in the forty-third or
+forty-third and one half or, according to others, the forty-fourth
+degree of latitude, more or less.” He is convinced that “the greater
+part” of those who speak of a great city there have never seen it, but
+repeat a mere rumor, but he thinks that some have seen the mouth of the
+river since it answers to their description.
+
+Under date of 1607 Champlain writes: “Three or four leagues north of
+the Cap de Poitrincourt [near the head of the Bay of Fundy in Nova
+Scotia] we found a cross, which was very old, covered with moss and
+almost all decayed, which was an evident sign that there had formerly
+been Christians there.”
+
+Also the following passage from Lescarbot will show how much the
+neighboring coasts were frequented by Europeans in the sixteenth
+century. Speaking of his return from Port Royal to France in 1607, he
+says: “At last, within four leagues of Campseau [the Gut of Canso], we
+arrived at a harbor [in Nova Scotia], where a worthy old gentleman from
+St. John de Lus, named Captain Savale, was fishing, who received us
+with the utmost courtesy. And as this harbor, which is small, but very
+good, has no name, I have given it on my geographical chart the name of
+Savalet. [It is on Champlain’s map also.] This worthy man told us that
+this voyage was the forty-second which he had made to those parts, and
+yet the Newfoundlanders [_Terre neuviers_] make only one a year. He was
+wonderfully content with his fishery, and informed us that he made
+daily fifty crowns’ worth of cod, and that his voyage would be worth
+ten thousand francs. He had sixteen men in his employ; and his vessel
+was of eighty tons, which could carry a hundred thousand dry cod.”
+(Histoire de la Nouvelle France, 1612.) They dried their fish on the
+rocks on shore.
+
+The “Isola della Réna” (Sable Island?) appears on the chart of “Nuova
+Francia” and Norumbega, accompanying the “Discourse” above referred to
+in Ramusio’s third volume, edition 1556-65. Champlain speaks of there
+being at the Isle of Sable, in 1604, “grass pastured by oxen (_bœufs_)
+and cows which the Portuguese carried there more than sixty years ago,”
+_i.e._ sixty years before 1613; in a later edition he says, which came
+out of a Spanish vessel which was lost in endeavoring to settle on the
+Isle of Sable; and he states that De la Roche’s men, who were left on
+this island seven years from 1598, lived on the flesh of these cattle
+which they found “_en quantie)_,” and built houses out of the wrecks of
+vessels which came to the island (“perhaps Gilbert’s”), there being no
+wood or stone. Lescarbot says that they lived “on fish and the milk of
+cows left there about eighty years before by Baron de Leri and Saint
+Just.” Charlevoix says they ate up the cattle and then lived on fish.
+Haliburton speaks of cattle left there as a rumor. De Leri and Saint
+Just had suggested plans of colonization on the Isle of Sable as early
+as 1515 (1508?) according to Bancroft, referring to Charlevoix. These
+are but a few of the instances which I might quote.
+
+Cape Cod is commonly said to have been discovered in 1602. We will
+consider at length under what circumstances, and with what observation
+and expectations, the first Englishmen whom history clearly discerns
+approached the coast of New England. According to the accounts of
+Archer and Brereton (both of whom accompanied Gosnold), on the 26th of
+March, 1602, old style, Captain Bartholomew Gosnold set sail from
+Falmouth, England, for the North part of Virginia, in a small bark
+called the _Concord_, they being in all, says one account, “thirty-two
+persons, whereof eight mariners and sailors, twelve purposing upon the
+discovery to return with the ship for England, the rest remain there
+for population.” This is regarded as “the first attempt of the English
+to make a settlement within the limits of New England.” Pursuing a new
+and a shorter course than the usual one by the Canaries, “the 14th of
+April following” they had sight of Saint Mary’s, an island of the
+Azores. As their sailors were few and “none of the best” (I use their
+own phrases), and they were “going upon an unknown coast,” they were
+not “overbold to stand in with the shore but in open weather”; so they
+made their first discovery of land with the lead. The 23d of April the
+ocean appeared yellow, but on taking up some of the water in a bucket,
+“it altered not either in color or taste from the sea azure.” The 7th
+of May they saw divers birds whose names they knew, and many others in
+their “English tongue of no name.” The 8th of May “the water changed to
+a yellowish green, where at seventy fathoms” they “had ground.” The
+9th, they had upon their lead “many glittering stones,”—“which might
+promise some mineral matter in the bottom.” The 10th, they were over a
+bank which they thought to be near the western end of St. John’s
+Island, and saw schools of fish. The 12th, they say, “continually
+passed fleeting by us sea-oare, which seemed to have their movable
+course towards the northeast.” On the 13th, they observed “great beds
+of weeds, much wood, and divers things else floating by,” and “had
+smelling of the shore much as from the southern Cape and Andalusia in
+Spain.” On Friday, the 14th, early in the morning they descried land on
+the north, in the latitude of forty-three degrees, apparently some part
+of the coast of Maine. Williamson (History of Maine) says it certainly
+could not have been south of the central Isle of Shoals. Belknap
+inclines to think it the south side of Cape Ann. Standing fair along by
+the shore, about twelve o’clock the same day, they came to anchor and
+were visited by eight savages, who came off to them “in a Biscay
+shallop, with sail and oars,”—“an iron grapple, and a kettle of
+copper.” These they at first mistook for “Christians distressed.” One
+of them was “apparelled with a waistcoat and breeches of black serge,
+made after our sea-fashion, hoes and shoes on his feet; all the rest
+(saving one that had a pair of breeches of blue cloth) were naked.”
+They appeared to have had dealings with “some Basques of St. John de
+Luz, and to understand much more than we,” say the English, “for want
+of language, could comprehend.” But they soon “set sail westward,
+leaving them and their coast.” (This was a remarkable discovery for
+discoverers.)
+
+“The 15th day,” writes Gabriel Archer, “we had again sight of the land,
+which made ahead, being as we thought an island, by reason of a large
+sound that appeared westward between it and the main, for coming to the
+west end thereof, we did perceive a large opening, we called it Shoal
+Hope. Near this cape we came to anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we
+took great store of cod-fish, for which we altered the name and called
+it Cape Cod. Here we saw skulls of herring, mackerel, and other small
+fish, in great abundance. This is a low sandy shoal, but without
+danger; also we came to anchor again in sixteen fathoms, fair by the
+land in the latitude of forty-two degrees. This Cape is well near a
+mile broad, and lieth northeast by east. The captain went here ashore,
+and found the ground to be full of peas, strawberries, whortleberries,
+etc., as then unripe, the sand also by the shore somewhat deep; the
+firewood there by us taken in was of cypress, birch, witch-hazel, and
+beach. A young Indian came here to the captain, armed with his bow and
+arrows, and had certain plates of copper hanging at his ears; he showed
+a willingness to help us in our occasions.”
+
+“The 16th we trended the coast southerly, which was all champaign and
+full of grass, but the islands somewhat woody.”
+
+Or, according to the account of John Brereton, “riding here,” that is,
+where they first communicated with the natives, “in no very good
+harbor, and withal doubting the weather, about three of the clock the
+same day in the afternoon we weighed, and standing southerly off into
+sea the rest of that day and the night following, with a fresh gale of
+wind, in the morning we found ourselves embayed with a mighty headland;
+but coming to an anchor about nine of the clock the same day, within a
+league of the shore, we hoisted out the one half of our shallop, and
+Captain Bartholomew Gosnold, myself and three others, went ashore,
+being a white sandy and very bold shore; and marching all that
+afternoon with our muskets on our necks, on the highest hills which we
+saw (the weather very hot), at length we perceived this headland to be
+parcel of the main, and sundry islands lying almost round about it; so
+returning towards evening to our shallop (for by that time the other
+part was brought ashore and set together), we espied an Indian, a young
+man of proper stature, and of a pleasing countenance, and after some
+familiarity with him, we left him at the sea side, and returned to our
+ship, where in five or six hours’ absence we had pestered our ship so
+with codfish, that we threw numbers of them overboard again; and surely
+I am persuaded that in the months of March, April, and May, there is
+upon this coast better fishing, and in as great plenty, as in
+Newfoundland; for the skulls of mackerel, herrings, cod, and other
+fish, that we daily saw as we went and came from the shore, were
+wonderful,” etc.
+
+“From this place we sailed round about this headland, almost all the
+points of the compass, the shore very bold; but as no coast is free
+from dangers, so I am persuaded this is as free as any. The land
+somewhat low, full of goodly woods, but in some places plain.”
+
+It is not quite clear on which side of the Cape they landed. If it was
+inside, as would appear from Brereton’s words, “From this place we
+sailed round about this headland almost all the points of the compass,”
+it must have been on the western shore either of Truro or Wellfleet. To
+one sailing south into Barnstable Bay along the Cape, the only “white,
+sandy, and very bold shore” that appears is in these towns, though the
+bank is not so high there as on the eastern side. At a distance of four
+or five miles the sandy cliffs there look like a long fort of yellow
+sandstone, they are so level and regular, especially in Wellfleet,—the
+fort of the land defending itself against the encroachments of the
+Ocean. They are streaked here and there with a reddish sand as if
+painted. Farther south the shore is more flat, and less _obviously_ and
+abruptly sandy, and a little tinge of green here and there in the
+marshes appears to the sailor like a rare and precious emerald. But in
+the Journal of Pring’s Voyage the next year (and Salterne, who was with
+Pring, had accompanied Gosnold) it is said, “Departing hence [_i.e._
+from Savage Rocks] we bore unto that great gulf which Captain Gosnold
+overshot the year before.”[2]
+
+So they sailed round the Cape, calling the southeasterly extremity
+“Point Cave,” till they came to an island which they named Martha’s
+Vineyard (now called No Man’s Land), and another on which they dwelt
+awhile, which they named Elizabeth’s Island, in honor of the Queen, one
+of the group since so called, now known by its Indian name Cuttyhunk.
+There they built a small storehouse, the first house built by the
+English in New England, whose cellar could recently still be seen, made
+partly of stones taken from the beach. Bancroft says (edition of 1837),
+the ruins of the fort can no longer be discerned. They who were to have
+remained becoming discontented, all together set sail for England with
+a load of sassafras and other commodities, on the 18th of June
+following.
+
+The next year came Martin Pring, looking for sassafras, and thereafter
+they began to come thick and fast, until long after sassafras had lost
+its reputation.
+
+These are the oldest accounts which we have of Cape Cod, unless,
+perchance, Cape Cod is, as some suppose, the same with that
+“Kial-ar-nes” or Keel-Cape, on which, according to old Icelandic
+manuscripts, Thorwald, son of Eric the Red, after sailing many days
+southwest from Greenland, broke his keel in the year 1004; and where,
+according to another, in some respects less trustworthy manuscript,
+Thor-finn Karlsefue (“that is, one who promises or is destined to be an
+able or great man”; he is said to have had a son born in New England,
+from whom Thorwaldsen the sculptor was descended), sailing past, in the
+year 1007, with his wife Gudrida, Snorre Thorbrandson, Biarne
+Grinolfson, and Thorhall Garnlason, distinguished Norsemen, in three
+ships containing “one hundred and sixty men and all sorts of live
+stock” (probably the first Norway rats among the rest), having the land
+“on the right side” of them, “roved ashore,” and found “_ör-æfi_
+(trackless deserts),” and “_Strand-ir láng-ar ok sand-ar_ (long narrow
+beaches and sand-hills),” and “called the shores _Furdustrand-ir_
+(Wonder-Strands), because the sailing by them seemed long.”
+
+According to the Icelandic manuscripts, _Thorwald_ was the first,
+then,—unless possibly one Biarne Heriulfson (_i.e._ son of Heriulf) who
+had been seized with a great desire to travel, sailing from Iceland to
+Greenland in the year 986 to join his father who had migrated thither,
+for he had resolved, says the manuscript, “to spend the following
+winter, like all the preceding ones, with his father,”—being driven far
+to the southwest by a storm, when it cleared up saw the low land of
+Cape Cod looming faintly in the distance; but this not answering to the
+description of Greenland, he put his vessel about, and, sailing
+northward along the coast, at length reached Greenland and his father.
+At any rate, he may put forth a strong claim to be regarded as the
+discoverer of the American continent.
+
+These Northmen were a hardy race, whose younger sons inherited the
+ocean, and traversed it without chart or compass, and they are said to
+have been “the first who learned the art of sailing on a wind.”
+Moreover, they had a habit of casting their door-posts overboard and
+settling wherever they went ashore. But as Biarne, and Thorwald, and
+Thorfinn have not mentioned the latitude and longitude distinctly
+enough, though we have great respect for them as skilful and
+adventurous navigators, we must for the present remain in doubt as to
+what capes they did see. We think that they were considerably further
+north.
+
+If time and space permitted, I could present the claims of other
+several worthy persons. Lescarbot, in 1609, asserts that the French
+sailors had been accustomed to frequent the Newfoundland Banks from
+time immemorial, “for the codfish with which they feed almost all
+Europe and supply all sea-going vessels,” and accordingly “the language
+of the nearest lands is half Basque”; and he quotes Postel, a learned
+but extravagant French author, born in 1510, only six years after the
+Basques, Bretons, and Normans are said to have discovered the Grand
+Bank and adjacent islands, as saying, in his _Charte Géographique_,
+which we have not seen: “Terra haec ob lucrosissimam piscationis
+utilitatem summa litterarum memoria a Gallis adiri solita, et ante
+mille sexcentos annos frequentari solita est; sed eo quod sit urbibus
+inculta et vasta, spreta est.” “This land, on account of its very
+lucrative fishery, was accustomed to be visited by the Gauls from the
+very dawn of history, and more than sixteen hundred years ago was
+accustomed to be frequented; but because it was unadorned with cities,
+and waste, it was despised.”
+
+It is the old story. Bob Smith discovered the mine, but I discovered it
+to the world. And now Bob Smith is putting in his claim.
+
+But let us not laugh at Postel and his visions. He was perhaps better
+posted up than we; and if he does seem to draw the long bow, it may be
+because he had a long way to shoot,—quite across the Atlantic, If
+America was found and lost again once, as most of us believe, then why
+not twice? especially as there were likely to be so few records of an
+earlier discovery. Consider what stuff history is made of,—that for the
+most part it is merely a story agreed on by posterity. Who will tell us
+even how many Russians were engaged in the battle of the Chernaya, the
+other day? Yet no doubt, Mr. Scriblerus, the historian, will fix on a
+definite number for the schoolboys to commit to their excellent
+memories. What, then, of the number of Persians at Salamis? The
+historian whom I read knew as much about the position of the parties
+and their tactics in the last-mentioned affair, as they who describe a
+recent battle in an article for the press now-a-days, before the
+particulars have arrived. I believe that, if I were to live the life of
+mankind over again myself (which I would not be hired to do), with the
+Universal History in my hands, I should not be able to tell what was
+what.
+
+Earlier than the date Postel refers to, at any rate. Cape Cod lay in
+utter darkness to the civilized world, though even then the sun rose
+from eastward out of the sea every day, and, rolling over the Cape,
+went down westward into the Bay. It was even then Cape and Bay,—ay, the
+Cape of _Codfish_, and the Bay of the _Massachusetts_, perchance.
+
+Quite recently, on the 11th of November, 1620, old style, as is well
+known, the Pilgrims in the _Mayflower_ came to anchor in Cape Cod
+harbor. They had loosed from Plymouth, England, the 6th of September,
+and, in the words of “Mourts’ Relation,” “after many difficulties in
+boisterous storms, at length, by God’s providence, upon the 9th of
+November, we espied land, which we deemed to be Cape Cod, and so
+afterward it proved. Upon the 11th of November we came to anchor in the
+bay, which is a good harbor and pleasant bay, circled round except in
+the entrance, which is about four miles over from land to land,
+compassed about to the very sea with oaks, pines, juniper, sassafras,
+and other sweet wood. It is a harbor wherein a thousand sail of ships
+may safely ride. There we relieved ourselves with wood and water, and
+refreshed our people, while our shallop was fitted to coast the bay, to
+search for an habitation.” There we put up at Fuller’s Hotel, passing
+by the Pilgrim House as too high for us (we learned afterward that we
+need not have been so particular), and we refreshed ourselves with
+hashed fish and beans, beside taking in a supply of liquids (which were
+not intoxicating), while our legs were refitted to coast the back-side.
+Further say the Pilgrims: “We could not come near the shore by three
+quarters of an English mile, because of shallow water; which was a
+great prejudice to us; for our people going on shore were forced to
+wade a bow-shot or two in going aland, which caused many to get colds
+and coughs; for it was many times freezing cold weather.” They
+afterwards say: “It brought much weakness amongst us”; and no doubt it
+led to the death of some at Plymouth.
+
+The harbor of Provincetown is very shallow near the shore, especially
+about the head, where the Pilgrims landed. When I left this place the
+next summer, the steamer could not get up to the wharf, but we were
+carried out to a large boat in a cart as much as thirty rods in shallow
+water, while a troop of little boys kept us company, wading around, and
+thence we pulled to the steamer by a rope. The harbor being thus
+shallow and sandy about the shore, coasters are accustomed to run in
+here to paint their vessels, which are left high and dry when the tide
+goes down.
+
+It chanced that the Sunday morning that we were there, I had joined a
+party of men who were smoking and lolling over a pile of boards on one
+of the wharves (_nihil humanum a me, etc_.), when our landlord, who was
+a sort of tithing-man, went off to stop some sailors who were engaged
+in painting their vessel. Our party was recruited from time to time by
+other citizens, who came rubbing their eyes as if they had just got out
+of bed; and one old man remarked to me that it was the custom there to
+lie abed very late on Sunday, it being a day of rest. I remarked that,
+as I thought, they might as well let the men paint, for all us. It was
+not noisy work, and would not disturb our devotions. But a young man in
+the company, taking his pipe out of his mouth, said that it was a plain
+contradiction of the law of God, which he quoted, and if they did not
+have some such regulation, vessels would run in there to tar, and rig,
+and paint, and they would have no Sabbath at all. This was a good
+argument enough, if he had not put it in the name of religion. The next
+summer, as I sat on a hill there one sultry Sunday afternoon the
+meeting-house windows being open, my meditations were interrupted by
+the noise of a preacher who shouted like a boatswain, profaning the
+quiet atmosphere, and who, I fancied, must have taken off his coat. Few
+things could have been more disgusting or disheartening. I wished the
+tithing-man would stop him.
+
+[Illustration: The day of rest]
+
+The Pilgrims say: “There was the greatest store of fowl that ever we
+saw.”
+
+We saw no fowl there, except gulls of various kinds; but the greatest
+store of them that ever we saw was on a flat but slightly covered with
+water on the east side of the harbor, and we observed a man who had
+landed there from a boat creeping along the shore in order to get a
+shot at them, but they all rose and flew away in a great scattering
+flock, too soon for him, having apparently got their dinners, though he
+did not get his.
+
+It is remarkable that the Pilgrims (or their reporter) describe this
+part of the Cape, not only as well wooded, but as having a deep and
+excellent soil, and hardly mention the word _sand_. Now what strikes
+the voyager is the barrenness and desolation of the land. _They_ found
+“the ground or earth sand-hills, much like the downs in Holland, but
+much better the crust of the earth, a spit’s depth, excellent black
+earth.” _We_ found that the earth had lost its crust,—if, in-deed, it
+ever had any,—and that there was no soil to speak of. We did not see
+enough black earth in Provincetown to fill a flower-pot, unless in the
+swamps. They found it “all wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper,
+birch, holly, vines, some ash, walnut; the wood for the most part open
+and without underwood, fit either to go or ride in.” We saw scarcely
+anything high enough to be called a tree, except a little low wood at
+the east end of the town, and the few ornamental trees in its
+yards,—only a few small specimens of some of the above kinds on the
+sand-hills in the rear; but it was all thick shrubbery, without any
+large wood above it, very unfit either to go or ride in. The greater
+part of the land was a perfect desert of yellow sand, rippled like
+waves by the wind, in which only a little Beach-grass grew here and
+there. They say that, just after passing the head of East Harbor Creek,
+the boughs and bushes “tore” their “very armor in pieces” (the same
+thing happened to such armor as we wore, when out of curiosity we took
+to the bushes); or they came to deep valleys, “full of brush,
+wood-gaile, and long grass,” and “found springs of fresh water.”
+
+For the most part we saw neither bough nor bush, not so much as a shrub
+to tear our clothes against if we would, and a sheep would lose none of
+its fleece, even if it found herbage enough to make fleece grow there.
+We saw rather beach and poverty-grass, and merely sorrel enough to
+color the surface. I suppose, then, by Woodgaile they mean the
+Bayberry.
+
+All accounts agree in affirming that this part of the Cape was
+_comparatively_ well wooded a century ago. But notwithstanding the
+great changes which have taken place in these respects, I cannot but
+think that we must make some allowance for the greenness of the
+Pilgrims in these matters, which caused them to see green. We do not
+believe that the trees were large or the soil was deep here. Their
+account may be true particularly, but it is generally false. They saw
+literally, as well as figuratively, but one side of the Cape. They
+naturally exaggerated the fairness and attractiveness of the land, for
+they were glad to get to any land at all after that anxious voyage.
+Everything appeared to them of the color of the rose, and had the scent
+of juniper and sassafras. Very different is the general and off-hand
+account given by Captain John Smith, who was on this coast six years
+earlier, and speaks like an old traveller, voyager, and soldier, who
+had seen too much of the world to exaggerate, or even to dwell long, on
+a part of it. In his “Description of New England,” printed in 1616,
+after speaking of Accomack, since called Plymouth, he says: “Cape Cod
+is the next presents itself, which is only a headland of high hills of
+sand, overgrown with shrubby pines, _hurts_ [i.e. whorts, or
+whortleberries], and such trash, but an excellent harbor for all
+weathers. This Cape is made by the main sea on the one side, and a
+great bay on the other, in form of a sickle.” Champlain had already
+written, “Which we named _Cap Blanc_ (Cape White), because they were
+sands and downs (_sables et dunes_) which appeared thus.”
+
+When the Pilgrims get to Plymouth their reporter says again, “The land
+for the crust of the earth is a spit’s depth,”—that would seem to be
+their recipe for an earth’s crust,—“excellent black mould and fat in
+some places.” However, according to Bradford himself, whom some
+consider the author of part of “Mourt’s Relation,” they who came over
+in the _Fortune_ the next year were somewhat daunted when “they came
+into the harbor of Cape Cod, and there saw nothing but a naked and
+barren place.” They soon found out their mistake with respect to the
+goodness of Plymouth soil. Yet when at length, some years later, when
+they were fully satisfied of the poorness of the place which they had
+chosen, “the greater part,” says Bradford, “consented to a removal to a
+place called Nausett,” they agreed to remove all together to Nauset,
+now Eastham, which was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire; and
+some of the most respectable of the inhabitants of Plymouth did
+actually remove thither accordingly.
+
+It must be confessed that the Pilgrims possessed but few of the
+qualities of the modern pioneer. They were not the ancestors of the
+American backwoodsmen. They did not go at once into the woods with
+their axes. They were a family and church, and were more anxious to
+keep together, though it were on the sand, than to explore and colonize
+a New World. When the above-mentioned company removed to Eastham, the
+church at Plymouth was left, to use Bradford’s expression, “like an
+ancient mother grown old, and forsaken of her children.” Though they
+landed on Clark’s Island in Plymouth harbor, the 9th of December (O.
+S.), and the 16th all hands came to Plymouth, and the 18th they rambled
+about the mainland, and the 19th decided to settle there, it was the
+8th of January before Francis Billington went with one of the master’s
+mates to look at the magnificent pond or lake now called “Billington
+Sea,” about two miles distant, which he had discovered from the top of
+a tree, and mistook for a great sea. And the 7th of March “Master
+Carver with five others went to the great ponds which seem to be
+excellent fishing,” both which points are within the compass of an
+ordinary afternoon’s ramble,—however wild the country. It is true they
+were busy at first about their building, and were hindered in that by
+much foul weather; but a party of emigrants to California or Oregon,
+with no less work on their hands,—and more hostile Indians,—would do as
+much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would
+have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as
+far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had
+climbed his tree. Or contrast them only with the French searching for
+copper about the Bay of Fundy in 1603, tracing up small streams with
+Indian guides. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims were pioneers and the
+ancestors of pioneers, in a far grander enterprise.
+
+By this time we saw the little steamer _Naushon_ entering the harbor,
+and heard the sound of her whistle, and came down from the hills to
+meet her at the wharf. So we took leave of Cape Cod and its
+inhabitants. We liked the manners of the last, what little we saw of
+them, very much. They were particularly downright and good-humored. The
+old people appeared remarkably well preserved, as if by the saltness of
+the atmosphere, and after having once mistaken, we could never be
+certain whether we were talking to a coeval of our grandparents, or to
+one of our own age. They are said to be more purely the descendants of
+the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the State. We
+were told that “sometimes, when the court comes together at Barnstable,
+they have not a single criminal to try, and the jail is shut up.” It
+was “to let” when we were there. Until quite recently there was no
+regular lawyer below Orleans. Who then will complain of a few regular
+man-eating sharks along the back-side?
+
+One of the ministers of Truro, when I asked what the fishermen did in
+the winter, answered that they did nothing but go a-visiting, sit about
+and tell stories,—though they worked hard in summer. Yet it is not a
+long vacation they get. I am sorry that I have not been there in the
+winter to hear their yarns. Almost every Cape man is Captain of some
+craft or other,—every man at least who is at the head of his own
+affairs, though it is not every one that is, for some heads have the
+force of _Alpha privative_, negativing all the efforts which Nature
+would fain make through them. The greater number of men are merely
+corporals. It is worth the while to talk with one whom his neighbors
+address as Captain, though his craft may have long been sunk, and he
+may be holding by his teeth to the shattered mast of a pipe alone, and
+only gets half-seas-over in a figurative sense, now. He is pretty sure
+to vindicate his right to the title at last,—can tell one or two good
+stories at least.
+
+For the most part we saw only the back-side of the towns, but our story
+is true as far as it goes. We might have made more of the Bay side, but
+we were inclined to open our eyes widest at the Atlantic. We did not
+care to see those features of the Cape in which it is inferior or
+merely equal to the mainland, but only those in which it is peculiar or
+superior. We cannot say how its towns look in front to one who goes to
+meet them; we went to see the ocean behind them. They were merely the
+raft on which we stood, and we took notice of the barnacles which
+adhered to it, and some carvings upon it.
+
+Before we left the wharf we made the acquaintance of a passenger whom
+we had seen at the hotel. When we asked him which way he came to
+Provincetown, he answered that he was cast ashore at Wood End, Saturday
+night, in the same storm in which the _St. John_ was wrecked. He had
+been at work as a carpenter in Maine, and took passage for Boston in a
+schooner laden with lumber. When the storm came up, they endeavored to
+get into Provincetown harbor. “It was dark and misty,” said he, “and as
+we were steering for Long Point Light we suddenly saw the land near
+us,—for our compass was out of order,—varied several degrees [a mariner
+always casts the blame on his compass],—but there being a mist on
+shore, we thought it was farther off than it was, and so held on, and
+we immediately struck on the bar. Says the Captain, ‘We are all lost.’
+Says I to the Captain, ‘Now don’t let her strike again this way; head
+her right on.’ The Captain thought a moment, and then headed her on.
+The sea washed completely over us, and wellnigh took the breath out of
+my body. I held on to the running rigging, but I have learned to hold
+on to the standing rigging the next time.” “Well, were there any
+drowned?” I asked. “No; we all got safe to a house at Wood End, at
+midnight, wet to our skins, and half frozen to death.” He had
+apparently spent the time since playing checkers at the hotel, and was
+congratulating himself on having beaten a tall fellow-boarder at that
+game. “The vessel is to be sold at auction to-day,” he added. (We had
+heard the sound of the crier’s bell which advertised it.) “The Captain
+is rather down about it, but I tell him to cheer up and he will soon
+get another vessel.”
+
+At that moment the Captain called to him from the wharf. He looked like
+a man just from the country, with a cap made of a woodchuck’s skin, and
+now that I had heard a part of his history, he appeared singularly
+destitute,—a Captain without any vessel, only a greatcoat! and that
+perhaps a borrowed one! Not even a dog followed him; only his title
+stuck to him. I also saw one of the crew. They all had caps of the same
+pattern, and wore a subdued look, in addition to their naturally
+aquiline features, as if a breaker—a “comber”—had washed over them. As
+we passed Wood End, we noticed the pile of lumber on the shore which
+had made the cargo of their vessel.
+
+About Long Point in the summer you commonly see them catching lobsters
+for the New York market, from small boats just off the shore, or
+rather, the lobsters catch themselves, for they cling to the netting on
+which the bait is placed of their own accord, and thus are drawn up.
+They sell them fresh for two cents apiece. Man needs to know but little
+more than a lobster in order to catch him in his traps. The mackerel
+fleet had been getting to sea, one after another, ever since midnight,
+and as we were leaving the Cape we passed near to many of them under
+sail, and got a nearer view than we had had;—half a dozen red-shirted
+men and boys, leaning over the rail to look at us, the skipper shouting
+back the number of barrels he had caught, in answer to our inquiry. All
+sailors pause to watch a steamer, and shout in welcome or derision. In
+one a large Newfoundland dog put his paws on the rail and stood up as
+high as any of them, and looked as wise. But the skipper, who did not
+wish to be seen no better employed than a dog, rapped him on the nose
+and sent him below. Such is human justice! I thought I could hear him
+making an effective appeal down there from human to divine justice. He
+must have had much the cleanest breast of the two.
+
+[Illustration: A Provincetown fishing-vessel]
+
+Still, many a mile behind us across the Bay, we saw the white sails of
+the mackerel fishers hovering round Cape Cod, and when they were all
+hull-down, and the low extremity of the Cape was also down, their white
+sails still appeared on both sides of it, around where it had sunk,
+like a city on the ocean, proclaiming the rare qualities of Cape Cod
+Harbor. But before the extremity of the Cape had completely sunk, it
+appeared like a filmy sliver of land lying flat on the ocean, and later
+still a mere reflection of a sand-bar on the haze above. Its name
+suggests a homely truth, but it would be more poetic if it described
+the impression which it makes on the beholder. Some capes have
+peculiarly suggestive names. There is Cape Wrath, the northwest point
+of Scotland, for instance; what a good name for a cape lying far away
+dark over the water under a lowering sky!
+
+Mild as it was on shore this morning, the wind was cold and piercing on
+the water. Though it be the hottest day in July on land, and the voyage
+is to last but four hours, take your thickest clothes with you, for you
+are about to float over melted icebergs. When I left Boston in the
+steamboat on the 25th of June the next year, it was a quite warm day on
+shore. The passengers were dressed in their thinnest clothes, and at
+first sat under their umbrellas, but when we were fairly out on the
+Bay, such as had only their coats were suffering with the cold, and
+sought the shelter of the pilot’s house and the warmth of the chimney.
+But when we approached the harbor of Provincetown, I was surprised to
+perceive what an influence that low and narrow strip of sand, only a
+mile or two in width, had over the temperature of the air for many
+miles around. We penetrated into a sultry atmosphere where our thin
+coats were once more in fashion, and found the inhabitants sweltering.
+
+Leaving far on one side Manomet Point in Plymouth and the Scituate
+shore, after being out of sight of land for an hour or two, for it was
+rather hazy, we neared the Cohasset Rocks again at Minot’s Ledge, and
+saw the great Tupelo-tree on the edge of Scituate, which lifts its
+dome, like an umbelliferous plant, high over the surrounding forest,
+and is conspicuous for many miles over land and water. Here was the new
+iron light-house, then unfinished, in the shape of an egg-shell painted
+red, and placed high on iron pillars, like the ovum of a sea monster
+floating on the waves,—destined to be phosphorescent. As we passed it
+at half-tide we saw the spray tossed up nearly to the shell. A man was
+to live in that egg-shell day and night, a mile from the shore. When I
+passed it the next summer it was finished and two men lived in it, and
+a light-house keeper said that they told him that in a recent gale it
+had rocked so as to shake the plates off the table. Think of making
+your bed thus in the crest of a breaker! To have the waves, like a pack
+of hungry wolves, eying you always, night and day, and from time to
+time making a spring at you, almost sure to have you at last. And not
+one of all those voyagers can come to your relief,—but when your light
+goes out, it will be a sign that the light of your life has gone out
+also. What a place to compose a work on breakers! This light-house was
+the cynosure of all eyes. Every passenger watched it for half an hour
+at least; yet a colored cook belonging to the boat, whom I had seen
+come out of his quarters several times to empty his dishes over the
+side with a flourish, chancing to come out just as we were abreast of
+this light, and not more than forty rods from it, and were all gazing
+at it, as he drew back his arm, caught sight of it, and with surprise
+exclaimed, “What’s that?” He had been employed on this boat for a year,
+and passed this light every weekday, but as he had never chanced to
+empty his dishes just at that point, had never seen it before. To look
+at lights was the pilot’s business; he minded the kitchen fire. It
+suggested how little some who voyaged round the world could manage to
+see. You would almost as easily believe that there are men who never
+yet chanced to come out at the right time to see the sun. What avails
+it though a light be placed on the top of a hill, if you spend all your
+life directly under the hill? It might as well be under a bushel. This
+light-house, as is well known, was swept away in a storm in April,
+1851, and the two men in it, and the next morning not a vestige of it
+was to be seen from the shore.
+
+A Hull man told me that he helped set up a white-oak pole on Minot’s
+Ledge some years before. It was fifteen inches in diameter, forty-one
+feet high, sunk four feet in the rock, and was secured by four
+guys,—but it stood only one year. Stone piled up cob-fashion near the
+same place stood eight years.
+
+When I crossed the Bay in the _Melrose_ in July, we hugged the Scituate
+shore as long as possible, in order to take advantage of the wind. Far
+out on the Bay (off this shore) we scared up a brood of young ducks,
+probably black ones, bred hereabouts, which the packet had frequently
+disturbed in her trips. A townsman, who was making the voyage for the
+first time, walked slowly round into the rear of the helmsman, when we
+were in the middle of the Bay, and looking out over the sea, before he
+sat down there, remarked with as much originality as was possible for
+one who used a borrowed expression, “This is a great country.” He had
+been a timber merchant, and I afterwards saw him taking the diameter of
+the mainmast with his stick, and estimating its height. I returned from
+the same excursion in the _Olata_, a very handsome and swift-sailing
+yacht, which left Provincetown at the same time with two other packets,
+the _Melrose_ and _Frolic_. At first there was scarcely a breath of air
+stirring, and we loitered about Long Point for an hour in company,—with
+our heads over the rail watching the great sand-circles and the fishes
+at the bottom in calm water fifteen feet deep. But after clearing the
+Cape we rigged a flying-jib, and, as the Captain had prophesied, soon
+showed our consorts our heels. There was a steamer six or eight miles
+northward, near the Cape, towing a large ship toward Boston. Its smoke
+stretched perfectly horizontal several miles over the sea, and by a
+sudden change in its direction, warned us of a change in the wind
+before we felt it. The steamer appeared very far from the ship, and
+some young men who had frequently used the Captain’s glass, but did not
+suspect that the vessels were connected, expressed surprise that they
+kept about the same distance apart for so many hours. At which the
+Captain dryly remarked, that probably they would never get any nearer
+together. As long as the wind held we kept pace with the steamer, but
+at length it died away almost entirely, and the flying-jib did all the
+work. When we passed the light-boat at Minot’s Ledge, the _Melrose_ and
+_Frolic_ were just visible ten miles astern.
+
+Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling
+with forts like chestnuts-burs, or _echinidæ_, yet the police will not
+let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring-match on one of them,
+as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing
+attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony
+knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.
+
+The Bermudas are said to have been discovered by a Spanish ship of that
+name which was wrecked on them, “which till then,” says Sir John Smith,
+“for six thousand years had been nameless.” The English did not stumble
+upon them in their first voyages to Virginia; and the first Englishman
+who was ever there was wrecked on them in 1593. Smith says, “No place
+known hath better walls nor a broader ditch.” Yet at the very first
+planting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the first Governor,
+the same year, “built and laid the foundation of eight or nine forts.”
+To be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship’s company that
+should be next shipwrecked on to them. It would have been more sensible
+to have built as many “Charity-houses.” These are the vexed
+Bermoothees.
+
+Our great sails caught all the air there was, and our low and narrow
+hull caused the least possible friction. Coming up the harbor against
+the stream we swept by everything. Some young men returning from a
+fishing excursion came to the side of their smack, while we were thus
+steadily drawing by them, and, bowing, observed, with the best possible
+grace, “We give it up.” Yet sometimes we were nearly at a standstill.
+The sailors watched (two) objects on the shore to ascertain whether we
+advanced or receded. In the harbor it was like the evening of a
+holiday. The Eastern steamboat passed us with music and a cheer, as if
+they were going to a ball, when they might be going to—Davy’s locker.
+
+I heard a boy telling the story of Nix’s mate to some girls as we
+passed that spot. That was the name of a sailor hung there, he
+said.—“If I am guilty, this island will remain; but if I am innocent it
+will be washed away,” and now it is all washed away!
+
+Next (?) came the fort on George’s Island. These are bungling
+contrivances: not our _fortes_ but our _foibles_. Wolfe sailed by the
+strongest fort in North America in the dark, and took it.
+
+I admired the skill with which the vessel was at last brought to her
+place in the dock, near the end of Long Wharf. It was candle-light, and
+my eyes could not distinguish the wharves jutting out towards us, but
+it appeared like an even line of shore densely crowded with shipping.
+You could not have guessed within a quarter of a mile of Long Wharf.
+Nevertheless, we were to be blown to a crevice amid them,—steering
+right into the maze. Down goes the mainsail, and only the jib draws us
+along. Now we are within four rods of the shipping, having already
+dodged several outsiders; but it is still only a maze of spars, and
+rigging, and hulls,—not a crack can be seen. Down goes the jib, but
+still we advance. The Captain stands aft with one hand on the tiller,
+and the other holding his night-glass,—his son stands on the bowsprit
+straining his eyes,—the passengers feel their hearts halfway to their
+mouths, expecting a crash. “Do you see any room there?” asks the
+Captain, quietly. He must make up his mind in five seconds, else he
+will carry away that vessel’s bowsprit, or lose his own. “Yes, sir,
+here is a place for us”; and in three minutes more we are fast to the
+wharf in a little gap between two bigger vessels.
+
+And now we were in Boston. Whoever has been down to the end of Long
+Wharf, and walked through Quincy Market, has seen Boston.
+
+Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, New Orleans, and the rest,
+are the names of wharves projecting into the sea (surrounded by the
+shops and dwellings of the merchants), good places to take in and to
+discharge a cargo (to land the products of other climes and load the
+exports of our own). I see a great many barrels and fig-drums,—piles of
+wood for umbrella-sticks,—blocks of granite and ice,—great heaps of
+goods, and the means of packing and conveying them,—much wrapping-paper
+and twine,—many crates and hogsheads and trucks,—and that is Boston.
+The more barrels, the more Boston. The museums and scientific societies
+and libraries are accidental. They gather around the sands to save
+carting. The wharf-rats and customhouse officers, and broken-down
+poets, seeking a fortune amid the barrels. Their better or worse
+lyceums, and preachings, and doctorings, these, too, are accidental,
+and the malls of commons are always small potatoes. When I go to
+Boston, I naturally go straight through the city (taking the Market in
+my way), down to the end of Long Wharf, and look off, for I have no
+cousins in the back alleys,—and there I see a great many countrymen in
+their shirt-sleeves from Maine, and Pennsylvania, and all along shore
+and in shore, and some foreigners beside, loading and unloading and
+steering their teams about, as at a country fair.
+
+When we reached Boston that October, I had a gill of Provincetown sand
+in my shoes, and at Concord there was still enough left to sand my
+pages for many a day; and I seemed to hear the sea roar, as if I lived
+in a shell, for a week afterward.
+
+The places which I have described may seem strange and remote to my
+townsmen,—indeed, from Boston to Provincetown is twice as far as from
+England to France; yet step into the cars, and in six hours you may
+stand on those four planks, and see the Cape which Gosnold is said to
+have discovered, and which I have so poorly described. If you had
+started when I first advised you, you might have seen our tracks in the
+sand, still fresh, and reaching all the way from the Nauset Lights to
+Race Point, some thirty miles,—for at every step we made an impression
+on the Cape, though we were not aware of it, and though our account may
+have made no impression on your minds. But what is our account? In it
+there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth.
+
+We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in
+midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand,
+amid the beach-grass and the bayberries, their companion a cow, their
+wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach-plums, and their music the
+surf and the peep of the beach-bird.
+
+We went to see the Ocean, and that is probably the best place of all
+our coast to go to. If you go by water, you may experience what it is
+to leave and to approach these shores; you may see the Stormy Petrel by
+the way, θαλασσοδρόμα, running over the sea, and if the weather is but
+a little thick, may lose sight of the land in mid-passage. I do not
+know where there is another beach in the Atlantic States, attached to
+the mainland, so long, and at the same time so straight, and completely
+uninterrupted by creeks or coves or fresh-water rivers or marshes; for
+though there may be clear places on the map, they would probably be
+found by the foot traveller to be intersected by creeks and marshes;
+certainly there is none where there is a double way, such as I have
+described, a beach and a bank, which at the same time shows you the
+land and the sea, and part of the time two seas. The Great South Beach
+of Long Island, which I have since visited, is longer still without an
+inlet, but it is literally a mere sand-bar, exposed, several miles from
+the Island, and not the edge of a continent wasting before the assaults
+of the Ocean. Though wild and desolate, as it wants the bold bank, it
+possesses but half the grandeur of Cape Cod in my eyes, nor is the
+imagination contented with its southern aspect. The only other beaches
+of great length on our Atlantic coast, which I have heard sailors speak
+of, are those of Barnegat on the Jersey shore, and Currituck between
+Virginia and North Carolina; but these, like the last, are low and
+narrow sandbars, lying off the coast, and separated from the mainland
+by lagoons. Besides, as you go farther south, the tides are feebler,
+and cease to add variety and grandeur to the shore. On the Pacific side
+of our country also no doubt there is good walking to be found; a
+recent writer and dweller there tells us that “the coast from Cape
+Disappointment (or the Columbia River) to Cape Flattery (at the Strait
+of Juan de Fuca) is nearly north and south, and can be travelled almost
+its entire length on a beautiful sand-beach,” with the exception of two
+bays, four or five rivers, and a few points jutting into the sea. The
+common shell-fish found there seem to be often of corresponding types,
+if not identical species, with those of Cape Cod. The beach which I
+have described, however, is not hard enough for carriages, but must be
+explored on foot. When one carriage has passed along, a following one
+sinks deeper still in its rut. It has at present no name any more than
+fame. That portion south of Nauset Harbor is commonly called Chatham
+Beach. The part in Eastham is called Nauset Beach, and off Wellfleet
+and Truro the Back-side, or sometimes, perhaps, Cape Cod Beach. I think
+that part which extends without interruption from Nauset Harbor to Race
+Point should be called Cape Cod Beach, and do so speak of it.
+
+One of the most attractive points for visitors is in the northeast part
+of Wellfleet, where accommodations (I mean for men and women of
+tolerable health and habits) could probably be had within half a mile
+of the sea-shore. It best combines the country and the seaside. Though
+the Ocean is out of sight, its faintest murmur is audible, and you have
+only to climb a hill to find yourself on its brink. It is but a step
+from the glassy surface of the Herring Ponds to the big Atlantic Pond
+where the waves never cease to break. Or perhaps the Highland Light in
+Truro may compete with this locality, for there, there is a more
+uninterrupted view of the Ocean and the Bay, and in the summer there is
+always some air stirring on the edge of the bank there, so that the
+inhabitants know not what hot weather is. As for the view, the keeper
+of the light, with one or more of his family, walks out to the edge of
+the bank after every meal to look off, just as if they had not lived
+there all their days. In short, it will wear well. And what picture
+will you substitute for that, upon your walls? But ladies cannot get
+down the bank there at present without the aid of a block and tackle.
+
+Most persons visit the sea-side in warm weather, when fogs are
+frequent, and the atmosphere is wont to be thick, and the charm of the
+sea is to some extent lost. But I suspect that the fall is the best
+season, for then the atmosphere is more transparent, and it is a
+greater pleasure to look out over the sea. The clear and bracing air,
+and the storms of autumn and winter even, are necessary in order that
+we may get the impression which the sea is calculated to make. In
+October, when the weather is not intolerably cold, and the landscape
+wears its autumnal tints, such as, methinks, only a Cape Cod landscape
+ever wears, especially if you have a storm during your stay,—that I am
+convinced is the best time to visit this shore. In autumn, even in
+August, the thoughtful days begin, and we can walk anywhere with
+profit. Beside, an outward cold and dreariness, which make it necessary
+to seek shelter at night, lend a spirit of adventure to a walk.
+
+The time must come when this coast will be a place of resort for those
+New-Englanders who really wish to visit the sea-side. At present it is
+wholly unknown to the fashionable world, and probably it will never be
+agreeable to them. If it is merely a ten-pin alley, or a circular
+railway, or an ocean of mint-julep, that the visitor is in search
+of,—if he thinks more of the wine than the brine, as I suspect some do
+at Newport,—I trust that for a long time he will be disappointed here.
+But this shore will never be more attractive than it is now. Such
+beaches as are fashionable are here made and unmade in a day, I may
+almost say, by the sea shifting its sands. Lynn and Nantasket! this
+bare and bended arm it is that makes the bay in which they lie so
+snugly. What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs,
+the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time
+to visit it; a light-house or a fisherman’s hut the true hotel. A man
+may stand there and put all America behind him.
+
+ [1] It is remarkable that the first, if not the only, part of New
+ England which Cartier saw was Vermont (he also saw the mountains of
+ New York), from Montreal Mountain, in 1535, sixty-seven years before
+ Gosnold saw Cape Cod. _If seeing is discovering_,—and that is _all_
+ that it is proved that Cabot knew of the coast of the United
+ States,—then Cartier (to omit Verrazani and Gomez) was the discoverer
+ of New England rather than Gosnold, who is commonly so styled.
+
+
+ [2] “Savage Rock,” which some have supposed to be, from the name, the
+ _Salvages_, a ledge about two miles off Rockland, Cape Ann, was
+ probably the _Nubble_, a large, high rock near the shore, on the east
+ side of York Harbor, Maine. The first land made by Gosnold is presumed
+ by experienced navigators to be Cape Elizabeth, on the same coast.
+ (See Babson’s History of Gloucester, Massachusetts.)
+
+
+The University Press, Cambridge, U. S. A.
+
+
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