Cape Cod

by F. Mitchell

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

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

COMMERCIAL STREET, PROVINCETOWN.

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

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

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

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

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

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