The settlement at Sandwich was quickly followed by others, at Barnstable, at Yarmouth, and lower down the Cape. Eastham was settled by a colony from Plymouth, headed by Thomas Prince, for many years governor, whose descendants live there still. The question of a general removal from Plymouth to Eastham was seriously debated.
GOVERNOR THOMAS PRINCE’S BIRTHPLACE.
Many interesting historical associations are connected with the different towns. In the scattered village of East Sandwich stands, on a little rise of ground, a large, bare building, which, from its absolute plainness, you would know, if you took it for a house of worship at all, to be a Friends’ meeting-house. This building dates only from the beginning of the present century, but it stands in the place of an older structure, and the society is of long standing. The Sandwich monthly meeting has been said to be the oldest in the country. The surnames which prevail in the neighborhood figure in the ancient court records of the Plymouth colony,—for this was a marked locality in the early struggle for religious liberty.
Nicholas Upsall was a member of the Boston church. When he was far advanced in years, he was, for outspoken disapproval of the persecution of the Quakers, fined twenty pounds and banished. His choice of a retreat being limited, he came to Plymouth; but he was now viewed as a Quaker, and it was illegal in the Plymouth colony to entertain him. Nevertheless, a man who was returning to Cape Cod took the old man in his convoy to Sandwich. Here he must have been harbored, for we find an order of the General Court to John Newland of that town, forbidding any further meetings at his house tending “to the disturbance of the public worship of God,” and a direction that Nicholas Upsall, the “instigator” of this trouble, “be carried out of the government by Tristan Hull, who brought him.” Upsall seems to have sown some seed, for, shortly after this, a number of persons were punished for encouraging what were called “Quaker” movements. In 1658, a large number of citizens of Sandwich were fined for expressing sympathy, in one way or another, with Quaker views, and feeling ran so high in the town against the strictness of the colony, that the town constable could not, or perhaps would not, perform the duties of his office, and a sort of metropolitan police, in the form of a special marshal, was appointed by the Plymouth government to fill his place. In Barnstable and Yarmouth, too, the local officer was superseded.
Barlow, the marshal set over Sandwich, had no morbid delicacy. When he had a fine to levy upon the goods of a Quaker, he would select for seizure the article least to be spared, as the family kettle. An Indian charged with theft justified himself by precedent: “I have done,” he said, “only as you do by the Quakers.”
There was a long contest between Barlow, backed by the Plymouth government, on the one hand, and public opinion in Sandwich on the other, with many amusing features. How natural and human it makes the life of those early days, to read of the superseded constable’s prosecution for “railing” at the marshal who supplanted him!
Perhaps, in the features of the settlements on Cape Cod, including their absolute freedom from the witchcraft mania, the curious inquirer may seek for a certain clew to traits that have marked Cape Cod in later times. Her genius has been practical. The strongest characteristics of her people have been a common-sense sagacity and a capacity for affairs. Perhaps it is that very enthusiastic temperament which, in other sections, led to extreme and fanatical convictions in religion, that has unfolded itself, in later times, in the imaginative literature of Massachusetts.
AN OLD INHABITANT.