By the end of the month, Tom and his Skeleton were warm friends, for they had discussed many things, and had played cribbage by the grave of Cyrus Goodestone, upon many occasions when the night’s posing was done. They parted with regrets, and the Skeleton wished Tom success and happiness in his career.
Tom completely retained in his mind all he had observed in his amazing month’s study, and by that knowledge, laid the foundation of a profound anatomical science by which he was afterwards to become famous.
It is needless to state that the above is the early history of an obscure Cape Cod boy with a dream who became a famous anatomist, and that any and all other accounts are baseless fabrications.
The Mooncussers
... The Mooncussers of
Cape Cod
Remaining only in tradition as some of the most colorful characters in the unending novel of Cape Cod are the swashbuckling domestic pirates known politely as salvagers, romantically as mooncussers, and more authentically as bandits.
Fables and tradition say that a band of these men anciently infested the shores of Cape Cod. But they were not merely plunderers who swept down on unsuspecting victims; their business was a serious, planned and profitable one, flavored with a touch of the wildly romantic stuff of which pirate stories are made. Theirs was a dangerous game, and they played it well.
The whole band of them were mounted on horses when they began their nightly adventures. Up and down the beaches they rode, armed with large lanterns which they placed at strategically dangerous points along the shores. These decoy lanterns led ships astray on treacherous sandbars and shoals. This completed, they plundered them of everything, leaving the ships stripped and gutted.
A group of the mooncussers would divide, two of them tramping the beach in one direction, two in the other, a shingle held up to protect their eyes from the flying sand, and straining to pierce the darkness for a light from a ship in distress or for a glimpse of a hull on the bars off shore. Perhaps the first sign would be a spar flung up by the wild surf, the tattered remnants of a sail, or the still and battered form of a dead sailor. It is easy to see the origin of the word “mooncusser,” for moonlight nights held no profit for these men, and the beauty of moonlight on still ocean was cursed and not admired.