Old Cape Cod

by Mary Rogers Bangs

In November, 1729, one Captain Lothrop, Boston to Martha’s Vineyard, espied off Monomoy a vessel in distress, and boarding her discovered shocking evidence of her state. Of the one hundred and ninety souls who had set sail from Ireland for the port of Philadelphia, no less than one hundred, including all the children but one, had died of starvation. Twenty weeks they had been afloat, and were out of both water and food. “They entreated him to pilot them into the first harbor they could get into, and were all urgent to put them ashore anywhere, if it were but land.” Lothrop would have taken them to Boston, but, when they threatened to throw him into the sea, landed them hastily with some provisions, at Sandy Point where there was but one house. A writer in a current number of the “New England Weekly Journal” remarks that “notwithstanding their extremity, ’twas astounding to behold their impenitence, and to hear their profane speeches.” Their captain proceeded to Philadelphia where he was arrested for cruelty to passengers and crew, sent in irons to Dublin, and met his just deserts by being hanged and quartered. The one young survivor of that wretched company, James Delap, found his way to Barnstable, and was apprenticed to a blacksmith there. In due time he married Mary O’Kelley, of Yarmouth, and in winter practised his trade, in summer was a seaman on the Boston packet. This Irishman was something of a Tory, and in 1775 emigrated to Nova Scotia where he died. A son, master of a vessel in the king’s service, perished on Nantucket where his boat was wrecked in a furious blizzard; two of his daughters married in Barnstable.

When the emigration of loyalists was well under way, boat after boat, crowded far beyond safety, set out from Boston and New York for Nova Scotia, where, as one such traveller said, “it’s winter nine months of the year, and cold weather the rest of the time”; and where, even were they fortunate enough to escape disease or starvation or wreck on the voyage, they were to suffer privations beyond any the early Pilgrims endured. In March, 1776, “a sloop loaded with English goods, having sailed from Boston for Halifax, with sundry Tories and a large number of women and children, some of whom were sick with smallpox,” was cast ashore at Provincetown. Nathaniel Freeman was one of a committee appointed “to repair forthwith to the place and prevent the escape of the passengers and crew and secure the vessel and cargo,” and the selectmen of Truro shared in the task. What became of the sick women and children we are not told, but we may be reasonably certain that the rancor of the Whigs was not vented on them. Another of these Tory refugee ships was wrecked on Block Island, and it was said that for years after the ghosts of those who perished there could be seen struggling in the surf and their cries heard by men ashore.

English ships, in these days, were raking the coast of the Cape from their stations at Tarpaulin Cove and Provincetown, but in November, 1778, a sorry landing was made when “The Somerset, British man-of-war,” sung by Longfellow in his “Landlord’s Tale,” struck on the murderous Peaked Hill Bar off Provincetown and, lightered of guns and ammunition, at high tide was flung on the beach. For two years, patrolling the coast or “swinging wide at her moorings” in the harbor, she had been a familiar sight to patriots ashore, and now, without observing too closely the letter of the law, they were to take what the sea gave them. Rich records some preliminary amenities between the captain and a company of visitors from Hog Back, one of whom, “a short old man with a short-tailed pipe,” asked for the captain, and Aurey, supposing him in authority, received him civilly. “Well, cap’n,” drawled Cape Cod, “who did you pray to in the storm? If you called on the Lord, he wouldn’t have sent you here. And I’m sure King George wouldn’t.” Whereupon the captain: “Old man, you’ve had your pipe fished.” An anecdote that goes to show not unfriendly relations between adversaries. In due time the captain and crew, to the number of four hundred and eighty, were marched to Boston to the exultation of all beholders, and the Board of War stripped the ship of her armament. But before and after this was accomplished, the neighborhood engaged itself with plunder, and there seems to have been some confusion in the right to loot. “From all I can learn,” wrote Joseph Otis, of Barnstable, “there is wicked work at the wreck, riotous doings.” He excused himself from the duty of regulating matters there as his father, the old chief justice, lay a-dying. “The Truro and Provincetown men made a division of the clothing, etc. Truro took two-thirds and Provincetown one-third. There is a plundering gang that way.” Certainly Barnstable was too remote to share in the largess. Mr. Rich had seen canes made from the Somerset’s fine old English oak, and cites a certain silver watch, part of the “effects,” that was still keeping good time at Pond Village. Drifting sands piled up to conceal the wreck, a century later swept back to disclose her to the gaze of the curious, and then again buried the bones of her.

In December of 1778, the Federal brig General Arnold, Magee master and twelve Barnstable men among the crew, drove ashore on the Plymouth flats during a furious nor’easter, the “Magee storm” that mariners, for years after, used as a date to reckon from. The vessel was shrouded in snow and ice, men froze to the rigging, others were smothered in the snow, a few were washed overboard; and when, after three days, succor came to them, only thirty-three men lived of the one hundred and five who had sailed from Boston so short a time before. Of the twelve Barnstable men only one survived. Bound in ice, he lay on deck as one dead: conscious, but powerless to move or speak. By one chance in a thousand, the rescuers caught his agonized gaze; they bore him ashore, nursed him back to life, and when he was able to travel sent him home over the snow-blocked roads in an ambulance improvised from a hammock slung between horses fore and aft. The Plymouth folk, unlike the looters of the Somerset—who, to be sure, looted only an enemy—not only buried the dead and sheltered the living, but guarded the property aboard the General Arnold for its owners. As for Barnstable, he lost both his feet from frost-bite, but could ride to church on the Sabbath as well as another. He busied himself about his garden in summer, and in winter coopered for his neighbors; with considerable skill, also, he cast many small articles in pewter and lead.

In 1798, the “Salem Gazette” reports: “seven vessels ashore on Cape Cod, twenty-five bodies picked up and buried, probably no lives saved.” In 1802, there was another memorable wreck on the Peaked Hill Bar when three Salem vessels richly laden, one for Leghorn, two for Bordeaux, foundered there in a blinding storm. And, slow as the posts then were, not for nearly three weeks were full details of the loss received at Salem. For many years, every great snowstorm following a fine day in March would revive the story of “the three Salem ships.” During the Embargo War, a Truro man fitted out an old boat to trade with Boston, and on one such trip was overtaken at nightfall, below Minot’s Ledge, by a furious northeast snowstorm. It seemed probable that there would be one embargo-dodger the less to harry the revenue officers. The crew consisted of a solitary seaman noted for good judgment, his only oath milkmild. “Well, Mr. White, what would you do now?” inquired the skipper. “By gracious, sir,” returned White, all unperturbed, “I’d take in the mains’l, double reef the fores’l, and give her an offing.” Laconic direction for the one course that offered hope, and the event justified its wisdom. In 1815 a September gale that equalled Bradford’s Great Storm swept Buzzard’s Bay, piled the tides higher than had ever been known, and all but excavated a Cape Cod Canal. Trees were uprooted, salt-works destroyed, and vessels driven high on land. In 1831, to vary the story, unprecedented snows were fatal to deer in the Sandwich woods where they fell easy prey to hunters on snowshoes who brought in no less than two hundred, forty of them trapped alive.

All up and down the Cape, in every village and town, as the years passed, the sea took its toll of men. In 1828 some thirty of them, mostly from Sandwich and Yarmouth, small merchants and artisans who had spent the winter “prosecuting their business” in South Carolina, were lost on their homeward voyage. That was a disastrous year for many a man who followed the sea, and in Truro, especially, the number of grave-stones grew. Of all these memorials the most tragic is that “Sacred to the memory of fifty-seven citizens of Truro who were lost in seven vessels, which foundered at sea in the memorable gale of October 3, 1841.” Fifty-seven men of Truro, ten of Yarmouth, twenty of Dennis “mostly youngsters under thirty,” never made port in that gale. They were fishing on George’s Bank when the storm broke, and “made sail to run for the highland of Cape Cod,” we may read. “But there were mighty currents unknown to them before which carried them out of the proper course to the southwest. Finding they could not weather by the highland they wore ship and stood to the southeast but being disabled in their sails and rigging—the strongest canvas was blown into shreds—they were carried by wind and current upon the Nantucket Shoals.” A few boats did succeed in rounding Provincetown; others never made even the Nantucket Shoals; one was found bottom up in Nauset Harbor, “with the boys drowned in her cabin.” A captain, whose seamanship and indomitable pluck saved him that day, lived to write the record. “I knew we had a good sea-boat; I had tried her in a hard scratch, and knew our race was life or death.” Somehow, where other masters failed, he won. By a hair’s breadth he escaped the shoals. “We hung on sharp as possible by the wind, our little craft proving herself not only able but seemingly endowed with life. In this way at 3.30 we weathered the Highlands with no room to spare. When off Peaked Hill Bar the jib blew away, and we just cleared the breakers; but we had weathered! the lee shore was astern, and Race Point under our lee, which we rounded and let go our anchor in the Herring Cove.” Rich chronicles the almost incredible feat of another boat that turned turtle and around again and survived. The Reform lay-to “under bare poles, with a drag-net to keep her head to the wind. As it was impossible to remain on deck on account of the sea making a breach fore and aft, all hands fastened themselves in the cabin and awaited their fate, at the mercy of the storm. A moment after a terrific sea fairly swallowed them many fathoms below the surface. The vessel was thrown completely bottom up. The crew had no doubt it was her final plunge. A few seconds only, she was again on her keel. Two or three men crawled on deck; they found the masts gone and the hawser of the drag wound around the bowsprit. She had turned completely over, and came up on the opposite side.” For weeks after the storm, a vessel cruised about seeking disabled boats or some trace of their loss; but save the schooner in Nauset Harbor, not a vestige of boats or men was ever found. It is said that a Provincetown father, “who had two sons among the missing, for weeks would go morning and evening to the hill-top which overlooked the ocean, and there seating himself, would watch for hours, scanning the distant horizon with his glass, hoping every moment to discover some speck on which to build a hope.”

In 1853 another Great Storm swept away wharves and storehouses on the bay, and wrecked a schooner at Sandy Neck, with “all hands lost” to add to the tale of disaster on the outer shore. And so walks the procession of storms down to the one of yesterday when the coast-guard fought hour by hour through the night to save the crew of a boat pounding to pieces in the surf a scant two hundred and fifty feet from shore. And before the days of the coast-guard, men had worn paths above the cliffs where they paced on the lookout for wrecks. “Thick weather, easterly gales, storms,” and on such nights men, even as they ate, kept an eye to the sea. One Captain Collins, of Truro, called from table by the familiar cry, “Ship ashore, all hands perishing,” within the hour had laid down his life in a fruitless effort at rescue—he and a companion whose widow had lost all the men related to her by the sea. By differing methods the same spirit has worked through all the years: “Ship ashore, all hands perishing,” and it is the business of men who might be safe to risk their lives in the fight with death.

II

The sombre tale of wrecks will never be done, but pirate stories no longer incite youth to possible adventure. In the old days Cape Cod men had plenty of chances to show their prowess against such adversaries, and likewise against the privateersmen who sometimes made use of their letters of marque in highly personal ventures. Nor was danger from out-and-out piracy unfamiliar to peaceful folk ashore. The Earl of Bellamont, Governor of Massachusetts and New York, was “particularly instructed to put a stop to the growth of piracy, the seas being constantly endangered by freebooters”; and the achievement of his short incumbency was the apprehension of Captain Kidd. Kidd, duly commissioned a privateer, was one of those who turned to the more lucrative trade of pirate. Then, pushed hard, he buried his profits, to the incitement of many future treasure hunts, and thinking to escape detection through sheer boldness, appeared in Boston. But he was recognized, laid by the heels, and packed off to London where he was duly hanged. An earlier pirate of our coast with better fortune died in his bed, a respected country gentleman, no doubt, at Isleworth, England, in the year 1703. He had been pilot on a pirate-chaser appointed by Governor Andros to clean up the seas off New England, and in process of pursuing the pirates had opportunity to observe the ease of their methods.

In 1689 this Thomas Pound, in partnership with another master-mariner and duly commissioned to prey upon French merchantmen, set sail from Boston. But they had proceeded no farther than the Brewsters when they were holding up a mackerel sloop for supplies, and fifteen miles out they neatly exchanged their own boat for a better one Salem-bound, whose crew, save one John Derby who joined the adventurers as a “voluntary,” was to turn up at home and give news of the lately commissioned privateer, Thomas Pound, master. Pound, meantime, with a long advantage in the chase, was off for Portland and Casco Bay. Fully equipped from the Portland militia stores with clothing, powder, musket and cutlass, carbines and brass cannon, he made for Provincetown and again changed to a better boat whose master was sent back to Boston with the saucy message to probable pursuers that: “They Knew ye goot Sloop lay ready but if she came out after them & came up wh them shd find hott work for they wd die every man before they would be taken.” Boston, nevertheless, sent out its sloop, with orders to take Pound, or any other pirate, but quaintly, in so hazardous an enterprise, “to void the shedding of blood unless you be necessitated by resistance.” Perhaps Boston had heard the rumor that Richard, brother to Sir William Phips, Governor, was of the pirate company. Pound rounded the Cape, picked up a prize in the Sound, was blown out to sea, and returned to the rich hunting about the Cape by way of Virginia. Off Martha’s Vineyard, again, he drove a ketch into the harbor and would have followed and cut her out, if the inhabitants had not risen in force. In Cape Cod Bay he held up a Pennsylvania sloop that was such poor prey he let her go scot free; but off Falmouth he got a fine stock of provisions—which very likely was needed by now—from a New London boat. Then he lay-to for several days in Tarpaulin Cove where, at last, the merry cruise was to end. Boston was sending out another boat, under command of one Samuel Pease, with instructions to get the pirates but, again, “to prevent ye sheding of blood as much as may bee,” and with better luck this time for the avengers of the law. In Tarpaulin Cove they surprised the pirate, with the red flag at her peak. Shots were exchanged, and called upon to strike to the King of England, Pound answered in true pirate rodomontade. “Standing on the quarter-deck with his naked sword in his hand flourishing, said, come aboard, you Doggs, and I will strike you presently, or words to yt purpose.” Firing was renewed, and “after a little space we saw Pound was shot and gone off the deck.” Quarter was offered, and refused. “Ai yee dogs we will give you quarter,” yelled the pirates. Pease was also wounded, but his men boarded the pirate sloop, and “forced to knock them downe with the but end of our muskets at last we quelled them, killing foure, and wounding twelve, two remaining pretty well.” This ended the Homeric battle of Tarpaulin Cove. Pease, the king’s captain, died of his wounds, and offerings were made in church for his widow and orphans. The pirates were taken to Boston jail where they were visited for the good of their souls by Judge Sewall and Cotton Mather. In due process of law they were condemned to be hanged on indictments for piracy and murder. But the sequel proved that fashion and the elders, whether or not by reason of the claims of consanguinity, were interested for the scapegraces. Justice was appeased by the hanging of one lame man of humble origin, and Pound was taken to England, where later he was made captain in the navy and died, as we have seen, in the odor of respectability. Some say that his brief piratical career was induced by politics rather than a criminal taste. He and his men were royalists, it was said, and, siding with Andros in the colonial quarrels, meant to draw out of Boston Harbor for their pursuit the royal frigate Rose which the colonists were holding there. But if that were their game, it was spoiled by the sending out of the Province sloop under Captain Pease and the genuine fight at Wood’s Hole. In any case the Salem and New London boats they had looted were not disposed, probably, to distinguish them from pirates.