Old Cape Cod

by Mary Rogers Bangs

To beat the Commodore and the Flight.”

Other packets had the romantic names of Winged Hunter and Leading Wind; the Sarah of Brewster was as familiar to her people as “old Mis’ Paine” or “Squire Freeman.” Truro had the Young Tell, the Post Boy and the Modena. The Post Boy may be said to have been queen of the bay, luxuriously fitted out in mahogany and silk draperies, and with a captain who had the reputation of knowing the way to Boston in the darkest night, and being able to keep his passengers good-natured in a head wind. Passengers by the Post Boy knew the quality of their company, and that the run to Boston could never be so long as to exhaust the fund of stories. “Each told his experience, or listened with interest or pleasure to the rest, and all sought with unaffected goodnature to please and profit.”

III

No picture of the Cape could be complete without some accent upon its men of the learned professions. Teacher, doctor, parson, and lawyer might or might not have shared the universal experience of the sea: it depended, usually, upon whether they were importations or native products. But certainly the memory of them adds another note to the richness of the general hue. We have met good Deacon Hawes, the Yarmouth schoolmaster, and the more elegant Sidney Brooks, of Harwich: they exemplify, perhaps, the two types of early teachers. Young collegians, working their way through the university, were for a later generation; and very well, for the most part, did they train the boys and girls of the district schools. They were absurdly young, some of them lads not yet in their twenties; but they imparted knowledge with the same clear-minded determination with which they were pursuing their own education. Schools of the best quality that offered, the people of any time were bound to have: Truro, as early as 1716, placed schoolmaster before politician. They engaged Mr. Samuel Spear “for the entire year” for the consideration that he should receive forty pounds salary and “board himself”; then, “determined to save in some way what they were compelled to spend for schools,” they voted to send no representative to the General Court, “because we are not obliged by law to send one, and because the Court has rated us so high that we are not able to pay one for going.” Later Mr. Spear served Provincetown as minister.

Of the early physicians Doctor Abner Hersey, of Barnstable, was, perhaps, the most famous. He came there from Hingham in 1769 to study medicine with a brother, who, however, died within the year of his arrival. Very likely the general knowledge he had picked up in that short association, supplemented by his native judgment and common sense, his keen observation and power of correct deduction, served his patients as well as would a more exact training in the science of the day. He became the leading physician of the Cape, and on his regular circuit through the towns, the sick were brought for his healing to every crossroads and centre. He was brusque and uncertain in temper, and was, withal, eccentric. Freeman judges him “subject to hypochondriac affections.” “He rejected alike animal food and alcoholic stimulants; his meals were fruit, milk, and vegetables. Contemning the follies of fashion, his garments were peculiar to himself—his overcoat to protect him in travel was made of seven calfskins, lined with flannel.” As a further precaution against the searching winter winds his chaise was entirely enclosed with leather curtains, pierced by two loopholes for his eyes and the reins. There is evidence that his bed was heaped high with “milled” blankets which he manipulated, up or down, in accord with the temperature. He was just, benevolent, shrewd, and his name lived after him. By his will he left five hundred pounds to Harvard University to endow a chair of anatomy and surgery; and after his wife’s death the residue of his estate was to be held for the thirteen Congregational parishes of the county, the income distributed in due proportion to the size of his practice therein. And there opened the door of temptation to the devout: for this sum, amounting to some four thousand pounds, was to be managed by the deacons and the income expended for such sound doctrinal books as Dodridge on the “Rise and Progress of the Christian Religion,” and Evans on “The Christian Temper.” But the deacons made such good cheer at their annual meetings, which held over sometimes for two or three days at the comfortable tavern of Mrs. Lydia Sturgis in Barnstable, that little of the income was left for the purchase of godly literature. The matter became something of a scandal, and after the lapse of thirty years the court settled the estate and distributed the principal among the several parishes.

Doctor James Thacher, who studied with Hersey and served as a surgeon in the Revolution, died, in 1844, at the age of ninety. Doctor Leonard, of Sandwich, born in 1763 and practising for sixty years, had the enviable reputation of being patient with chronic invalids, prompt in epidemics or “occasional” diseases—in short, a good Christian and a good doctor. He was succeeded by his son, who links up the profession, in the memory of the living with Doctor Gould, of Brewster. Vast, kindly, skilful, sympathetic with his patients to his own hurt, rather silent, who can forget him on his errands of mercy as he drove from house to house or town to town in the “sulky” that was so exact a fit for his bulk the wonder was he must not always carry it upon his back as the snail his shell. It was an ordeal then for a child to be stood on a chair and have that Jovine ear applied to back and chest in lieu of a stethoscope. “Have you a phial?” inquired Jove of the parent after one such test. Later a terrified infant was abstracted from the depths of a broom-cupboard. “O mother, mother, what is a phial?” cried the victim of his fears.

The early parsons were often, as we have seen, of a fine type—English university men usually, who had travelled far in their quest of freedom. They were perforce, in the new country, farmers as well as clergymen, and one of them, the Reverend John Avery, of Truro, practised, in addition, the arts of doctor, lawyer, and smith. It is written of him that he “manifested great tenderness for the sick, and his people very seriously felt their loss in his death.” He came to them in 1711, and lived active, beneficent years among them until his death in 1754. These Cape pastorates frequently covered a great span of years. In its first century the West Parish of Barnstable had but two ministers. In 1828 died the Reverend Timothy Alden, of Yarmouth, after a tenure of fifty-nine years. Alden was more truly of the soil than many of his brethren, as he was in direct line from John of the Mayflower. He was a man of wit in the choice of his texts: “Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out,” brought forth on the Monday his stipulated firewood that had been lacking; and to a critic he gave answer on the following Sabbath: “The word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.” Mr. Freeman remembers that Alden was the last to wear the Revolutionary costume. As late as 1824 he saw him at an ordination: “his antique wig conspicuous, in small clothes, with knee and shoe buckles, and three-cornered hat lying nearby—objects of interest to the young.” “He sat there as sometimes stands a solitary, aged oak, surrounded by the younger growth of a later period. It was to us the last exhibition of the great wigs and cocked hats; it left also impressions of a bygone age long to be remembered.”

The pastorates of Mr. Avery, Mr. Upham, and Mr. Damon, of Truro, covered one hundred and eighteen years. It was Mr. Upham who rebated fifty pounds of his salary during the hard times of the Revolution, and gave further evidence of public spirit by travelling to Boston to aid in adjusting “the prices of the necessities of life.” His people were ready to raise one hundred dollars for his expenses. Mr. Upham “left behind him a poem in manuscript, the subject of which was taken from the Book of Job. He was ever attentive to the real good of his people, and exerted himself with zeal and fidelity in their service.” The Reverend Jude Damon was ordained in 1786, and some notion of the festivity may be gathered from the fact that Captain Joshua Atkins was voted forty dollars (Spanish Milled) to defray the expense of entertaining the council. Mr. Damon was voted two hundred pounds “settlement,” and, annually, seventy-five pounds specie, the use of the parsonage, fifteen cords of oak wood, three of pine, and five tons of hay delivered at his door. And Mr. Damon’s comments upon certain of his parishioners, deceased, are preserved for our pleasure in his private memoranda. One Mary Treat, dead at ninety-five, “came from England at the age of fourteen, and was a person of fine mind and robust constitution. She gave me a tolerable account of London and Westminster bridges, and likewise observed that the distance from Dover to Calais was so small that in a very clear day linen might be seen from one place to another.” Samuel Small was “a pious and good man whose great desire was to be prepared for another and better world and to have an easy passage out of this.” Of the Widow Atkins her “usefulness and activity in sickness and midwifery will be remembered, and her memory will be embalmed with a grateful perfume in the minds of all who were within the circle of her acquaintance.” Another “had a taste for reading both sacred and profane history.” Another, of enterprising spirit, was “greatly prospered in his secular affairs, tender-hearted to the poor.” Vivid little portraits flash out from his page: the husband, “tender and affectionate, as a father distinguished for his talent of governing his children, tempering indulgence with prudence; as a neighbor pleasant and obliging, as a magistrate he was a peacemaker, as a deacon of the church he magnified his office. He came to his grave in full age, like a shock of corn cometh he in season.” Mr. Damon himself was beloved for his tolerance and sweet spirit: of a welcome guest one could say no more than “I would as soon see Mr. Damon.” But his memoranda reveal that Mr. Damon had a keen eye. Of one female parishioner who in her last illness “frequently expressed her desire to be with her Redeemer,” he remarks, “It is to be hoped she was as really pious as she seemed.” And of one deceased “professor” he wrote that he “was possessed of good abilities and powers of mind. These were, however, much eclipsed by his selfish spirit and avaricious disposition.” To Mr. Damon’s cure belonged a local astronomer, unlettered and untaught, a dreamer, who loved the stars. He knew them all and called them by name, and, meeting with scant sympathy in his star-gazing, scorned not the humblest disciple. “I swear,” he had been known to exclaim, “half the stars might go out of the sky, and nobody here would know it, if it wasn’t for me and Aunt Achsah.”

The pastorates of Mr. Dunster, Mr. Stone, and Mr. Simpkins in the North Parish of Harwich included its transfer to Brewster, and covered a span of one hundred and thirty-one years. Mr. Dunster married Reliance, daughter of Governor Hinckley, who is said to have been baptized on the day of the memorable “swamp fight” that ended King Philip’s War, and received her name in “token of firm reliance in Divine Power” held by her mother for the safety of the father who was fighting that day. Mr. Stone, in 1730, inveighs against “a sad failing in family government—a wicked practice of young people in their courtships which I have borne my public testimony against”—an allusion, no doubt, to the ancient betrothal custom of “sitting-up.” There are interesting cases of parish discipline recorded. In Mr. Dunster’s time, “the church met to hear a charge examined against a sister, brought by another sister in the church, the pushing her out of a pew, and hunching another in time of divine service in the meeting-house.” And as late as 1820 a committee was appointed “to keep the meeting-house clear of dogs, and to kill them if their owners will not keep them out”; boys, likewise, the committee were to “take care of and keep them still in time of meeting.” No light task, we may guess, where the boys were segregated in a balcony apart as if for the special incitement of mischief; nor were boys the only ones who were irked by those long services. It was the sexton’s duty to turn the glass at the beginning of the sermon, which must be ended with the sand, and Freeman remembers the “early preparation for a determined stampede from the meeting-house the moment that the benediction was pronounced. Coats were buttoned, canes and hats were taken in hand, pew-doors were unbuttoned, and diligent and full preparation was made for a general rush to ensue as soon as the closing Amen should begin to be articulated by the minister. And such a babel of tongues and noisy scattering of devout worshippers as followed was memorable.” Nor is it remarkable that men should have welcomed the Amen as a blessed release when pews must have been stools of penance for a full-bodied sailor, or for a child whose short legs must dangle unsupported, so narrow was the seat, so hard and straight did the back rise therefrom. Mr. Freeman recalls other points of the service, that of the choir “tuning their voices—often with the aid of the bass viol and sometimes violin, during the reading of the psalm,” and the slamming of the hinged seats of the pews when the congregation rose for the prayer. It would have been papistical then to kneel in the house of God, and a man addressed his Maker stoutly upon his feet; the monotony of the service was further varied, when the last hymn was given out, by standing with backs to the parson as if, his contribution duly delivered, full criticism might be turned upon the choir.

Mr. Simpkins steered Brewster through the troubled times of the Embargo War, and aided with his intercession the deliberations of the town as to paying war tribute to the British. Grandmothers of not many years ago could tell stories of Parson Simpkins, a stately gentleman for whom the best New England rum was kept on the sideboard to cheer his parochial calls. But the parson, on such visits, was not infrequently the herald of disaster: for when a ship arrived with captain or seaman missing, drowned or dead in some foreign port, the minister was first notified, and even if his call were only for pleasure, the wife or mother who saw him coming would have a pang of dread, and the neighbors say: “There goes Mr. Simpkins—bad news for some one.”