“In the wind’s teeth and the spray’s stinging
Westward and outward forth we go,
Knowing not whither nor why, but singing
An old old oar-song as we row—”
Madoc of Wales, Saint Brendan the Irishman, Icelanders, Phœnicians even; and, more certainly, a company of Norsemen who set up a wrecked boat on the Cape Cod bluffs, the Long Beaches, to guide the landfall of later visitors to their Keel Cape.
French, Dutch, Spanish, English, all had their names for the Cape, but in 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold, examining the coast of New England with a view to colonization, was to give it the predestined and only right name: “Cape Cod.” Making across Massachusetts Bay “with a fresh gale of wind,” writes his chronicler, “in the morning we found ourselves embayed with a mightie headland” with “a white sandie and very bolde shore,” where, landing, they met an Indian “of proper stature, and of a pleasing countenance; and after some familiaritie with him, we left him at the seaside and returned to our ship.” Another scribe of the party remarks that the Indian had plates of copper hanging from his ears and “shewed willingness to help us in our occasions.” “From this place, we sailed round about this headland, almost all the points of the compass,” and so on to Cuttyhunk, “amongst many faire Islands.” But the significant point for us is that they “pestered” their ship so with codfish that they threw numbers of them overboard, and thereupon named the land Cape Cod.
In 1604, and for several years thereafter, Champlain was much upon the New England coast, helping Du Monts in a colonizing scheme under a charter of Henri Quatre; had they succeeded, New France would have reached Long Island Sound. Champlain landed at Barnstable and named the harbor “Port aux Huistres,” “for the many good oysters there.” He judged, also, that it would have been “an excellent place to erect buildings and lay the foundations of a state, if the harbor were somewhat deeper and the entrance safer.” The tip of the Cape he called “Cap Blanc,” the treacherous shoals at the elbow “Mallebarre,” and at Chatham he was like to have been swamped in the shoals had the Indians not dragged his boats over into the harbor—“Port Fortune” he called it. But it held no good fortune for him: for his men quarrelled with their rescuers, and after two of them had been killed, he sailed away. Champlain, a scientific man, the king’s geographer, wrote interestingly of the savages, their appearance, customs, agriculture, dwellings, and weighed the advantages of colonization there, but French the land was not to be.
After Gosnold came several Englishmen, Martin Pring among them, searching for sassafras, which he knew was to be found in sandy soil, and was then much esteemed in pharmacy as of “sovereigne vertue against the Plague and many other Maladies.” Pring coasted along to Plymouth, where at last he found “sufficient quantitie” of his sassafras, and camped for several months. There one of his company played the “gitterne” to the joy of the savages who danced about him “twentie in a Ring, ... singing lo la lo la la and him that first brake the ring the rest would knocke and cry out upon.” Henry Hudson spent a night off the Cape and had some difficulty with shoals and tides and mists; but he testified that “the land is very sweet,” and some of his men brought away wild grapes and roses; as did also Edward Braunde, who hoped to discover “sertayne perell which is told by the Sauvages to be there,” and found near Race Point, where he landed, only some “goodly grapes and Rose-Trees.” It should be noted that as Hudson cruised thereabouts, Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayney of his crew saw “the mermaid.” And in 1614 Captain John Smith set sail for these shores to look for whales and gold-mines, failing which they would take “Fish and Furres,” as the event proved to an amount of some fifteen hundred pounds. Smith, with eight men in an open boat, explored and charted the coast and dedicated his map to Prince Charles, with the request that he change “the barbarous names” thereon. “As posteritie might say,” writes Smith, “Prince Charles was their godfather.” New England, the river Charles, Plymouth retain the royal nomenclature. But his Stuart Bay and Cape James are still Cape Cod and Cape Cod Bay, and Milford Haven is Provincetown Harbor. Cape Cod, “a name, I suppose, it will never lose,” said Cotton Mather, “till the shoals of codfish be seen swimming on the highest hills.” “This Cape,” wrote Smith, “is made by the maine Sea on the one side, and a great Bay on the other in forme of a Sickell.” “A headland of high hills, over growne with shrubby Pines, hurts [huckleberries] and such trash, but an excellent harbour for all weathers.”
And while Smith was engaged in his scientific expedition, Captain Thomas Hunt, whom he had placed in command of the larger boat, after lading her with fish and furs, put his time to profit by capturing twenty-four savages, Nauset and Patuxet Indians among them; and setting sail for Malaga, he sold the cargo for his masters and the savages at twenty pounds the head for the advantage of his own pocket. “This vilde act,” wrote Smith, “kept him ever after from any more employment in these parts.” But such commerce was not unknown: in 1611, Harlow, sailing for the Earl of Southampton, with “five Salvages returned for England,” and one of these men “went a Souldier to the Warres of Bohemia.” The Cape Cod Indians seem to have been a gentle, even a forgiving race, but they had a long memory for such perfidy, which was to prove a bad business for all later visitors to the region. Yet more often than not whites and natives fought, however friendly the first overtures might have been; and Smith reports, as a matter of course, of the Indians about Plymouth: “After much kindnesse wee fought also with them, though some were hurt, some slaine, yet within an houre after they became friends.” But kidnapping seems to have been the unforgivable offence.
Only the summer before the Pilgrims arrived came Thomas Dermer, sailing for Fernando Gorges, Governor of Old Plymouth, and returned the Indian Tasquantum or Squanto, captured by Hunt and survivor of many vicissitudes, to the end that he might serve as interpreter and find out the truth about tales of treasure in the country. Dermer thought favorably of Plymouth for a settlement, and rescued a Frenchman who had been wrecked three years before on Cape Cod and was living with the Indians. He brought back, with Squanto, Epenow, one of Harlow’s victims, who, however, succeeded in escaping at Martha’s Vineyard. Epenow, during his exile, had been something of a personage: “being of so great stature he was shewed up and downe London for money as a wonder, and it seemes of no lesse courage and authoritie, than of wit, strength and proportion.”