THE GURNET.
Having wind enough, we were soon up with Saquish Head, and in a few minutes more were fast moored to the little jetty at Clark's Island. The presence at one time of two islands in Plymouth Bay is fully attested by competent witnesses. Many have supposed Brown's Island, a shoal seaward of Beach Point, to have been one of these, tradition affirming that the stumps of trees have been seen there. One author[201] believes Brown's Island to have been above water in the time of the Pilgrims. Champlain locates two islands on Duxbury side, with particulars that leave no doubt where they then were. Mourt twice mentions them, and they are on Blauw's map inside the Gurnet headland. In an account of Plymouth Harbor, printed near the close of the last century, two islands are mentioned: "Clark's, consisting of about one hundred acres of excellent land, and Saquish, which was joined to the Gurnet by a narrow piece of sand: for several years the water has made its way across and insulated it. The Gurnet is an eminence at the southern extremity of the beach, on which is a light-house, built by the State."[202]
Bradford mentions the narrow escape of their pinnace from shipwreck on her return from Narraganset in 1623, by "driving on ye flats that lye without, caled Brown's Ilands." Winthrop relates that in 1635 "two shallops, going, laden with goods, to Connecticut, were taken in the night with an easterly storm and cast away upon Brown's Island, near the Gurnett's Nose, and the men all drowned." In 1806 it was, as now, a shoal. There can be little dispute as to Saquish having been permanently united to the main-land by those shifting movements common to a sea-coast of sand.[203]
It is rather remarkable that, with a sea-coast exceeding that of the other New England colonies, Plymouth had so few good harbors. The beach, the safeguard of Plymouth, was once covered on the inner side with plum and wild cherry trees, pitch-pines, and undergrowth similar to that existing on Cape Cod and the adjacent islands. The sea has, in great storms, made a clean breach through it, digging channels by which vessels passed. There was a shocking disaster within the harbor in December, 1778, when the privateer brig General Arnold broke from her anchorage in the Cow Yard,[204] and was driven by the violence of the gale upon the sand-flats. Twenty-four hours elapsed before assistance could be rendered, and when it arrived seventy-five of the crew had perished from freezing and exhaustion, and the remainder were more dead than alive.[205]
WATSON'S HOUSE, CLARK'S ISLAND.
As we sailed I observed shoals of herring breaking water, or, as the fishermen word it, "scooting." Formerly they were taken in prodigious quantity, and used by the Pilgrims to enrich their land. Squanto gave them the hint of putting one in every hill of corn. His manner of fishing for eels, I may add, was new to me. He trod them out of the mud with his feet, and caught them in his hands. I was surprised at the number of seals continually rising within half a cable's length of the boat, at which they curiously gazed with their bright liquid eyes. We did them no harm as ever and anon one pushed his sleek round head and whiskered muzzle above water. Hundreds of them disport themselves here in summer, though in winter they usually migrate.