This hook, though a sandy one, caught many a school of migratory fish, and even whales found themselves often embayed in the bight of it, on their way south, until, from being so long hunted down, they learned to keep a good offing. It also caught all the southerly drift along shore, such as stray ships from France and England. Bartholomew Gosnold and John Brereton were the first white men to land on it. De Monts, Champlain, De Poutrincourt, Smith, and finally the Forefathers, were brought up and turned back by it.
Bradford, under date of 1620, writes thus in his journal: "A word or two by ye way of this Cape: it was thus first named (Cape Cod) by Captain Gosnold and his company, Ano:1602, and after by Capten Smith was caled Cape James; but it retains ye former name amongst seamen. Also yt pointe which first shewed those dangerous shoulds unto them, they called Point Care, and Tucker's Terrour;[216] but ye French and Dutch, to this day, call it Malabarr, by reason of those perilous shoulds, and ye losses they have suffered their."
Notwithstanding what Bradford says, the name of Mallebarre is affixed to the extreme point of Cape Cod on early French maps. In Smith's "New England" is the following description:
"Cape Cod is the next presents itselfe, which is onely a headland of high hills of sand, overgrowne with shrubbie pines, hurts, and such trash, but an excellent harbor for all weathers. The Cape is made by the maine sea on the one side and a great Bay on the other, in forme of a sickle; on it doth inhabit the people of Pawmet; and in the bottome of the Bay, the people of Chawum. Towards the south and south-west of this Cape is found a long and dangerous shoale of sands and rocks. But so farre as I encircled it, I found thirtie fadom water aboard the shore and a strong current, which makes mee thinke there is a channel about this Shoale, where is the best and greatest fish to be had, Winter and Summer, in all that Countrie. But the Salvages say there is no channel, but that the shoales beginne from the maine at Pawmet to the ile of Nausit, and so extends beyond their knowledge into the sea."
The historical outcome of the Cape is in the early navigations, and in the fact that Provincetown was the harbor entered by the Forefathers. The first land they saw, after Devon and Cornwall had sunk in the sea, was this sand-bar, for it is nothing else. It appeared to their eager eyes, as it will probably never again be seen, wooded down to the shore. Whales, that they had not the means of taking, disported around them. They dropped anchor three-quarters of a mile from shore, and, in order to land, were forced to wade a "bow shoot," by which many coughs and colds were caught, and a foundation for the winter's sickness laid. The first landing was probably on Long Point. The men set about discovery; for the master had told them, with a sailor's bluntness, he would be rid of them as soon as possible. The women went also to shore to wash, thus initiating on Monday, November 23d, the great New England washing-day.
Were there to be a day of general observance in New England commemorative of the landing of the Pilgrims, it should be that on which they first set foot on her soil at Cape Cod; the day, too, on which the compact was signed.[217] Whatever of sentiment attached to the event should, it would seem, be consecrated to the very spot their feet first pressed. There is yet time to rescue the day from unaccountable and unmerited neglect.
On the map of Cyprian Southack a thoroughfare is delineated from Massachusetts Bay to the ocean at Eastham, near Sandy Point. His words are: "The place where I came through with a whale-boat, April 26th, 1717, to look after Bellame the pirate." I have never seen this map, which Douglass pronounces "a false and pernicious sea-chart."
From its barring their farther progress, Cape Cod was well known to the discoverers of the early part of the seventeenth century. According to Lescarbot, Poutrincourt spent fifteen days in a port on the south side. It had been formally taken possession of in the name of the French king. The first conflict between the whites and natives occurred there; and in its sands were interred the remains of the first Christian who died within the ancient limits of New England.[218]
The assault of the natives on De Poutrincourt is believed to have occurred at Chatham, ironically named by the French Port Fortuné, in remembrance of their mishaps there. It was the very first collision recorded between Europeans and savages in New England. Five of De Poutrincourt's men having slept on shore contrary to orders, and without keeping any watch, the Indians fell on them at day-break, October 15th, 1606, killing two outright. The rest, who were shot through and through with arrows, ran down to the shore, crying out, "Help! they are murdering us!" the savages pursuing with frightful whoopings.
Hearing these outcries and the appeal for help, the sentinel on board the bark gave the alarm: "Aux armes! they are killing our people!" Roused by the signal, those on board seized their arms, and ran on deck, without taking time to dress themselves. Fifteen or sixteen threw themselves into the shallop, without stopping to light their matches, and pushed for the shore. Finding they could not reach it on account of an intervening sand-bank, they leaped into the water and waded a musket-shot to land. De Poutrincourt, Champlain, Daniel Hay, Robert Gravé the younger, son of Du Pont Gravé, and the younger Poutrincourt, with their trumpeter and apothecary, were of the party that rushed pell-mell, almost stark naked, upon the savages.