BLUE-FISHING.
Many blue-fish are caught off the beach on the south shore of the island by casting a line among the breakers, and then hauling it quickly in. This method they call "heave and haul." It takes an expert to get the sleight of it. Gathering the line in a coil and swinging it a few times around his head, an old hand will cast it to an incredible distance. The fish is also frequently taken in seines in shallow creeks and inlets, but he as often escapes through the rents he has made in the net.
I had three excursions to make before I could say I had seen Nantucket. One was to the hills and sands toward Coatue, that curved like a sickle around the harbor; another was to Siasconset; and yet another to the south side. This being done, I had not left much of the island unexplored.
It was on a raw, blustering morning that I set out for a walk around the eastern shore of the harbor. I saw the steamboat go out over the bar, now settling down in the trough, and now shaking herself and staggering onward. Dismally it looked for a day in July, but I had not the mending of it. After getting well clear of the town I found the hills assuming some size and appearance of vegetation. They were overgrown with wild-cranberry vines bearing stunted fruit, each turning a little red cheek to be kissed by the morning sun. Some beautiful flowers sprung from among the neutral patches of heather. The Indian pea, unmatched in wild beauty, displayed its sumptuous plume among the gray moss or modest daisies.
The beach grass was rooted everywhere in the hillocks next the shore, and appeared to be gradually working its way inland. I attempted to pull some of it up, but only the stalks remained in my hand. Each leaf is like a sword-blade. Pass your hand across the under-surface, and it is prickly and rough. What there formerly was of soil has been growing thinner and thinner by being blown into the sea. Unlike the buffalo-grass of the plains, the beach grass possesses little nutriment, though cattle crop the tender shoots in spring. It was formerly much used for broom-stuff.
I picked up by the shore many scallop-shells, and on the hills saw many more lying where pleasure-seekers had held, as the saying is, their "squantum" or picnic. This is a historical shell. It surmounts the cap-stone of the monument built over the Rock of the Forefathers at Plymouth. In the Dark Ages, a scallop-shell fastened to the hat was the accepted sign that the wearer had made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. We read in Parnell's "Hermit:"
"He quits his cell, the pilgrim staff he bore,
And fixed the scallop in his hat before."
Professor Gosse says there was a supposed mystical connection between the scallop-shell and St. James, the brother of the Lord, first bishop of Jerusalem. The scallop beds are usually in deep water, and the fish, therefore, can be obtained only by dredging. They are rather plentiful in Narraganset Bay. Some, of a poetic turn, have called them the "butterflies of the sea;" others a "frill," from their fancied resemblance to that once indispensable badge of gentility. As much as any thing they look like an open fan. Many other shells I found, particularly the valves of quahaugs, and a periwinkle six inches in length. Its shell is obtained by fastening a hook in the fish and suspending it by a string. In a few hours the inhabitant drops his integument. Amber is sometimes picked up on the shores, they say, but none came to my share.
Shells of the same kind as those now common to the shores of the island have been found at the depth of fifty feet, after penetrating several strata of earth and clay. In digging as deep as the sea-level, the same kind of sand is brought to the surface as now makes the beaches, and the same inclination has been observed that now exists on the shores. Mr. Adams, my landlord, told me he saw taken from a well, at the depth of sixty feet, a quantity of quahaug-shells of the size of a half-dollar. They usually have to go this depth in the sand, and then get poor, brackish water. There is an account of the finding of the bone of a whale thirty feet under-ground at Siasconset. I saw many covered wells in Nantucket streets that appeared to be the supply of their immediate neighborhoods.
The fogs that sometimes envelop Nantucket gave rise to a pleasant fiction, which smacks of the salt. A whaling ship, outward-bound, having been caught in one of unusual density in leaving the port, the captain made a peculiar mark in it with a harpoon, and on his return, after a three years' cruise, fell in with the harbor at the very same spot.