Historic Towns of New England

by Unknown

Up and down the sandy knolls behind the streets straggle populous graveyards, where one may read the fortunes of Provincetown more impressively, if less precisely, than in the census reports. Where the goodly old Nathaniels and Shubaels and Abrahams and Jerushas rest, a certain decorum of green sodding and white headstone is maintained, despite the irreligious riot of the winds. The Catholic burial-ground, too, is not uncared for in its Irish portion. Marble and granite monuments implore “Lord have mercy on the soul” of some Burke or Ryan or McCarty, but the Portuguese, wanderers from the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores, sleep the sleep of strangers, with no touch of tenderness or beauty about their dreary lodging. Only here and there a little Jacinto or Manuel or Antone has his short mound set about with fragments of clam-shell, as if in children’s play. Some lots are enclosed, the black posts with rounded tops looking like monastic sentries, and a few headboards, with the painted name already rain-washed out of recognition, lean away from the wind. In the centre of this gaunt graveyard, where the roaring Atlantic storms tear up even the coarse tufts of beach-grass, a great gray cross of wood, set in a hill of sand, spreads weather-beaten arms. The guardianship of the Church and the fellowship of the sea these Portuguese fisherfolk brought with them, and as yet America has given them nothing dearer.

The Portuguese constitute a large proportion of the foreign element in Barnstable County, where nearly nine tenths of the people are of English descent. The protruding tip of Cape Cod easily catches such ocean drift as these Western Islanders, and they have made their way as far up the Cape as Falmouth, where they watch their chance to buy old homesteads at low rates. They are natural farmers and even in Harwich and Truro divide their labors between sea and land. But it is in Provincetown that these swart-faced strangers most do congregate, gardening wherever a garden is possible, tending the fish-weirs, working, when herring are plenty, in the canning factories, and almost monopolizing the fresh fishing industry. Even those who are most thrifty, building homes and buying vessels, wear the look of aliens, and some, when their more active years are over, gather up their savings and return to the Azores; but the raven-haired girls are beginning to listen to Yankee wooers, and the next century may see the process of amalgamation well under way. Already these new Pilgrims have tasted so much of the air of freedom as to wax a little restive under the authority of their fiery, devoted young priest, who upbraids them with his last expletive for their shortcomings as energetically as he aids them with his last dollar in their distress.

In the general aspect of the port, it is as true to-day as when, in 1808, the townspeople petitioned for a suspension of the embargo, that their interest is “almost totally in fish and vessels.” A substantial citizen keeps his boat as naturally as an inlander would keep his carriage. Any loiterer on the street can lend a hand with sweep-seine or jibstay, but the harnessing of a horse is a mystery known to few. In 1819, there was but one horse owned in Provincetown, and that “an old, white one with one eye.” In point of fact, however, the fortunes of Provincetown seem to demand, at present, some further support than the fisheries. It is believed that, by dint of capital, labor and irrigation, more could be gained from the soil, and that the advantages of the place as a summer resort might be developed. The whaling business has greatly declined

since the discovery of petroleum, the mackerel have forsaken their old haunts, and even cod-fishing, in which Provincetown long stood second to Gloucester, is on the wane. Wharves and marine railways are falling into ruin, and the natives of the old Cape seek a subsistence in Western ranches and crowded cities, leaving their diminished home industries to the immigrants. Still twoscore or so of vessels go to the Grand Banks, and as many more engage in the fresh fishing. Emulous tales do these fishermen tell of quick trips and large catches, for example the clipper Julia Costa, under a Portuguese skipper, which set sail at six in the morning for fishing-grounds about fifteen miles northeast of Highland Light, took fifteen thousand pounds of cod, and arrived at her Boston moorings an hour before midnight. But the “fish-stories” told in Provincetown are more often legends of the past, before the heroic days of whaling went out with the invention of the explosive bomb lance,—legends of fortunes made in oil and ambergris, of hair-breadth escapes from the infuriated monsters, and especially of Moby Dick, the veteran whale who, off the coast of Chili, defied mankind until the whale-gun rolled him over at last, with twenty-three old harpoons rusted in his body.

The foreign element in Provincetown is not all Portuguese. There is a sprinkling of many nationalities, especially Irish, and, more numerous yet, English and Scotch from the British provinces, while sailor-feet from all over the globe tread the long plank-walk of Front Street. This famous walk was built, after much wrangling, from the town’s share of the Surplus Revenue distributed by Andrew Jackson, and the story goes that the more stiff-necked opponents of this extravagance refused their lifetimes long to step upon the planks, and plodded indignantly through the sandy middle of the road. Upon this chief thoroughfare stand several churches, looking seaward. Sailors in these waters used to steer by the meeting-house steeples, which are frequent all along the Cape. Some of those early churches now struggle on with meagre congregations, and a few are abandoned, the wind whistling through the empty belfries. Provincetown has a record of ancient strife between the Orthodox and the Methodists. The established sect resented the intrusion of the new doctrine to such a degree that they made a bonfire of the timber designed for the Methodist building. The heretics effectively retaliated by securing the key to the Orthodox meeting-house, locking out the astonished owners, and taking permanent possession, triumphantly singing Methodist hymns to the Orthodox bass-viol. It was thirty-two years before the discomfited Orthodox rallied sufficiently to build themselves another church.

Journeying from Provincetown, “perched out on a crest of alluvial sand,” up the wrist of the Cape, one sees the land a-making. At first the loose sand drifts like snow. Then the coarse marsh-grasses begin to bind and hold it, low bushes mat their roots about it, and planted tracts of pitch-pine give the shifting waste a real stability. The Pilgrims found, they said,—but perhaps there was a Canaan dazzle in their eyes,—their landing-place well wooded and the soil “a spit’s depth, excellent black earth.” But now all sods and garden-ground must be brought from a distance, and a mulberry or a sycamore, even the most stunted apple-tree that squats and cowers from the wind, is a proud possession. When President Dwight of Yale rode through Truro into Provincetown a century ago, he was amazed at the sterility and bleak desolation of the landscape, half hidden as it was by “the tempestuous tossing of the clouds of sand.” He was told that the inhabitants were required by law to plant every April bunches of beach-grass to keep the sand from blowing. The national government, stirred by the danger to the harbor, afterwards took the matter in hand. Between 1826 and 1838, twenty-eight thousand dollars were expended in an attempt to strengthen the harbor shores by beach-grass. Of late Massachusetts has become aroused to the desolate condition of her Province Lands, and is making a determined effort to redeem them by the planting of trees and by other restorative measures. These blowing sand-dunes have, however, a strange beauty of their own, and the color effects in autumn, given by the low and ragged brush, are of the warmest.

“It was like the richest rug imaginable,” wrote Thoreau, “spread over an uneven surface; no damask nor velvet, nor Tyrian dye or stuffs, nor the work of any loom, could ever match it. There was the incredibly bright red of the Huckleberry, and the reddish brown of the Bayberry, mingled with the bright and living green of small Pitch-Pines, and also the duller green of the Bayberry, Boxberry and Plum, the yellowish green of the Shrub Oaks, and the various golden and yellow and fawn-colored tints of the Birch and Maple and Aspen,—each making its own figure, and, in the midst, the few yellow sand-slides on the sides of the hills looked like the white floor seen through rents in the rug.”

The sand has dealt most unkindly of all with Truro, choking up her harbor, from which a fine fleet of mackerel vessels used to sail. No longer is her rollicking fishing-song, apparently an inheritance from Old England, lifted on the morning breeze: