Wellfleet, which drew off from Eastham in 1763, has also fallen on evil days. Perhaps the fishermen have overreached themselves with the greedy seines. There is high controversy on this point between line-fishers and weir-fishers, but the fact stands that fish are growing scarce. Wellfleet had once her hundred vessels at the Banks, her whaling-schooners, built in her own yards from her own timber, and beds of oysters much prized by city palates. There was a time when forty or fifty sail were busy every season transporting Wellfleet shell-fish to Boston. “As happy as a clam” might then have been the device of Wellfleet heraldry. But suddenly the oyster died and, although the beds have been planted anew, the ancient fame has not been fully regained. A town, too, many of whose citizens spent more than half their lives on shipboard, was sure to suffer from our wars, peculiarly disastrous to seafaring pursuits. Early in the Revolution, Wellfleet was constrained to petition for an abatement of her war-tax, stating that her whale-fishery, by which nine tenths of her people lived, was entirely shut off by British gunboats, and that the shell-fish industries, on which the remaining tenth depended, was equally at a standstill. In this distress, as again in the Civil War, Cape Cod sailors took to privateering and made a memorable record. Wellfleet, like Truro, has lessened more than one half in population since 1850, but her shell roads are better than the sand-ruts of her neighbor, and bicyclists and other summer visitors are beginning to find her out. She has her own melancholy charm of barrenness and desolation quite as truly as she has her characteristic dainties of quahaug pie and fried-quahaug cakes. The place abounds in dim old stories, from the colonial legend of the minister’s deformed child, done to death by a dose from its father’s hand, that child whose misshapen little ghost still flits, on moonlight nights, about a certain rosebush, to the many-versioned tale of the buccaneer, ever and anon seen prowling about that point on the Back Side where Sam Bellamy’s pirate-ship was cast away, and stooping to gather the coins flung up to him by the skeleton hands of his drowned shipmates. A volume would not suffice for the stories of these Cape towns. Their very calendar is kept by storms: as the Magee storm of December, 1778, when the government brig General Arnold, commanded by Captain James Magee, went down; or the Mason and Slidell storm of 1862, when the Southern emissaries were brought from Fort Warren to Provincetown, and there, amidst the protest of the elements, yielded up to the British steamer Rinaldo; or the pitiless October gale of 1841, when from Truro alone forty-seven men were swallowed by the sea.
The quiet little town of Eastham, originally “Nawsett,” settled in 1646, only seven years after the three pioneers, Barnstable, Sandwich and Yarmouth, has shared the hard fortunes of the lower Cape. With a remnant of less than five hundred inhabitants, it finds, under the present stress, a resource in asparagus, shipping a carload or two to Boston every morning in the season. To this land industry the ocean consents to contribute, the soil being dressed for “sparrowgrass” with seaweed and shells. But no hardship can deprive Eastham of its history. After the encounter between the Pilgrims and Indians here in 1620, the place was not visited again until the following July, when Governor Bradford sent from Plymouth a boatload of ten men to recover that young scapegrace, John Billington. This boy, whose father, ten years after, was hanged by the colonists for murder, had come near blowing up the Mayflower, in Provincetown harbor, by shooting off a fowling-piece in her cabin, close by an open keg of powder, and, later, must needs lose himself in Plymouth woods. He had wandered into the territory of the Nausets, who, although this was the tribe which had suffered from Hunt’s perfidy, restored the lad unharmed to the English. The Nausets further proved their friendliness by supplying the Pilgrims, in the starving time of 1622, with stores of corn and beans. But the following year, suspecting an Indian plot against the colonists, Myles Standish, that “little chimney soon on fire,” appeared upon the Cape in full panoply of war, executed certain of the alleged conspirators and so terrified the rest that many fled to the marshes and miserably perished.
The traveller up the Cape notices still that Eastham has more of a land look than the lower towns. The soil is darker, small stones appear, and the trees, although still twisted to left and right, as if to dodge a blow, are larger. The Indians had maize-fields there and the site seemed so promising to the Pilgrims that talk sprang up in the early forties of transferring the Plymouth colony thither. As a compromise, several of the old-comers obtained a grant of the Nauset land, and established a branch settlement, soon incorporated as a township. Promptly arose their meeting-house, twenty feet square, with port-holes and a thatch. They secured a full congregation by absence penalties of ten shillings, a flogging or the stocks. One of these sturdy fathers in the faith, Deacon Doane, is said to have lived to the patriarchal age of one hundred and ten, rounding life’s circle so completely that at the end, as at the beginning, he was helplessly rocked in a cradle.
Thoreau was amused over a provision made by the town of Eastham in 1662, that “a part of every whale cast on shore be appropriated for the support of the ministry,” and drew a fancy-picture of the old parsons sitting on the sand-hills in the storms, anxiously watching for their salaries to be rolled ashore over the bars of the Back Side. One of these worthies, Rev. Samuel Treat, whose oratory outroared the stormy surf, shares with Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, the memory of a true pastoral care for the Cape Indians. He was, in return, so well beloved, that, on his death, his wild converts dug a long passage through the remarkably deep snowfall of the time, and bore him on their shoulders down this white archway to his grave. The Revolutionary War was a heavy drain on the resources of the staunch little town, but, with the restoration of peace, whaling and all kinds of deep-sea fishing were resumed, and a tide of prosperity set in. Salt-works were established, and presently Eastham was able to afford such luxuries as a pulpit cushion and a singing-school.
Orleans, set off in 1797 from the southerly portion of Eastham, has an old-fashioned quaintness that is better than business prosperity. Sand has partially closed the harbors, and the population has been dwindling for the past half-century, but the ocean still serves old neighbors as it can with quahaugs and the seaweed, now collected for paper-making. The distinction of being the terminus of the French Atlantic Cable from Brest is in keeping with the name Orleans—a unique instance of a foreign title among these old Cape towns. The early settlers put by the melodious Indian words, Succanessett, Mattacheeset, and the rest, and substituted the dear home names from Devon, Cornwall, Norfolk and Kent. The christening of Brewster, Bourne and Dennis honored severally the Pilgrim elder, the Sandwich friend of the Indians and a Yarmouth pastor; but these are of comparatively recent date. As Wellfleet and Orleans have been cut, on north and south, out of the original Eastham, so were Harwich, Chatham, Dennis, Brewster, once “within the liberties of Yarmouth.”
The history of Yarmouth, too, is so closely allied to the histories of Barnstable and of Sandwich, with her daughter Bourne, that the story of all these may be told as one.
These three initial settlements on the Cape were recognized as townships in 1639. From the outset, the difference in their locations imposed upon them different tasks. Yarmouth, the elbow town of the Cape, bore the brunt of wind and wave; Sandwich kept the border, notably in King Philip’s War, when she guarded the faithful Cape Indians from temptation and received for safe harborage English refugees from the ravaged districts; and Barnstable, the aristocratic sister of the group, made traditions, set examples and produced the Otis family. With Old Yarmouth, the Cape widens. No longer do householders, as at Truro, own land in strips from shore to shore. The soil, too, deepens, and the cows need not with hungry noses brush away the drifted sand to find the grass. On the Back Side is no marked change in aspect. Still pine grove after pine grove adds flavor to the salt air, and where the carpet of needles is trodden through, gleam patches of white sand. The strange reappearance of the Somerset is out-miracled in Old Ship Harbor, where, in 1863, long after the significance of the name had been forgotten, the hull of the Sparrow-Hawk, wrecked there in 1626, on her way from London to Virginia, rose again to view. This portion of the Cape is in excellent repute with pleasure-seekers, and the seaside cottage is ubiquitous, especially in beautiful Chatham, whose ever-changing shore takes the wildest raging of the surf. Harwich, which has gone through the regular stages of whaling, codding, mackerel-fishing and salt-making, cultivates in turn the summer boarder, but somewhat quizzically. Retired sea-captains are not easily overawed even by golf-sticks, and retired sea-captains, in Harwich, are as thick as cranberries. Snuffing the brine, they pace their porches like so many quarter-decks and delight their auditors and themselves with marvellous recitals. The Cape has not proved friendly to manufactures in general. Salt-works and glass-works have come to naught,—but the spinning of sea-yarns is a perennial industry.
