Barnstable has pursued from the outset a course of modest prosperity. She does not ask too much of fortune. If her census-roll has gained only five in the last decade, that is better than losing, as most of the Cape towns have done, and, even so, her numbers rank next to Provincetown. How humble were the beginnings of this sedate and gracious county seat may be learned from the letter of an early citizen, declining Governor Winslow’s appointment to lead an expedition against the Dutch. This quiet colonist, who commanded the Plymouth forces in King Philip’s War, pleads his domestic cares:
“My wife, as is well known to the whole town, is not only a weak woman, and has been so all along, but now, by reason of age, being sixty-seven years and upwards, and nature decaying, so her illness grows more strongly upon her. Never a day passes but she is forced to rise at break of day, or before. She cannot lie for want of breath. And when she is up, she cannot light a pipe of tobacco, but it must be lighted for her. And she has never a maid. That day your letter came to my hands, my maid’s year being out, she went away, and I cannot get or hear of another. And then in regard of my occasions abroad, for the tending and looking after all my creatures, the fetching home my hay, that is yet at the place where it grew, getting of wood, going to mill, and for the performing all other family occasions, I have now but a small Indian boy about thirteen years of age, to help me. Sir, I can truly say that I do not in the least waive the business out of an effeminate or dastardly spirit, but am as freely willing to serve my King and my country as any man whatsoever, in what I am capable and fitted for, but do not understand that a man is so called to serve his country with the inevitable ruin and destruction of his own family.”
An “effeminate or dastardly spirit” would indeed be a novelty in the birthplace of James Otis. But it was not only in face of the Indian and the redcoat that these three old towns showed firm courage. To their glory be it remembered that they withstood the persecutor and bluntly refused to enforce the laws against heresy, so that a special officer had to be sent by Plymouth Court to hunt out and oppress the Quakers. Under his petty tyrannies, the faith of the Friends gained many converts, and Quakerism became permanently established on the Cape.
These upper towns have never depended on the sea as exclusively as those below, and hence the decline of the fisheries has been less disastrous to them. They need industries to hold their young people at home, but the marine manufacture of salt by solar evaporation, the discovery of a Dennis sea-captain, has had its day, and the once famous Sandwich glass-works are now idle. Sheep-raising and cattle-raising were long since abandoned, but while the New England Thanksgiving lasts, cranberry culture bids fair to yield an honest profit. As early as 1677, Massachusetts presented Charles II. (put out of humor by the pine-tree shilling) with three thousand codfish, two hogsheads of samp and ten barrels of cranberries. These last are still good enough for a better king than the Merry Monarch, and cranberry-picking is one of the most picturesque sights on the modern Cape. Hundreds of pickers, gathering by hand or with the newly invented machines, move over a bog in ordered companies. The “summer folks” flock to the fun, and Portuguese, Italians, Swedes, Poles, Finns, Russians, troop down from Boston and over from New Bedford for the brief cranberry season, or they may come earlier to join the blueberry-pickers that dot the August hills. The bogs are easily made from the wastes of swamp, which are drained, sanded, planted and given three years to grow a solid mat of vines. The crop from a few acres brings dollars enough to carry the thrifty Cape Codder through the year. Rents are of the lowest, and the shrewd old seaman who tends his own garden, salts his own pork, raises his own chickens, milks his own cow and occasionally “goes a-fishin’,” while his wife cooks and sews, and “ties tags” for pin-money, has no heavy bills to meet. There is so little actual poverty in these towns that the poorhouse is often rented.
Even Mashpee, once the Indian reservation, but now a little township peopled by half-breeds, mulattoes and a sprinkling of whites, grows tidier and more capable every year. The aborigines of Cape Cod have left slight traces save the melodious names that cling to bay and creek. Arrow-heads are scattered about, and now and then the plough turns up one of the clam-shell hoes with which the Nausets used to till their maize-fields. The Praying Indians of the Cape deserve our memory, for they were always faithful to their English neighbors. When the first regiment was raised in Barnstable County for the Revolutionary War, twenty-two Mashpees enlisted, of whom but one came home. A Praying Indian of Yarmouth has won a place in New England song,—Nauhaught the Deacon, who, hunger-pinched, restored the tempting purse of gold to the Wellfleet skipper and received a tithe “as an honest man.”
The beauty of the upper Cape, culminating in the lovely town of Falmouth, is largely rural and sylvan. A system of dyking has, within the last fifty years, converted much of the salt marsh to good, fresh meadow, and, from Orleans up, the look of the country is more and more agricultural. Portions of Yarmouth are well wooded, and in Barnstable, Sandwich and Falmouth are depths of forest where the fox and the deer run wild. The wolf alone has been exterminated, and that with no small trouble, the Cape finally proposing, after grisly heads had been nailed on all her meeting-houses, to build a high fence along her upper border and shut the wolves out. But Plymouth and Wareham objected, from their side of the question, to having the wolves shut in, and this ingenious scheme had to be abandoned. These woodlands are dotted in profusion with silvery ponds, which the Fish Commission at Wood’s Holl keeps well stocked. Often the north side, as in Sandwich, is skirted by long stretches of unreclaimed marsh, over which the heron flaps, with the distinguished air of an old resident, and from which the sweet whistle of the marsh quail answers the “Bob White” of the woods. There is plenty of rock in this landscape, the backbone of the Cape jutting through. Barnstable proudly exhibits four hundred feet of wall, two feet in width, wrought from a single mass of granite found within her limits. Falmouth arbutus grows pinkest about the base of a big boulder known as City Rock, and a field of tumbled stones upon her Quisset road is accounted for on the hypothesis that here the Devil, flying with his burden over to Nantucket, “broke his apron-string.” The trees, too, are of goodly size and stand erect. Elms, silver-leaf poplars, balm of Gileads, great sycamores, spotted with iron-rust lichen,
