Old Cape Cod

I

The so-called French and Indian Wars, a series of conflicts reflecting the entanglements of England overseas, lasted well on to seventy-five years after the accession of William and Mary in 1689. Political history in Massachusetts was making in the meantime: Andros had reigned and been deposed; the Earl of Bellamont, a good friend of King William and a just man popular with the colonists, had served a brief term, wherein he had captured and shipped to England for trial the notorious Captain Kidd; and Sir William Phips, a native of New England acceptable to the people, was the first Governor under the charter of William and Mary that, in 1692, formally united Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. Plymouth had fought well for her independence as against absorption either by New York or Massachusetts Bay; but when the skill of Increase Mather won her as prize, Governor Hinckley had the good sense to thank him for his work, as Massachusetts was preferable to New York. Maine, Massachusetts, and Plymouth, then, were united under the rule of Governor, Deputy Governor, and Secretary appointed by the king, and twenty-eight Councillors chosen by the people. On Cape Cod, at the time of the union, there were about four thousand whites grouped in six towns—Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Eastham, Falmouth, and Mannomoit—which sent nine representatives to the first Provincial Assembly.

It is interesting that at about this time began the advent of men of Irish blood, who, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, have been among the most thrifty and prosperous of the Cape people. Early in the reign of William and Mary laws were put afoot to turn Ireland from manufacturing to agriculture. Swift gibed at the policy of “cultivating cattle and banishing men”; Lord FitzWilliam protested that a hundred thousand operatives were forced to leave the country. Many, the vanguard of a mighty host, came to the American colonies. Few of these early immigrants, probably, were of pure Celtic blood: they were the Scotch-Irish of the north, the Anglo-Irish and the French of the south, artisans rather than farmers, who were to play an enormous part in the development of our country. Among the early settlers of the Cape were many Irishmen: Higgins, Kelley, Belford, Delap, Estabrook, Wood, and the Reverend Samuel Osborn who succeeded Mr. Treat at Eastham. Mr. Osborn taught his parishioners the use of peat as a fuel and some improvements in farming; but, alas, in that orthodox community, he was suspected of liberalism. Thoreau says: “Ten ministers with their churches sat on him and spoiled his usefulness”—but only for Eastham. In Boston he became a successful schoolmaster, and lived there to be near a hundred years of age.

Life at the Cape flowed on with simple annals to mark its course. In 1687 a mill for grinding corn was set up at Barnstable, to the wonder of the Indians who took it for a monster with arms—the precursor of the winged mills that once dotted the Cape from shoulder to tip and played no small part in the charm of its picture. At Barnstable, too, was the first mill to “full and draw the town’s cloth on reasonable terms,” to the satisfaction, one may suppose, of busy workers at spinning-wheel and loom. And the erection of a mill at Yarmouth was even celebrated in verse:

In 1694 Harwich was set off from Eastham, and it is said that Patrick Butler walked all the way to Boston to secure the act of incorporation. In 1709 Truro, also, with the usual stipulation that it “procure and settle a learned and godly minister,” was set off from Eastham, which, indeed, as Pamet, it had long antedated in settlement. In 1705 there had been an abortive attempt to incorporate this district as Dangerfield, and in 1718 there was a motion to set off the future Wellfleet as Poole; but nothing further was heard of these names. There had always been wrangling over the settlement at Mannomoit, at the elbow of the Cape: first attached to Yarmouth, then to Eastham, in 1688 it was made an independent “constablerick,” and in 1712 was incorporated as Chatham. In 1714 the Province Lands became the Precinct of Cape Cod under the “constablerick” of Truro, and there was a tax of fourpence for the upkeep of a minister there. But evidently Truro had trouble with her ward—the population was a drifting one, for the most part irresponsible fishermen and adventurers—and in 1715 she petitioned the General Court that the new Precinct be “declared either a part of Truro or not a part of Truro, that the town may know how to act in regard to some persons.” From the beginning, with a care to the preservation of crops, householders were required to kill blackbirds and crows, and there was a large bounty on wolves. In 1717 there was even talk of building “a high fence of palisades or boards” across the Cape between Sandwich and Wareham “to keep wolves from coming into the county.” But there were two points of view for that question, and the scheme, opposed by some within on the score of expense and by others without who did not “wish all the wolves to be shut out of the county upon their own limits,” was soon abandoned. In 1721 there was a fearful epidemic of smallpox throughout the State; and Cotton Mather, who favored inoculation, was held by the pious to prefer “the machinations of men to the all-wise providence of God.”

As the Cape became more closely settled, men of the pioneer spirit were again feeling themselves cramped for room; and in 1727 certain lands which the Government had been ready to give as bounty to veterans of King Philip’s War, were, at length, granted to their heirs—a township ten miles square to each one hundred and twenty persons where claims thereto were established within four months of the act. Seven townships were taken up. Number Seven, in Maine, assigned to the heirs of men who had served under Captain John Gorham, was named after him, and his grandson, Shubael, ruined himself in promoting the enterprise. Amos Otis writes that “he lost his property in his endeavors to secure to the officers and soldiers in King Philip’s War, or their legal representatives, their just dues. In his strenuous efforts to do justice to others, he was unjust to himself, and involved himself, for the benefit of others, in liabilities which he was unable to meet.” Of John Phinney, one of these pioneers of Gorham, a son of one of the conquerors of the Narragansetts, it is recorded that “he disembarked from his canoe on the Presumpscot River, with his axe and a small stock of simple provisions, attended by a son of fourteen years of age, with a design to make a home for himself and family in the then wilderness. Having selected a spot for his future dwelling, that son Edmund, afterwards distinguished as a colonel in the war of the Revolution, felled the first tree for a settlement.” Nearly every town on the Cape sent men to the new country, and here the old Cape Cod names were perpetuated: Bacon, Bangs, Bourne, Freeman, Knowles, Paine, Sturgis.

In 1727 the Precinct of Cape Cod was incorporated as Provincetown, with important reservation of rights to the Government in exchange for which the inhabitants were held exempt from all but local taxes and from military duty. The Province held title to the land; and it was not until 1893, when the State surrendered its holdings in the village that a Provincetown man could be said to own his home, or give more than a quitclaim deed for its transfer. In 1740 Provincetown seems to have added some grazing to her activities by sea, and is presented for so carelessly herding cattle that the “beaches were much broken and damnified, occasioning the moving of the sands into the harbor to the great damage thereof.” The French wars were working havoc in the fortunes of her fishermen and the population melting away until, in 1755, there were not more than three houses in the village and then increasing until the Revolution, when there were twenty. In 1763 that part of Eastham known as Billingsgate—Poole it never was to be—became Wellfleet. And a year earlier the Mashpee Indians, feeling the push for fuller political rights, petitioned for and obtained their Mashpee District, eight miles by five or six, comprising two hundred and thirty-seven souls and “sixty-three wigwams.” To the Yarmouth Indians had been granted the greater part of South Yarmouth on Bass River. Mr. Freeman records that 1749 was known as the year of the Great Drought which destroyed the early crops of hay and feed; but in July the weather broke, the bare earth miraculously put forth its green, and there were as many thanksgivings as there had been intercessions for Divine aid.

Martha’s Vineyard had been found particularly adapted to sheep-raising, and wool was ferried over to Falmouth to keep the Cape women busy at their looms. In 1738 a Barnstable man founded Marston’s Mills, and a letter from Newport in a later year speaks of the woollen factory at Barnstable which receives from the spinners it employs sometimes five hundred skeins a day and clears in a year three thousand dollars, “which is the most profitable of any business now carried on in America according to the stock improved in it”; broadcloth “selling for three dollars a yard in London may be had here for a dollar and a half.” This public industry supplemented the one that a family conducted on its own account: for nearly every farm had its sheep, and homespun was the wear. The moors of Truro were dotted with sheep, and very likely some of its surplus wool was sent to the Barnstable mills.

That the Cape people, in parsonage or farm, followed the custom of the day and kept slaves is evidenced, among other ways, by many wills. Mr. Bacon, of Barnstable, for instance, directs that in case his negro Dinah be sold, “all she is sold for be improved by my executors in buying Bibles,” which are to be distributed among his grandchildren. Mr. Walley had his slaves; the Reverend Mr. Avery, of Truro, whose farm and forge were near Highland Light, was able to bequeath a considerable estate to his children; and among the assets were his negro “girl named Phillis,” his Indian girl named Sarah, and the negroes Jack and Hope who were never to be sold out of the family. Old Totoo, slave to Mrs. Gorham, of Barnstable, survived her eight years and, dying, begged that he might be buried at his mistress’s feet. In 1678 two Indians of Sandwich, convicted of stealing twenty-five pounds, were sentenced to be sold, for the profit of their victims, somewhere in New England as “perpetual slaves.”

And that apprenticeship in the early days was sometimes practical slavery is shown by the case of Jonathan Hatch, a Yarmouth lad, bound out at the age of fourteen to a Salem man, from whose harsh service he fled only to be caught in Boston, sentenced to be severely whipped, and returned as a slave to his master. Again escaping, he reached Yarmouth where he was arrested, condemned to be whipped, and passed from constable to constable back to Salem. Appeal was made to the Plymouth Court which made an excuse of “doubting its jurisdiction” to evade the issue, and the boy was “appointed to dwell with Mr. Stephen Hopkins” at Yarmouth. In due time he married and went to live at South Sea, near the sachem of the Mashpees, with whom he became on very good terms. In 1652 he was had up for furnishing an Indian with gun and ammunition, and later befriended the Indian Repent who was charged with threatening to shoot Governor Prince. From the South Sea, with Isaac Robinson, he became a squatter at Falmouth, but soon was duly granted a plot of eighty acres. He was to act, moreover, as the land agent of the proprietors, and ended the career that had begun as a runaway slave by becoming a respected measurer of metes and bounds.

For these early farmers slavery seems to have been the solution of their problem of trying to tie a laborer to his job. While land was available in practically unlimited amount and money was scarce, any man might find himself a proprietor, a point illustrated by an amusing story of Winthrop’s. A certain man, lacking cash, paid off his farmhand by giving him a pair of oxen. The laborer was willing to continue such service. “But how shall I pay you?” asked the man. “With more oxen.” “And when the oxen are gone?” “Then you can work for me and earn them back again.” But in the North, as time went on, and land was taken up in comparatively small farms that could be profitably worked by owners who could pay for necessary labor, the convenience of slaves was easy to forego, and the public conscience began to work for abolition. As early as 1733 Sandwich voted: “that our representative is instructed to endeavor to have an act passed by the Court to prevent the importation of slaves into this country; and that all children that shall be born of such Africans as are now slaves among us, shall after such act be free at twenty-one years of age.” Five years later selling slaves in the American market was prohibited at Boston. It is at Truro, one may believe, that one of the last slave trades on the Cape was consummated when, in 1726, Benjamin Collins bought from a neighbor Hector, aged three, for thirty pounds, and in due time made a Christian of him, as the parish records show. Hector grew to a great age, and evinced confidence in salvation, among other ways, by praying in loud tones as he went to his labor in the fields of the Truro Highlands where, sure gage of notability, certain expressions to commemorate him crept into the vernacular—“Old Hector,” “black as Hector,” “Hector’s Nook,” “Hector’s Stubble,” “Hector’s Bridge.”

In the later years, preceding the Civil War, it was natural that among a people which had always counted many progressives, there should be Abolitionists. They were kindly folk, it is said, “with strong convictions, never attending church because the sermons did not condemn slavery”—the early racial touch cropping out, it seems, in this later generation. Some of the ships of an Osterville owner even landed runaway slaves on the south shore whence they passed along by “underground railway” to a certain house in Barnstable. One remembers that as a boy he used to go there to teach them their letters; and he also remembers that “they were treated as equals; but sometimes they made their way to ‘Mary Dunn’s Road’ where they found rum and congenial companions.”

Finance, swinging from stringency to inflation of the currency, was an ever-present problem in the colony during the French and Indian Wars. In the mid-eighteenth century, a land bank was proposed in the hope of using land as the basis for credit in a country where gold and silver were so lacking, with a result disastrous to many farmers on the Cape. In 1748 paper was called in and the “piece of eight,” or Spanish dollar, made the standard; but again the easy issue of paper was too great a temptation, again there was depreciation and instability, again the struggle back to a standard dollar. In 1749, after “King George’s War,” England liquidated the war debt of the Province by paying into the treasury at Boston a fund of some one hundred and eighty thousand pounds that were carted through the streets in seventeen truckloads of silver and ten of copper. Henceforth it was provided that all debts should be paid in coined silver, which is said to originate the term “lawful money.”

II

All these fifty years since the accession of William and Mary had been complicated by more or less participation in the foreign wars of the mother country; and the hereditary hatred of France and England lived on, with new occasions, in their colonies. Those of France had been planted and fostered by the crown; those of England largely by her rebels; Catholic France never could sympathize with the English heretics; and now that the power of Spain was broken, French and English traders and fishermen were the chief rivals for domination of the new countries and the seas, east and west, north and south, the world over. In 1689 the principle of colonial neutrality had been proposed by France and rejected, to her considerable subsequent cost, by England. And at the beginning of “King William’s War,” so-called, Massachusetts, commanded by the Governor, Sir William Phips, set forth on her adventure for the reduction of Port Royal and Quebec. Port Royal fell, its loot paying for the expedition, but was retaken by the French. France’s reply was an invasion of the border, assisted by her Indian allies; and now and thereafter throughout the French wars there was great apprehension, particularly by Cape Cod in its defenceless state, of French sea-raids on the New England coast. After the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, France claimed all the fisheries east of the Kennebec and all English boats there found were forfeit by order of the king—fruitful cause, one may suppose, for fresh quarrels. And no later than 1702 “Queen Anne’s War” revived the Indian raids, and the sacking of Deerfield roused the colonies to a holy war. On the Continent, meantime, “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre” and in 1713 the Peace of Utrecht ended the French wars for thirty-three years’ breathing space; in the new world France lost forever Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay Territory.

In these wars five expeditions had been fitted out by the colonies to attack the enemy on the east, under Colonel Benjamin Church, and in his command were found the Cape Cod men. Thomas Dimmock, of Barnstable, fell, fighting gallantly, at the battle of Canso. He would not shelter himself, as did the other officers, but stood boldly out in the open cheering on his men—a conspicuous mark for sharpshooters. Major Walley, son of the old minister, was another officer—a gallant figure, handsome and debonair, as a portrait of him, in fine surtout, ruffles and periwig, testifies; and there was Caleb Williamson in command of the Plymouth forces, and Captain Gorham, later lieutenant-colonel, son of the old Indian fighter of Philip’s War. And Gorham, especially, did unique and valuable service in command of the “whaleboat fleet.” These light-draft boats, manned by whalemen and Indians, could transport men and supplies up the shallow bays and rivers to the spot where they were most needed; and without such a device, the enemy, stationed for the most part where the transports could not land troops, would have been hard come at by marches overland through the wilderness. At night, or in bad weather, the boats were taken ashore and turned over to serve as shelter. In 1704 Church called for fifty of these boats, and that winter visited every town on the Cape to recruit men. “For years after,” writes Amos Otis, “these old sailors and soldiers, seated in their roundabout chairs, within their capacious chimney-corners, would relate to the young their adventures in ‘the Old French Wars.’”

In 1739 there was an abortive war with Spain when Cape men enlisted for an expedition to the Spanish Main where many died of disease, and there was no result beyond a further impoverishment of the country. And by 1745 England and France, drawn as they were into the War of the Austrian Succession, were fighting out in America “King George’s War.” In April of that year thirty-five hundred troops, chiefly “substantial persons and men of beneficial occupations,” sailed from Boston under another fighting Governor, Sir William Pepperell, to attack Louisburg, the “Gibraltar of America.” In this force the Seventh Massachusetts was known as the “Gorham Rangers” under the command of a Gorham of the third generation. With him, as it chanced, was a descendant of Richard Bourne, William by name, whom an Indian medicine-man had cured in childhood when white doctors had given him up as dying. William came scathless through the wars to die in old age, rich and respected, at Marblehead.

In the following June Louisburg fell. Colonel Gorham commanded a whaleboat fleet as had his father under Churchill; and the first man to enter the Grand Battery, was one of the thirteen Indians in Captain Thacher’s Yarmouth contingent, who, for the bribe of a bottle of brandy, crawled through an embrasure and opened the door to the besiegers. The exploit was the less glorious as it was apparent that the enemy had evacuated the place.

Great was the joy throughout New England at the successful outcome of the siege, and not least in the Old Colony which had contributed so many men to the enterprise. Pæans of praise ascended from the pulpits; bards broke forth into verse. “The Wonder-working Providence” recites the prowess of certain heroes from the Cape:

Rejoicing was shortly tempered by wholesome dread of reprisals. As a fact France, enraged at the loss of her stronghold, was sending out a great armament under command of the Duc d’Anville, not only to retake Louisburg, but to ravage the New England coast. There were eleven ships of the line and thirty smaller vessels, as well as transports for three thousand men. But Providence was to intervene for the humbling of French pride and the salvation of the faithful. Storms reduced the armada one half before it could even make port, disease swept away most of the troops, the two commanders died suddenly, by suicide men were ready to say, and the remnant of the fleet, without striking a blow, sailed back to France. The Cape, especially, had been alarmed at the prospect of such a punitive expedition: she urged the danger to her long coast-line; Truro petitioned the General Court for protection, and received a four-pound cannon, some small arms and ammunition.

The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, ended the general conflict, and in the negotiations overseas hard-bought Louisburg, to the great displeasure of the colonists, was traded for more valuable considerations elsewhere. In America guerrilla warfare, a raid here, a raid there, continued; and in three years’ time, the greatest conflict of the series, when Washington and other young officers got their training for a greater war to follow, was raging all along the border. It terminated, in 1763, with the Peace of Paris, when France gave over to England her last American holdings. The colonies had learned painfully lessons to their great advantage in the struggle with the mother country that was even then beginning; and when the clash came, France was glad to range herself with the colonists for another blow at her old enemy England.

It was during this war that England broke up some of the French communities that had remained unmolested since Nova Scotia was ceded to her by the Peace of Utrecht; and the “neutral French,” as they were called, were scattered throughout the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia. Longfellow’s poem of “Evangeline” tells the story of those pathetic exiles; and we know that in July, 1756, a little band of Acadians, ninety souls in all, men, women, and children, landed from seven two-mast boats at Bourne. They were tenderly received, we may believe, by the people who had never refused shelter to the unfortunate. Silas Bourne wrote to James Otis asking what should be done with them, and eventually their boats were sold and they were distributed among the neighboring towns. It is not improbable that Peter Cotelle, of Barnstable, was of this company—a Frenchman who lived in a gambrel-roofed cottage set in a pretty garden. He was a tinker by trade, and made shrewd use of his imperfect English, it is said, in driving a bargain.

The Cape seems to have furnished no leaders in this war where so many famous men fought, but, steadily, she gave her quota of men and her money; and Amos Otis has preserved for our delectation the stories of many of the humbler folk of the time. There was a Barnstable man who had shipped as carpenter aboard a privateer which soon brought into Boston as prize a Spanish ship laden with dollars and bullion. By some means the ship was made out to be French property, and the Yankee captain offered each of his men for prize money as much silver as he could carry from Long Wharf to the head of State Street, with the chance of forfeiting the whole if he stopped to rest by the way. Barnstable, apparently, cut his cloth to fit his stature and came off with some two thousand dollars and a little hoard of silver to boot which he discovered in a ship’s boat he had purchased. At any rate, he had enough to lay the foundation of a snug fortune which he augmented by becoming something of a usurer in his native town. As a young man his marriage had been delayed from year to year through a difference with his sweetheart as to where they should live. He preferred the village where he had learned his trade, she, being well-to-do, her own good farm at Great Marshes. In the end she prevailed; and no doubt, as one who knew her will and practised effective methods to obtain it, contributed her due share to the family fortune. The grandchildren, Otis implies, “having no reverence for antiquity or love of hoarding,” made the dollars fly.

A Gorham of this generation seems to have had an over-supply of such “reverence for antiquity”: he was so wedded to the customs of his fathers that he would not use a tipcart because they had none, and drove his team with a pole as they had done; he farmed by their methods, and made salt, though it were bad salt, by their mode of boiling. He had other oddities, such as fastening his shirt in the back with a loop and nail, and eschewing rum in a time when the best kept tavern and drank thereat; he lived on salt-meat broth, bread and milk, hasty-pudding and samp; he was honest, industrious, a good neighbor and citizen, as valuable to the community, perhaps, as his more brilliant kinsmen.

A somewhat younger man than he, born in 1739, a doctor by profession, who seldom practised, had no such antipathy to rum, though it is said he never got drunk save at another’s charge. At such times he obliged the company with “Old King Cole,” his only song, and also with well-worn stories of some earlier adventures in Maine. There is record of a certain Christmas party at Hyannis when at midnight, song sung and story told, he was helped on his old gray mare for the journey home. Left to herself the mare would have taken him safe there, but he must needs turn into a narrow lane, where, in the brilliant moonlight he spied the mild phosphorescence of a rotten log. A fire, thought he, very likely his own fire, and drew off his boots to warm his chilled feet. Resuming his journey, at dawn he came upon the highway and lashed his mare to the gallop, but, as it chanced, in the wrong direction. “Gentlemen,” cried he, drawing up to accost some early travellers, “can you tell me whether I am in this town or the next?” They answered cavalierly enough: “You’re in this town now, but ’t won’t be long before you’re in the next at that rate.” And perceiving his state, they saw to it that he straightway had breakfast and boots. Nor was this the end of the affair, which the village boys improved for their amusement. A ring at his bell: “Doctor, just wanted to ask if you’d found your boots.”—“Doctor, am I in this town or the next?” And they never failed to dodge the lash of his whip which he kept handy to the door for such visitors. He was the first village postmaster, and during the wars, when men were eager for the news which came bi-weekly from Boston, it was on mail nights that the boys and men of the village gathered about his fire and listened to his old stories of Maine. He was a genial soul, a little simple-minded, one who liked to make a show of business by laying out spurs and saddle-bags of a night as if ready for a call. The village library was kept at his house, and administered by his daughter.

The stories go on, with a touch here and a touch there to accent the village flavor. The Bodfishes, huge father and huge sons, lived a patriarchal life on their farm; for more than seventy years their estate was held in common, the father acting as trustee and granting his sons only as much as would qualify them for voters. And a scion of the less illustrious branch of a prominent family was ready to argue his claim for preëminence: “We’ll discuss that,” he would thunder with swelling port. And won the sobriquet of “Scussion Sam” for his pains. There was another member of the same family whose shrewd humor served as well as roguery. He was master of the little packet nicknamed Somerset after the British man-of-war, which carried to Boston onions, among other cargo, for the West Indies market. “Gentlemen,” said he persuasively to some possible buyers, “these are what are called ’tarnity’ onions; they’ll keep to all eternity.” But a week out of port on their way to the south, the onions had to be thrown overboard. At another time he outsailed a neighbor who was shipping onions to a Salem trader, and presented his own cargo in their stead. “But how about Huckins?” asked the trader. “My son-in-law,” returned the captain glibly. “Here are the onions.” One may fancy that tavern and living-room buzzed with the news of this trick when the discomfited Huckins made the home port. Still another member of the family was of different mould—one who gloried in the ease his poverty gave him. “I’m thankful I don’t own that number of cattle,” commented he, watching a neighbor laboring over his stock on a snowy day. “Squire and I,” said he again genially, “keep more cows than any other two men in town.” Squire, his brother, had twenty cows, he one.

But the account of Barnabas Downs best typifies, perhaps, the tranquil village life that flowed on amid the outer turmoil of war and politics and finance. He was born in 1730 and lived long and laborious years on his thirty-acre farm, which supported some cattle, a horse or two, a large flock of sheep, and produced sufficient grain and vegetables. His stock ran at large through the summer; his winter hay he cut in the salt meadows. His clothing was made from the wool of his sheep; the surplus produce of his farm he traded for groceries at the village shop, and exchanged labor for labor with blacksmith, shoemaker, and carpenter. Sometimes he shipped onions to Boston; but he had little money, and needed little. And at this time his class of small farmers made perhaps more than half the population in any one of the Cape towns except those, like Truro, where practically every man in the community “went to sea”—simple, industrious creatures, who lived comfortably by another standard than ours, and were not unmindful of larger interests than their own. “He was the most independent of men,” is the comment of Otis. “Six days he labored and did all his work, and the seventh was a day of rest.”