Old Cape Cod

I

Sixty years ago the thread snapped in that fine sea-piece of the American foreign trade, and now the calling and time of those deep-water sailors are dead as Nineveh. But Old Cape Cod was one with the illimitable seas and the spot most loved by men for whom the ocean was a workroom where fortunes might be made to spend at home. No picture of these men could be complete without the background of their life afloat. For five decades Yankee ships were weaving at the great loom of the Western Ocean to set the splendid colors of European adventure into new patterns of romance. Their tea-frigates raced around the “Cape” to the Far East; they took the short cut about Scotland to bargain with Kronstadt and Hamburg and Elsinore; barques and brigantines and full-riggers caught the “brave west winds” at the right slant and made record voyages past old Leeuwin, the Cape of Storms, standing out there to give them a last toss as they “ran down by” to Port Philip and “Melbun” and Sydney; clipper ships, the fastest under sail that have ever been known, winged their way around to “Frisco” in the great days of ’49. Cargoes sold there at a fabulous price, and then, short-handed, perhaps, because of desertion to the gold-fields, the great ships rushed by San Diego and Callao, rich ports enough for other times, and, storm or shine, swung ’round the Horn,

to load again, and return by the path they had come.

Yankee captains who crowded on sail every hour in the twenty-four had soon out-raced stolid John Company’s ships in the Far East; but back in the seventeen-hundreds, before Maury had written on navigation, they thanked England for their sailing texts, and notably the “English Pilot,” printed by Messrs Mount & Page on Tower Hill, to show “the Courses and Distances from one Place to another, the Ebbing and Flowing of the Sea, the Setting of Tides and Currents.” “We shall say no more,” cry Mount & Page, “but let it commend itself, and all knowing Mariners are desired to lend their Assistance and Information towards the perfecting of this useful work.” Every inch of water is charted, the land invites with names of eld; the black letterpress, with the long lisping s, tells of the great Western Ocean, water and rim, from Barbary to Hispaniola, from Frobisher’s Meta Incognita to the “Icey Sea” of the Far South. There are burning mountains and cliffs, castles and towns, treacherous rocks and tides; and west of a certain “white mount” on Darien three peaks are sharply etched, and the legend, “Here hath been Gold found.” Due regard is had to eastern and western variation, and the line of no variation at all that springs from the coast of Florida; and it should be noted that Sir Thomas Smith’s Sound is “most admirable in this respect, because there is in it the greatest variation of the compass, that is in any part of the world, as was discovered ... by divers good observations made by that judicious artist Captain Baffin.” One Captain Davis, no less judicious, had observed the same phenomenon on his third voyage to the North in the year 1587. And those who sailed the Western Ocean had learned painfully other facts than variations of the compass: the sharp path about the doldrums, the way of Gulf Stream and trades, and of the great west winds that sent them bowling along through the Roaring Forties.

From the beginning of things men of the Old World, with the salt of adventure in their blood, had passed “the forelands of the tideless sea” to look upon the green distances beyond; those more greatly daring had swept through the gate and brought back stories of the Hesperides. Phœnicians seeking trade, ocean thieves their prey, poet adventurers they knew not what, had sighted on the Barbary Coast the “Pilot’s” “little Hommock which appeareth like a Castle,” and sailed perhaps down by Arzille and Lavrache, Fedale and Azamoor, names of sorcery with the soft purr of Eastern tongues. Another and another slipped by Spartel, “shooting far into the Sea, the very Point guarded with a Rock,” the “Pilot” tells us, and circled northward through stormy cross-currents to Britain, or southward by the treacherous coasts where “the grown Sea cometh rowling in so hard.” Then sailors, north and south, put the land behind them, and turned their prows due west: here lay the great adventure for men who loved to play at chance, and they won, beyond dreams, a new world. Norsemen, Portuguese, Basque, and Briton found, not Cathaia, but the fishing-banks of Newfoundland, or boundless forests where men might be free, or those magic islands of the South where Spain was the first to gather her fleet of plate-ships for the homeward run to Cadiz, where secret landlocked harbors sheltered evil, and simple natives, bearing gifts, were kidnapped for their pains. Other mariners, whose thirst for gold was not to be slaked with a New World, made for the Far East by the Cape of “Buena Esperanza.” Slipping down the coast of Africa beyond Blanco, they skirted a sullen coast where the shore is broken by distorted trees and rocks and the mouths of great rivers that cast their freight from the sinister entrails of the land far out into a protesting ocean.

These men, and others, nameless and forgotten mariners, with a keen eye for coast configuration and accurate soundings, made calculations and drawings and passed them on to their mates, until Messrs. Mount & Page winnowed out something of the truth of it all and constructed their “English Pilot.” And now should you devise a voyage about the seas of old romance, here is the chart for your venture. Swashbuckler pirates sailed this way, and discreet men who would elude them; slavers skulked down malign African coasts; clean, hardy voyagers, who sought only glory and the Northwest Passage, battered frail ships against the everlasting barriers of ice; adventurers in quest of gold worked their way down the Spanish Main; and, turn about, our fine young seamen of the New World wrung their vantage from the Old.

A certain navigator from the Cape, we know, used his “Pilot” on sober trading voyages to the West Coast of Africa, or London, or the Spanish Main, and sailing days over pushed his great sea-chest back under the eaves of the trim house he had built after a rich voyage to Russia. He had sailed for pure love of churning blue water, and the sweep of wind through the rigging, and great clean distances, and a fine manly sense of mastering the tools of fate: wind and water and cloud, and men, and the job of making a good trade. Yet never had he been at sea that he was not homesick for the land, and his adventurous youth was no more than the price he paid for plenty ashore. He had met chance as it came and turned it to gold; and here in the “Pilot,” forgotten for a generation in the cavernous depths of his worm-eaten coffer, were notes for the story he had been too simple to read as romance. Its worn leather covers open out comfortably, and within, a cabin boy, perhaps, idling about while the master was on deck, had scrawled “Sloop Maremad of Boston,” and for another try “The Sloop Mairmad,” and knew his hornbook no better than a merman. Some leaves are burned through by a coal that smouldered there how many years ago, on this good sloop Mermaid, at a guess, in the year 1789, and silver-moths now plunge among the pages like cachalots in southern seas.

When the captain had set out for Africa, with a cargo of cloth, iron kettles, and such-like trifles to barter for ivory and gold, the “Pilot,” by word and chart, painted the chances before him. Over there among the Cape Verdes lay Saint Jago, “rich in products, so that were it not for the continual Rains in the Times of the Travadoes, which render it unpleasant to the Inhabitants, it would without doubt be as delightsome an Island as any in the world”; and Garrichica, in the Canaries, is no winter port, for then “the grown Sea out of the North West comes running in there sometimes so forcible and strong, that it is not possible to hold a Ship, although she had ten Anchors out.” South and east now the sullen mainland lowers, and there “lying under the Tropick of Cancer,” is a country “high and stony, so that there is nothing to be had hereabouts, ... and with the Sun’s heat, continuing sometimes thirty and forty Days together ... it is so intolerable hot in the Valleys, that it blinds and deafens those that travel this Way.” But knowing skippers that “sail near this Coast, pass along, none go a-shore, for ’tis not worth their while.” At a shoal called “the Goulden Bark, much Fish is taken at sometimes of the Year,” and there’s trading at last on “the great River Senega”: “several Commodities, as Amber, Elephants Teeth, with Abundance of Wax and Skins.” But on Serbera is the Traders’ Paradise, whose delights the “Pilot” accentuates by a printer’s slip: “When you come into the heaven, you may anchor where you will, but commonly they run towards Madra Bombo, as being the chief Place for Traffic; though there is Merchandizing on the Right Side of the River, where you may run with Sloops and Boats. The Place affords all Varieties of Refreshment, as Hens, Rice, Lemons, Apples, with several merchantable Commidities.”

Happy Madra Bombo! thrice happy Trader! And let him refresh himself well before proceeding to the unfriendly Coast of Malegate where the “Rains begins with May, and continues till October; during which time, they have great and terrible Thunder and Lightning,” and “mountainous Billows rowl to the Shore, so that ’tis in effect impossible to approach the same in Boats, without danger of splitting. But these Seasons once over, from October to May, the Weather proves pleasant and dry; ’till indammaged by the fiery Heat of the scalding Air.”

The lean coast is marked by trees and blasted rocks: “a high tree called Arbor de Castacuis”; “a few Trees, appearing like Horsemen”; a white rock, with a look, “afar off, like a Ship under Sail”; and at Setra Crue, “high and bare Trees which raise themselves in the Air like masts of Ships laid up”; and “on a Cliff a crooked Tree appearing like an Umbrella.” Slight landmarks for a man, less imaginative, perhaps, than the “Pilot,” who shall sweep the coast with his spyglass and debate with himself whether a grove looks rather like a mizzen-sail than like a horse; and madness for the skipper to whom a tree is but a tree, no more, no less. But here is trading again with the Ivory or Tooth Coast and the “Gold Coast of Guiney,” and solid English forts where “in coming off Seaward ... you must brace your Sails to the Mast, and let it drive; firing off a Shot as a Token of yielding before the Castle.”

Now through the great Bights of Benin and Biafra, and all along to Cape Lopez Gonzalez, must a captain keep a sharp weather eye to “mind which way the Travadoes drive the Water, for the Sea Flowes from whence they arise,” and be ready to run before the tornado, “which when you see it it is best to hand all your Sail except your Foresail which you may keep in your Brails to command your Ship.” But, above all, must you “weigh with all Speed and get off.” And these are the sinister coasts where men were sold and bought; brave John Hawkins shamed England by trading here; Spain and America loaded the scales that must be balanced with blood. “About thirteen Leagues up River Benin, on the East-side thereof, stands the great Town of Gaton or Benin, ... doubly pallisado’d with huge thick Trees, and on the other Side ’tis strongly fortified with a great Ditch and a Hedge of Brambles. Here the King of Benin keeps his Court, having there a stately Palace.” But the high words cloak a reality sordid enough when the great King of Benin sat in his house of logs and sold meat for the slavers. And peril lurks here at every turn, “for the Ground is so very foul, and the Inhabitants such Brutes, that there is no coming near it.” Peril, again, in possible confusion of the rivers Forcades and Lamas: for many pilots, thinking they are near Forcades, where there is “Fairing in twelve Fathoms good Anchor-ground,” make for Lamas, “running into it till they become shoal, then perceiving their error, but too late, the Ship is lost, and the Men endeavouring to save themselves from being swallowed up by the Sea and Mud, are devoured and eaten up by the greedy Negroes.” Such, for a slaver, should be the proper adventure of the river Lamas. May the dinner of his “greedy Negroes” sit light!

Slaves, slaves, and more slaves are all the “refreshment” here, and an honest Yankee trader, who has exchanged his “silesia linnen and basons” for ivory and gold dust, best be off for home by way of the Amboises, Fernando Po, and Prince’s Island, high, wooded, beautiful, and “affording good Refreshment in Abundance”; or, down by Lopez, the “Island Annebon,” where “those that return Home from the Cape are supplied with Abundance of choice Oranges and Pomegranates, as also good fresh Water.”

II

The “Pilot” of Messrs. Mount & Page was contrived from the reports of some who “put more westing into their navigation” to sail for plunder rather than trade; and in Volume IV, on the “West India Navigation from Hudson’s Bay to the River Amazones,” they step down easily from Terre de Labrador, where lay, they thought, the chance of that short-cut to Cathaia, to the treasure-house of the Spanish Main. The Yankee captain, laying a northern course to Europe would need only to reverse the sequence of procedure in the “Pilot’s” voyage thence. “When a voyage is intended from the river Thames to those Northern Parts of America, you may go out of the North Channel by Scotland or else through the West Channel by the Lands End of England, according as the winds may favour you.” Martin Frobisher, of will as stubborn as the impenetrable North, had set sail by the West Channel to prove his “plaine platte” that Frobisher’s Straits should make a broad highway to the East by the other way round of the world. He sailed by Greenland, where “you will have the sea of divers colours, in some places green, in some black, and in others blue”; and there is Cape Desolation, “the most deformed land that is supposed to be in the whole world,” where the water is “black and thick, like a standing pool.” It was Warwick Sound “where Sir Martin Frobisher intended to lade his supposed gold ore,” says the “Pilot,” and within his “Streits” lies “a whirlpool where ships are whirled about in a moment; the waters making a great noise and are heard a great way off.”

So much for their Meta Incognita, where the old mariners dug worthless ore, and fished, and killed whale, and made poor trading with the wretched natives; and never breaking through to Cathaia, they were swept up and down, among “strange rocks and overfalls and shoals.” Caught by winter, they bivouacked somehow in the snows, and in June nosed their way out to free water, or, undiscouraged, beat ahead for their Northwest Passage. The “Island of God’s Mercy” and “Hold with Hope” tell of some cockle-shell sailor’s escape from “many points and headlongs” and “broken ground and shoals, worse than can be expected.” Captain Bayley, Captain Zacchary Gillam, in his “Nonsuch Ketch,” Henry Southwood, and William Taverner cruised here, and their findings are printed in the “Pilot.” And as to Newfoundland and the fishing-banks, if we go astray, it is by our own obstinacy: for the reporter here is a peppery old party who “informs those that are bound for that coast that they may not be deceived, as I myself had been like to have been in going to Saint John’s on the 29th day of June, 1715, at 8 o’clock in the morning, ... having been just a month that very day from Plymouth Sound,” by reason of “a very great error in those charts which have hitherto been published.” And he sets us right as to computing “the true Distance between the Lizard and Cape Spear,” where other navigators “would still continue the old erroneous Way; because, they say, when I argu’d with them, it is the custom; they might as well have persuaded me, that old custom could oversway Reason.”

Yankee cruisers to the southward found profitable advice, again: for “such as are bound for Virginia or Maryland will find many times on the coast of America various winds and weathers, and streams and currents also, therefore they must take the more care, and not trust with much confidence to dead reckoning.” (Mr. Rich tells us of one Truro skipper who “could keep a better dead reckoning with fewer figures than any sailor ever known. A few chalk marks on the cabin door or at the head of his berth, and he knew his position on the Western ocean, whatever wind or weather, as well as if in his father’s cornfield.”) “For by experience,” the “Pilot” goes on to say, “has been found sometimes in twenty-four hours such currents as hath carried them either to the Northward or Southward, contrary to the reckoning beyond credit.” But we are off for the Caribbees, and as we leave “those northern parts of America,” Saint Vincent and Domenica, Marygalante, “Guardaloupa,” and all the jewelled drops of the Antilles, from Bermuda to the Isle of Pearls, slip by on the blue ribbon of the summer seas; and the wind, whether or no, veers back to the “spacious time of great Elizabeth,” when Hakluyt is the master. Yet may we as well sail by the “Pilot,” who also knows “Franky Drake,” and tells us that the “Islands of the Virgia Gorda were ever accounted dangerous, but we find by the worthy Sir Francis Drake, in his relation of them, that they were not so, who sailed through and among them. There is good shelter, if you are acquainted with going in among them, for many hundred sails of ships.” And here, with Drake, sailed Martin Frobisher to recoup his fortunes blasted by the north, and returned to England with sixty thousand pounds in gold and two brass cannon as profit.

All is war and pillage, surprise and counter-manœuvre. On Hispaniola, over against the two islands Granive and Foul Beard in the Bay of Jaguana, “the Spaniards have made three or four ways through the Krenckle woods against time of war, that they may convey their merchandise thro’ the same woods without being discovered.” “In a little bay near Cape Tiburon the English used to lie, waiting for the Saint Domingo fleet, and the reason why they laid there was, because there was refreshment to be had from the shore.” And at Veragua, where is “good fresh water, and almost anything you want,” we hear of Drake again: “It is said that on this island Sir Francis Drake fell ill and died, and was there buried.” But here the “Pilot” trips, for Drake, sick with rage and disappointment, died when the fleet lay off Porto Bello, and was buried from his ship. There are treacherous keys among the islands where many a great ship has laid her bones; the Coffin Key, dreaded of sailors, where after sundown walk the ghosts of murdered men; and quiet little bays for “cruizing ships to anchor, when they want to heel or boot top, or to refit any of their rigging.” Saona is “a fruitful island abounding in cassava ... so that it hath oftentimes been to the Spaniards as a granary whereby they have been sustained.” And practical directions for the navigator run with the allusion to old report: at Illuthera you may look out for two white cliffs “called the Alabasters”; “along shore you will see a hill resembling a Dutchman’s thumb cap”; and one Captain Street tells of the “Colloradoes” pricking out “where we saw to the eastward of us three hommocks on Cuba,” with “flocks of pelican sitting on the red white sand.” “Take this one more observation of the Colloradoes,” says Captain Street, “when you think you are near them, keep then your lead going, for there is good gradual shoaling on them, at first coming on them, excellent sticking oazy ground and then sand.”

Down the slope of Campeachy Bay the whole coast is fever-stricken and bare of all comfort; nor is there brook or fresh water, unless you dig deep in the sand, save one spring about two hundred yards from the shore, where “you may see a small dirty path that leads to it through the mangroves.” Forests rise from the marshes, rivers skulk behind great sandbars; the place smells of pirates, and their light-draft brigs thread the innumerable salt lagoons, that Laguna of the Tides, perhaps, where “small vessels, as barks, periagoes, or canoes may sail.”

Turning, we are for “the Amazones,” and then back again, up the great coast of the mainland. Here is the “Oronoque” and many a lesser stream: the Wannary, “shallow, craggy and foul, the land soft and quaggy,” and “therefore thereabouts not inhabited but with that vermin Crocodile, of which there are in this place abundance”; and the Caperwaka with an island in it where there is rich quarry for fo’c’s’le hunters—“such multitudes of parrots and other fine feathered fowls, that you cannot hear each other speak for their noise; there are many apes on this island, and other creatures, which I omit here to mention.” At the Roca Islands “are no beasts but some few fowls, which they call Flamingoes, having long legs almost like storks, with orange-coloured feathers, and great crooked bills.”

All along to Caracas a captain must be on the alert because of “the boisterous winds that blow there,” the “Turnadoes,” that “cause a great overflowing of water.” And “the land is very high, some say as high as Teneriffe. You have there an extraordinary hollow sea, therefore those that would anchor on this coast do best to run a little westward ... where you may lie quiet and secure.” Down through the “Gulph of Venezula” “the country is full of brooks and rivulets; the people, ugly, thin, and ill-favoured, going naked, are frightful to behold.” But “there is much gold brought from thence, and some costly stones of several virtues,” and “in the country are many tygers and bears.” Rio de la Hacha, as we know, was “formerly a rich place by reason of the pearl fishing and other trading. On the east side of the river lies a bank which must be shunned,” as was successfully accomplished by Captain John Hawkins when he outwitted the Don and watered his ship at the enemy’s wells—perhaps that Jesus of Lubec he was to lose by Spanish treachery at San Juan d’Ulloa. And the river Trato, with its mouth blocked by “march land and Sea Cows,” runs “South a long way into the bowels of the country near the golden mines of Canea.” Gold and more gold, and here, in the old days, was bloody work done by Spain which, in turn, was pillaged by England and France. One Captain Long made a smug show of setting up “English colours by consent of the Indian natives,” but on a certain reef “Captain Long had like to have lost His Majesty’s Ship the Rupert prize.” And between the keys called the Sambello and main “used to be the rendezvous of the French buccaneers,” as off Andero and Catalina “the French used to lie with their privateers and plague the Spaniards to leeward, especially those at Porto Bello and Nombre de Dios.” At Lake Nicaragua “is a thing may be called a wonder; some of the trees can scarcely be fathomed by fifteen men; that is the body of the tree; which thing is confirmed by many.” And it was such a tree that Drake climbed when first he looked upon the slow surge of the Pacific and swore the oath that was to disturb Spain’s comfortable looting of the South Seas.

Mexico is coasted about in short order. An island off Vera Cruz comes in chiefly for “extraordinary remarks”; for “in this place the Spanish fleet used to lie, and bring their loading from all parts, until the month of March, from whence they sail to the Havannah, where they always make their fleet to depart for Spain.” And “now we come to the wild coast of Florida, of which take brief account,” says the “Pilot,” because, forsooth, there was then little trade or plunder to be had. Even the mighty Mississippi appears only as the Bay of Spirito Sancto, with, inland, a shadowy “mishisipi.” Steering out by Florida, we discover the Gulf Stream, “an extraordinary strong current, without rippling or whirling, or any other distinction than in the main ocean, always setting to the northward, occasioned by the northeast winds, which there always blow, not altering till you come as far as the Canaries or Salt Islands or thereabouts.”

But we turn back toward the “Northern Parts of America,” and the good ports of Baltimore or Boston or New York, and leave John Hawkins and Francis Drake and their mates who, after all, were only seeking gold at as good a bargain in blood or adventure as fortune sent, and were traders no less than the man who owned our “Pilot” and pored over its charts and quaint letterpress while the shores of Africa thundered in the offing or, down by the Spanish Main, his lookout watched sharp for the lurch of a pirate brig. Nor was he less adventurer than they, though he travelled the Western Ocean by roads that were as undeviating, for a good seaman, as those built by Rome, and knew the way of the currents there and the steady sweep of the trades. More than once he had anchored at Prince’s Island for a cargo of sugar and oil, more than once he had weighed and run before the “Turnado” and crept back to his anchorage when the commotion was past. He had traded at Matanzas and Surinam; he knew the trick of the Spaniard at “the Havannah” and Cadiz; and down at Rio he rode fast horses on the beach and steved his hold full of precious woods. He was no scholar, yet could calculate his position at sea by the latest mode of the navigator; he was no linguist, yet could bend Frenchman, or Russian, or the wily Chinese hong to his will. Like the Elizabethans, he loved gold: for that meant home and honor and dry land under foot. And he plunged into seafaring with all the strength in him only to win through to that career ashore when he should own the ships that other men sailed. He showed an unaffected, outspoken piety that would be impossible to the young blood of to-day, and he and his calling are no more. Yet the type persists, the type of all true adventurers old and new: the men who steer for free waters, but first of all are masters of the ship.