Mary Rogers Bangs

“ And then the swamps are charming centres of activity: women in bright sunbonnets, men in soft shirts and caps, move swiftly on their knees up the roped-off aisles as they scoop the berries into shining tin measures, and a good picker earns a considerable number of dollars in the day. There is the sound of talk and laughter, and the patter of berries as they are “screened” of refuse and swept into barrels. The sun brings out the last tint of color, the atmosphere is like a crystal goblet of heady wine: it is the homely festa of the Cape at its most beautiful season of the year. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Then roads, with no necessity laid upon them to be the servants of speed, were honest native sand, and, gleaming like yellow ribbons across hills and meadows, linked farm to farm and went trailing on to the next township where houses nestled behind their lilacs in a sheltered hollow, or stood four-square on the village street. As if by instinct, the early settlers from Saugus and Scituate and Plymouth, accustomed as their youth had been to the harmonies of Old England, hit upon a style of building best suited to the genius of the country. ”

“ The village is bounded by wooded hills, and a drive oceanward brings us to the dunes where the State, year after year, has waged war with the drifting sand of its Province Lands. Life-saving stations and beacons are set at short intervals, and are needed, on this shore, and out there lie the great shoals of the Peaked Hill Bar, the cruellest of all the coast, where ship after ship has piled her bones, and men by the hundred have gone to their death. To the eye, in a crisp north wind, they present only lines of vivid jade-green water set in the wide field of blue ”

“ One may concede at once that it is a country adapted to the pleasure of summer folk, if they be not set upon taking their pleasure too seriously where there are neither mountains to climb nor big game to hunt, and the soft air does not invite to endeavor. But the wind sweeps clean from ocean to bay and picks up in passing resinous scents of the pine; sands reflect magic lights of rose and pearl; the townships to the north, as Robert Cushman reported of Plymouth, are “full of dales and meadow ground as England is” ”

“ And although the steamship has a romance and daring of its own—a puny hull that carries forth upon the waters a little flare of flame to wage the old warfare—it was with sails aloft and no wires from shore that a lad then, who had the gift of using the decisive moment, would best find a career. The master of a ship was master in the markets ashore, and there, or afloat, he must be quick to seize fortune as it came. ”

“ Winter drains the scene of color, but salt winds cheat the lower temperatures of their rigor, and it is a hard season when snow lies in the meadows through consecutive weeks. Then there are days of brave sunlight when whitecaps feather over the surface of the bay, and ice-cakes churn in with the tide and pile up like opals on the beach: days when the air is wine-clear, and the land is dressed in its best of warm russet brown, and hoofs strike the frozen roads with the resonance of Piccadilly pavements. ”

“ In the towns nearer the mainland are creeks and brooks and tiny runlets, flooded cranberry swamps, a ditch choked with the lush growth it nourishes; or near the beach a peat bog may wink unexpectedly from its bosky rim where a colony of night heron have nested to be near their feeding-ground in the bay. And when the tide is at ebb they and the seagulls wheel out there in airy platoons that manœuvre as if to catch the light on their ermine or sleek surtouts of gray. ”

“ It was a life meagre, perhaps, in the picture of it, but all deep concerns were there—love, loyalty, birth, death, a conviction of personal responsibility for what should follow—and the whole web of it was shot through with a rich, racy humor. They could be neither driven nor easily led, these people; and justice they meant to exact and cause to be done. In the old time their fathers had turned misfortune to the profit of their souls, and in the new country the natural energy of the children led them to succeed in what they might undertake. ”

“ And in summer and winter, from north, south, east, or west, the wind brings us news from the sea: the savor of salt, gray billows of cloud and fog, clear stark bright days following one another through a season. The southwest gales of summer beat down ripe grasses in the field and feather willow and poplar with silver; the great autumn gales go trumpeting through the land; the nor’easter sends surf thundering on the outer shore; and there are the soft moist winds that relax the high-wrought tension of humans, and melt the rigors of winter. ”

“ A scarf of gray tops the sand bluffs of the opposite shore, and when the land looms, miragelike, scattered villages appear; or on certain clear evenings we may catch the twinkle of friendly lights. And in summer days when the languid creeks threading the marshlands add a brighter blue to the picture that throbs in the sun—water and sky and the dazzling collar of sand that yokes land and sea—the bay, seeming all but landlocked in its honey-colored bluffs, deceives us with a look of inland waters and lies as softly there as Long Pond among the hills. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Perhaps at no point is it more lovely than at Wellfleet, where the bluffs curve gently to a promontory and the surf, touched by a stray shaft of sunlight, breaks into crystal and jade. In and out, they trend away again to the north; and the sea at our feet, forward flow and backward clutch, even on a cold day of spring sounds the whole gamut of blue, light, dark, bewilderingly mingled, out to the intense purple of our farthest reach of vision—literally, the Purple Sea. ”

“ OLD SEA WAYS 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. ”

“ STORMS AND PIRATES I The sea that was at every man’s threshold, combing down the beaches of the outer shore, lapsing from the sands ebb-tide and flood again in the bay, formed such a part of the day’s experience as would be inconceivable to one of inland habitude. It was a friend to be loved, an enemy to be fought, a giver of food, and a solemn harvester that brought dead men to the door. Memorable storms have ravaged the shore: it is amazing that anything so delicate as the charming curve of Champlain’s Cap Blanc could withstand the pull and push of the Atlantic surges ”

“ The doors are often beautiful in themselves: their panels of true proportions framed in delicately moulded pilasters with a line of glazing to light the tiny hall; frequently a pediment above protects the whole from the dripping of eaves. And before paint was used to mask the wood, the whole structure, played upon by sun and storm, wore to a tone of silver-gray that made a house as familiar to the soil as a lichen-covered rock. The square Georgian mansions came later, with the prosperity of reviving trade after the Revolution. ”

“ Such clamor is unbelievable in the pearly haze of summer; but even then an infrequent nor’easter may whip the Atlantic into a hungry rage as if to send it leaping over the puny barrier that divides the outer uproar from the gray dogs of the bay that are showing their teeth to the gale.
Provincetown is a story in itself. The village, with its ingredients of old Cape Cod and a large proportion of handsome, gentle-mannered folk from the East Atlantic Islands, is curled comfortably about the edge of its harbor. ”

“ It would be easier to be persuaded than to persuade them; and in the end it is probable that your yielding would be justified in wisdom. From such characters could be drawn a composite that might fitly be the genius loci; and lest its secret charm elude us and Cape Cod appear no more than a pleasing sandy offshoot of New England, we should do well to learn of him. He is, as we see him, in essence a follower of the sea: one who pursues romance to mould it to everyday use. ”

“ To the north the shore rises steadily to the great bluffs at Highland Light—the Norsemen’s Gleaming Strands, a name best appreciated by the seafarer proceeding, on a fair morning, to the port of Boston, when the hours spent in running by that line of golden cliffs may be the pleasantest of his voyage. And wherever one may penetrate to the coast—unless one has the enterprise of Thoreau to tramp along shore, he must return to a town and take the next road eastward—there is always a difference in the scene. ”

“ At Nauset Beach we look out over the ocean, and turning, see behind us the Harbor that lies there as if bent upon offering every variety of inlet—bay, lagoon, cove, and salt river threading the marshes—that may be crowded into a small compass of miles. ”

“ One Captain Collins, of Truro, called from table by the familiar cry, “Ship ashore, all hands perishing,” within the hour had laid down his life in a fruitless effort at rescue—he and a companion whose widow had lost all the men related to her by the sea. By differing methods the same spirit has worked through all the years: “Ship ashore, all hands perishing,” and it is the business of men who might be safe to risk their lives in the fight with death.
II The sombre tale of wrecks will never be done, but pirate stories no longer incite youth to possible adventure. ”

“ The harbor is a picture at high tide or low, with the boats anchored in the roadstead or moored to the wharves; or the [Pg 12] sun slanting across the sandflats where a dory is stranded by the tide, and its master, dark-ringletted, slouch-hatted, a red kerchief knotted at his throat, a red flower in his shirt, strides shorewards with his catch dripping in its creel. The fish-wharves make a painter’s fingers itch to be at work, and many are those who respond to the impulse. ”

“ The deep valleys among them conceal many snug homesteads built there by the First Comers; and the atmosphere is indescribably pure blending, by the winds that always blow, the bracing qualities natural to ocean and upland. It is easy to share the enthusiasm of a physician travelling this way who exclaimed: “It’s the best air in North America.” The hills now merge into high moors that narrow to the Clay Pounds where Highland Light finds a firm foundation. One overlooks both sea and bay and walks poised aloft as on a roof-tree. ”

“ GENIUS LOCI I Otis and Shaw were great, and the qualities that made them so, particularly those of Shaw, were indigenous to the soil. It is interesting to look through a book like Freeman’s “Cape Cod,” and study there the portraits of the men who built this unique community. They are often singularly handsome, with a fine, well-bred, upstanding air. They, preëminently, are not villagers, but men of the world who know their world well and have considered its works. ”

“ There is one of the best intensive farms in the State at Truro; a model farm of twelve thousand acres is being developed at the other extremity of the Cape; there is a great duck-raising farm, and asparagus farms at Eastham. And why should not sheep-raising be revived on the moors of Truro, and Eastham become a granary once more?
Those men who remained at home after the Civil War became again, for the most part, farmers and fishermen, and the humble native cranberry was to do as much for their prosperity as had the salt-works for their fathers. ”

“ Retired sea-captains, in easy circumstances, who talked of farming as sea-captains are wont; an erect, respectable and trustworthy-looking man, in his wrapper, some of the salt of the earth, who had formerly been the salt of the sea; or a more courtly gentleman, who, perchance, had been a representative to the General Court in his day; or a broad, red-faced, Cape Cod man, who had seen too many storms to be easily irritated.” In short, Thoreau’s Cape-Codders were cosmopolitan creatures, men of the world that he was so ready to despise. ”

“ A few boats did succeed in rounding Provincetown; others never made even the Nantucket Shoals; one was found bottom up in Nauset Harbor, “with the boys drowned in her cabin.” A captain, whose seamanship and indomitable pluck saved him that day, lived to write the record. “I knew we had a good sea-boat; I had tried her in a hard scratch, and knew our race was life or death.” Somehow, where other masters failed, he won. By a hair’s breadth he escaped the shoals. “We hung on sharp as possible by the wind, our little craft proving herself not only able but seemingly endowed with life. ”