Mary Heaton Vorse

“ There is a measured slowness in the way the men unload the cotton-bales at the wharves—a down-at-the-heels look foreign to New England. The air is full of a golden dust. The paint scales from the fine old houses, once the homes of whaling captains, and the shutters are loose. To-day they are inhabited by Portuguese-speaking negroes, a different race from the negroes that we know. They carry themselves with the splendid stride of those accustomed to bearing burdens on their heads, and their noses are straight and of an Arab cast. ”

“ In the very midst of wharf traffic was a small and flashing garden gay with cannas and dahlias, a garden kept with care and tenderness. It had an air of having strayed in by mistake; one expected to see the wife of one of the old whalers' weeding it.
I suppose it has been the dream of everyone who cares for things of the sea to take a long voyage on a sailing-vessel. Most of us on the New England coast have had our minds stored when we were young with tales of such voyages. ”

“ Our people have the calm fatalism of those who live perpetually under the shadow of disaster.
Buzzard's Bay is inland water. On the left side its harbors are small, the shore bordered with what, to our eyes, accustomed to our low-lying houses, looked like the infant progeny of the summer hotel. What with its yacht clubs and its "summer-people" air, it reminds one of Long Island Sound. Some serious-minded craft have always made their way to its head bound for Wareham, but until the canal went through most vessels having a business in the world stopped at New Bedford. ”

“ At the end of the canal, however, the traveler has his moment of victory, when the great bridges docilely lift themselves to let him into Buzzard's Bay.
They are so short, a distance apart—our bay and Buzzard's Bay—but they belong to different worlds. Provincetown is a serious and self-supporting town. And, though the summer colony splashes color on its streets, it lives by the sea; its crop is fish. Almost every one earns his living in some way connected with this industry. No year passes that this dangerous trade does not kill its men. ”

“ We lived remote, a dour, harborless coast on whose length lie the bones of vessels—they call it the graveyard of the Atlantic—separating us from the Vineyard Sound and our sister towns. When the Cape Cod Canal joined our bay to Buzzard's Bay as with a silver wire, it made New Bedford our neighbor, Nantucket and Edgartown accessible, and our cruise became a reality. ”

“ During the talk it came out that he hailed from Provincetown. Now in fiction one may not drive coincidence too hard; the writer finds everywhere in life coincidences that are too flagrant for him. Life itself continually hands one out plots that seem as though made by a machine, so abounding with chance detail that one must tone down, omit, elide. But in telling a plain story of facts one can transcend the inevitable limitations of fiction; one may, in short, tell the truth.
My own home once belonged to a whaling captain, Kibbe Cook. ”

“ LOVELY NANTUCKET IS THE ARISTOCRAT OF THE COAST TOWNS We dropped them astern, two of them sitting in the cross-tree of their sloop watching for the ripple of schooling fish to flush with a darker blue the shining surface of the water, spots of black against the sky's lofty pallor. ”

“ We had planned rather vaguely to go to No Man's Land, an island off Gay Head, but in New Bedford we had heard rumors that the man who once kept sheep there had gone, and that instead there was a summer hotel "which wouldn't let you land." Besides, fog still hemmed the horizon. A rabble of hunted clouds streamed down the sky, the mirage of headlands and distant islands reared itself from the water. ”

“ For a moment we had a disquieting vision of man in his true perspective, no longer filling the picture as he does within the kindly shelter of low walls, but helpless beneath distant towering skies whose lambent battlements were aflame, at the mercy of hidden currents and life-taking fog or a fierce and sudden wind carried by bellying clouds. We knew we as individuals meant nothing, for man has significance only collectively. ”

“ And those negroes with their soft guttural honeyed syllables of Portuguese dripping from their tongues form a town as alien as anything you might find in the mysterious islands to which the Clarendon Belle was bound. So foreign is this quarter of the town that the very children in the streets turn to stare at you, and a splendid negress with thin features, the yellow handkerchief on her head like a spurt of flame against the faded pallor of the street, checks her stride to wonder about us. ”

“ When one looks back on a cruise one sees it as a series of adventures strung like bright beads, the road one followed the string connecting them. Usually on any given journey the events are of a kind—and so with us, but for the night at Nashawena. That stands out as lit by lights from other worlds. ”

“ The book-stores have an array of new books, telling of the old characters of Nantucket. There is even a glossary of old whaling terms.
A place, like a person, which does not earn its own living must lack moral stamina, and when the minority of the population lives on the majority there is an atmosphere partaking of a flint-hearted step-parent and a grasping boarding-house keeper. ”

“ An old man pushed along a barrow of clams; he stopped and asked us where we came from. " Provincetown," he repeated after us in tones of gentle finality; "there ain't nothin' in Provincetown." We stopped and chatted and it developed that he, too, had gone whaling in his young days—and this is a symbol of Nantucket: an old man once a whaler now a digger of clams for the summer people.
Edgartown and Nantucket have retired genteelly from the fishing business—their harbors are now but a refuge for the vessels of off-islanders.
New Bedford has already put its whaling vessels in a museum ”

“ I had cruised often enough, but always in the capacity of an afterthought, a meek creature of protective coloring, who cherished in her heart the stern maxim that on a boat a woman should neither be seen nor heard ”

“ They cherish the memory of the old days—even the butcher had been a whaling captain. I suppose there must be elderly and middle-aged men around the Vineyard Islands who were not whalers in their youth, though I met none. I came down the dark streets rather sorry about the town, cherishing its memries amid the cheerful clatter of alien young people. I felt alien myself. I walked down our dock and a dark shape loomed out of the black and a soft Portuguese voice asked me:
"How's Maria?" ”

“ I was commander of the boat—it was my cruise. Why didn't I put my foot down? Even now I cannot tell. I can call it a semi-victory that the captain didn't attain his goal, which was the moving pictures of Oak Bluff's—née Cottage City. We compromised on Edgartown.
NEW BEDFORD WHALERS—THE LAST OF A GALLANT BUT PASSING RACE As we made the harbor a bright fleet of little boats, their sails the color of cream, winged their way toward us. We had come from the world that works to the world that amuses itself. ”