Chapter VI: CIVIL and Military History to 1775

Though the Cape’s influence in legislative matters was not at first so great as its citizens would have liked, the days of its weakness did not last long, for by 1650 Plymouth had shot its bolt and was beginning to decline in population, business, and wealth, whereas the Cape, its feet firmly under it, was stretching forward with vigor and assurance. An indication that the tide had turned was the election of Thomas Prince, of Eastham, as Governor of the Colony in 1657. From this point on, the Cape was a bright spot in the political map. Prince was a man of experience in Colony affairs. He had recently moved to Eastham from Plymouth, where he had already served two terms as Governor. The last thing he wished now was to go back to Plymouth, where the Governor was expected to live while he held office. Prince held out so firmly for remaining at Eastham that the Court consented, and to the delight of all the citizens, the new Governor began his third term with his residence on the Cape. He was reëlected every year for the next seventeen years, with Thomas Hinckley, of Barnstable, as his assistant, and died in office in 1673.

The years of Prince’s régime were not years of tranquillity. The Quakers were making themselves obnoxious and were in turn outrageously treated by the magistrates. These troubles will be discussed more fully in another chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that the Governor’s inflexible hostility toward the antics of this sect did nothing to remedy a situation which would have tried the abilities of the most seasoned diplomat. The difficulties increased instead of subsiding, and the blame may be divided about equally between the Governor and the Quakers.

But Prince’s years as chief magistrate were marked by more profitable activity than anti-Quaker demonstrations. Two of the original Cape towns, Yarmouth and Barnstable, became parents during this period, the former under picturesque circumstances. William Nickerson, a citizen of Yarmouth, and the greatest speculator in wild lands the Cape ever saw, had the soul of a pioneer and the tenacity of a bulldog. He needed both in his undertaking--which was to buy a great tract of land at Monomoyick (now Chatham) and start a new settlement.

He began cheerfully in 1656 by purchasing about a thousand acres from Mattaquason, the sachem of the region, giving him a boat in payment. But here his troubles began, for he had neglected to obtain the Court’s permission to make the purchase, and was haled to Plymouth for trial. He pleaded ignorance of the law, and the Court, anxious to have a settlement started, but reluctant to let one man hold so much land, and determined always to uphold its authority, first disfranchised Nickerson for furnishing Mattaquason with a boat, then fined him five pounds for each acre bought, and finally gave him a title to a small tract of land. There was not money enough in the whole Plymouth Colony to pay such a fine as this, as the Court well knew, and for some time no attempt was made to collect it. As for the disfranchisement, that seems to have worried Nickerson very little; if it was ever put into effect at all, it was only for a short time. But the loss of most of his purchase grieved the pioneer deeply. He temporarily abandoned his attempt to settle in Chatham, went instead to Boston, took a flier in Roxbury real estate, and was back in Yarmouth in 1661.

Here his proximity to Chatham made him think again of his great plan, and he petitioned the Court for a title to all the lands he had purchased. The Court then perpetrated the one joke in its history by replying that if Nickerson would pay the fine of five pounds per acre on all the land that he had bought illegally, he might have a title to it. Nickerson’s answer was to move to Chatham with six sons, three daughters, three sons-in-law, and all their families. He arrived there about 1664. It was now Plymouth’s move, and without delay the Court ordered the Chief Marshal to collect two hundred pounds in money or goods from this troublesome speculator. The Marshal did his best, but found nothing worth taking. Nickerson then appealed to the Commissioners of the Crown, a group of royal inspectors who turned up in Plymouth about this time in the course of a tour of the Colonies. These dignitaries thought that he wanted too much; but the Court, tired of the whole affair, and wishing to appear generous in the eye of the King’s minions, remitted Nickerson’s fine, and gave him title to one hundred acres, assigning all the rest to a group of very distinguished citizens, including Thomas Hinckley, the Governor’s assistant.

Nickerson was furious and was foolish enough to put his fury on paper, accusing Hinckley of using his position to influence the Court. For this, and for another written invective against the colonial authorities, the luckless settler was summoned to Plymouth and fined again. This last encounter with the law convinced him that opposition was useless. Instead of continuing the losing battle, he approached Hinckley and the other grantees, and for ninety pounds succeeded in buying out all their interest, thereby at last acquiring title to the tract of land on which his heart had been set for sixteen troublous years. The deed was dated 1673. This, and other large purchases made from time to time during the next ten years, made him the proprietor of four thousand acres--a domain princely enough to compensate him for the bitter years he had spent in acquiring it. His settlement grew slowly and after being first placed under the jurisdiction of Yarmouth and later under that of Eastham, it was finally incorporated as the Town of Chatham in 1712.

Governor Prince died the year after Nickerson’s great purchase, and for the first time in seventeen years the two chief executives of the Colony were not Cape men. Prince and Hinckley had guided its affairs so long that their repeated elections had become matters of routine. A contested election was still unheard of. The problem was not for a man to get himself elected, but for the electors to find a suitable man who would consent to serve. With the death of Governor Prince, Hinckley withdrew from public life for several years and lived quietly in Barnstable.

While Nickerson was in the midst of his legal troubles, a group of men and women moved quietly from Barnstable and started a new settlement at Succonessitt, now called Falmouth after the English town. The first detachment arrived in 1660. The Court had given its consent the year before. The reasons for this enterprise are not entirely clear. There was no land-greedy Nickerson among the emigrants, to establish himself first and then sell lots to newcomers. They could not have felt cramped for pasturage with Great Marshes close at hand. Probably there were Quakers in the group who wanted to get away as far as possible from the established church. But though freedom to enjoy their Quaker meetings unmolested was apparently the principal motive of the settlers at Succonessitt, their removal did not exempt them from attending the regular church at Barnstable; and whatever services they may have held at home, they were obliged every Sunday to travel twenty miles through the woods to the meeting-house at Barnstable. For the first twenty-five years of its history, Succonessitt remained under the jurisdiction of Barnstable; finally in 1686 it was incorporated, and in 1693 its name was changed to Falmouth.

Up to this time, the South Side of Barnstable had remained virtually a wilderness. Hyannis, which to-day acknowledges itself to be the business center of the Cape; the Port, which boasts the summer residences of as many millionaires as are good for any community; Centerville, the most quietly prosperous and dignified village on the South Side--all were forests of virgin pine, and the whole region was known as the South Sea. A Barnstable trader, Nicholas Davis, was the first man to put up a building there, which he used as a warehouse for goods received from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York. This outpost of progress was at Lewis Bay, and Davis’s shed stood on land which the Sachem Yanno ‘gave’ him in 1660; but no houses were built in Hyannis for another twenty years. By the end of the century, about a dozen families, attracted by the abundance of oysters, had settled alongshore between Hyannis and Cotuit. A few years later, the Indians had been done out of the ownership of Oyster Island and Cotuit Neck, and all was marching smoothly for the whites. Though handicapped by this comparatively late start, the South-Siders have done well, and their villages have grown into prosperity.

Meanwhile, the lower Cape had not been idle. The region lying north and west of Chatham, and now comprising the towns of Brewster and Harwich, was thinly settled at about the time when Nickerson was beckoning recruits to his domain at Monomoyick. By 1694 the inhabitants of this anomalous territory, which in theory was under the jurisdiction of Eastham, had become numerous enough to form a town of their own, and the Court authorized its incorporation that year. The new town was called Harwich, after the famous English seaport.

As early as 1689, a group of Eastham men had begun negotiations with the Pamet Indians for purchasing land at Truro, and, calling themselves the Pamet Proprietors, were allotting farms to newcomers. They appointed one of their number--Thomas Paine, Jr., son of the millwright--as agent for all their purchases. In this way they avoided the risk of trouble from any who might develop land-grabbing propensities, and at the same time protected themselves against the chance of the Indians’ selling the same property twice. By 1700, enough land had been bought to furnish each proprietor with a good-sized tract, and the settlers left Eastham and established themselves at Pamet. Five years later, under the name of Dangerfield, the community was granted municipal privileges, and in 1709 it was incorporated as the town of Truro.

Dangerfield, apparently, was not thought to be a name likely to attract newcomers, so the settlers wisely changed it; and Truro it has remained ever since.

Provincetown, the first place on the Cape to be visited by white men, was one of the last to be dignified with the title of town. Its geographic situation is responsible for both facts: an explorer, groping his way in New England waters, could hardly fail to stumble over the tip of the Cape, and Provincetown Harbor was pretty sure to tempt him to anchor. The settlers, on the other hand, making their way overland from various parts of the Bay Colony, found plenty of good sites long before they reached the sand spit that is Provincetown. If they had been seafarers from the outset, instead of farmers and herdsmen, there would have been a different story to tell. But they were looking for hay grounds and arable fields, and took small interest in harbors.

Other Europeans had been interested in Provincetown Harbor, however, long before the Mayflower found shelter there--long before the Concord skirted its outer shore, carrying Gosnold and Archer. Landlords of sixteenth-century fishermen’s taverns anywhere along the coast of Brittany or the Bay of Biscay had heard all about Provincetown from the picturesque villains who dropped in to drink brandy and sour wine of an evening between one fishing season and the next. They told tales of lurid sojourns ashore where a sickle-shaped arm of sand made a harbor in which their vessels could ride out storms from any quarter, and where natives gave them venison and strange corn for rum; tall trees stood close to the water’s edge; all day great flocks of wild fowl flew about the marshes; they could fill their holds with fish without going a mile from shore. This was better than facing the rigors of the Grand Banks to the north; here they lived in houses, and the savages were their friends. ‘An island, perhaps?’ the landlord suggested. An island, perhaps; perhaps a cape; of that they knew nothing. So the conversation drifted along, and by and by the fishermen went to bed.

With a history like this behind it, Provincetown smiled at the earnestness of the Pilgrims. Incorporation was an amusing detail to a region whose fame had reached Europe a hundred years before. Moreover, the grandsons and great-grandsons of these first merry Gallic buccaneers, following the family tradition, continued to make free at Provincetown even after 1700, when the first staid Britishers had built their houses there. Vessels of other nationalities likewise dropped in for one purpose or another, greatly to the concern of the permanent population. One pious settler, William Clap, recorded his indignation in a letter to Governor Dudley dated 1705:

SQUIER DUDLEY;

... Very often hear is opportunity to seas vesels, and goods which
are upon a smoglen acompt. i believe had i had a comishon so to do i
could have seased a catch this last weak which had most of thar men
outlandish men i judge porteges. she lay hear a week and a sloop i
believe did thar bisnes for them.... one thing more I make bould to
inform your honor that hear are a gret many men which goes fishing
at this harbor and som times the french comes hear and then every
one runs his way because they have no one to hud them. i myself have
been a souferor since i lived hear, being cared away by a small sloop
and hear was 130 men and several brave sloops and no hand, a capt.
about 12 miles distant, but we may all be tacken at the Cap and he no
nothing of it.... your homble and unworthy sarvont

WM. CLAP

This picturesque document reflects in a curiously exact fashion the random work at Provincetown. Miscellaneous smugglers, ‘Portege’ whalemen, French privateers, and colonial fishermen who camped for the summer, all plied their trades with as much freedom as if Provincetown had been a remote island of the Spanish Main. The town was living up bravely to the wild days of its youth. Echoes of riotous doings reached and shocked the ears of the General Court, and resulted in an act, passed in 1714, which put the unruly settlement under the jurisdiction of Truro and decreed that all visiting fishermen--of whatever nationality--should pay four shillings a week during their sojourn. Truro had no desire to act as mere disciplinarian for a lawless gang of polyglots, and promptly petitioned the Court ‘that Cape Cod [that is, the tip end of the Cape] 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.’ At the same time Truro demanded an explanation from its troublesome protégé why it ‘did not entertain a learned orthodox minister of the Gospel to dispense the word of God to them as required by law.’ In 1727, Provincetown petitioned to be incorporated. The Court granted its request, and Truro was released from the burden that it had borne dutifully for twelve years. By degrees, as the new town learned respect for law, the gay French freedom that had marked its early days gave way to more decorous walking. The town became a dignified and subsequently a very prosperous member of the community.

Shortly after Provincetown was incorporated, the lower Cape, on the strength of its growing population and the new towns that were being incorporated there, petitioned the Court to be made a separate county, with its headquarters at Eastham. The reason for the request was that the distance to Barnstable Courthouse was a great inconvenience to jurymen and others who had lawsuits on their hands. The Court, however, wisely refused. In 1763, Billingsgate, which had always been under the jurisdiction of Eastham, set up for itself and became the town of Wellfleet. In the act of incorporation the Court christened the new town Poole, perhaps after the English town of that name. But the citizens preferred Wellfleet and Wellfleet it became. Clearly this is not a fancy name. Its origin was for many years a mystery. Various conjectures were made--among them the suggestion that the name was a corruption of ‘Whale fleet’--appropriate enough in view of the town’s activity in this business, but hardly convincing. The late Everett Nye, postmaster and historian of the town, suggests that it was named for the celebrated Wallfleet oysters, which came from Blackwater Bay in the English Essex; and quite recently an alert antiquarian, in glancing over a sixteenth-century broadside, came upon the line ‘Wallfleet oysters be very good food.’ The riddle was answered--oysters had lain thick on Billingsgate flats from time immemorial; nothing was more natural than that the men who lived there should name the town for these famous oyster beds of England.

In 1797, Eastham was shorn of still another great district, Orleans, that lay along her western border. The incorporation of this town completed the ruin of Eastham. Originally she had controlled--nominally, at least--all the territory below Yarmouth. One by one, as her forests fell and her soil was blown thin, Chatham, Harwich, Truro, and Wellfleet had been lost to her. Now, with the independence of Orleans, the old mother town of the lower Cape experienced the same feelings of desertion that Plymouth had undergone when half her men left home to settle Eastham in the wilderness. Her prestige was gone; like Plymouth, she must from now on rest content with a small tax list, a modest acreage, and a proud past.

Minor troubles like these, however, are of no importance when compared with a very real disaster that the Cape met with during this period. Prosperity, in spite of Quaker troubles, had marked the long régime of Prince and Hinckley. Prosperity continued, after Prince’s death, under the tolerant leadership of Josiah Winslow, who served as Governor until his death in 1680. The helm was then once more put into the hands of a Cape-Codder, and Thomas Hinckley, after seven years of retirement from public life, was elected Governor. He was sixty-two years old, and no man in the colony had a more intimate knowledge of its affairs. He had come to Barnstable with Lothrop in 1639, had fought in the French and Indian War, and afterwards had served for seventeen years as Prince’s assistant. Thus he had had experience as pioneer, soldier, and magistrate. Hinckley was progressive, and under him in 1685 the Colony, for convenience in administration, was divided into three counties, Plymouth, Bristol, and Barnstable, the last including the entire Cape, with Barnstable as the shire town. A courthouse was built, and appropriate officials were appointed.

But the great disaster lay ahead. In 1686, while Hinckley was serving his sixth term, the notorious Edmond Andros came from New York with a commission from James II, and not only supplanted Hinckley as Governor, but completely abolished the now long-sanctioned government of the Plymouth Colony. This amazing magistrate operated on the theory that the colonists were not Englishmen. The titles to their farms, which the settlers had earned by the sweat of their brows, and had hewn with their own hands out of the wilderness, Andros declared worthless. Indian deeds he characterized as ‘a scratch with a Bear’s paw,’ and he demanded that the colonists pay quit-rent for land that had been theirs for two generations.

Nothing can more effectively destroy a man’s peace of mind than to be told that his house is built on quicksand; he may not believe it, but his tranquillity is at an end. Such was the effect of Andros’s proclamation. Hinckley was powerless to oppose this royal representative, who came armed with the majesty of the British Empire, but his long training stood him in good stead. He kept his head, bowed though it was to the inevitable, and, realizing that he could best serve the interests of the Colony by quiet work from the inside, he accepted a seat in Andros’s Council. While he held this position--which he soon discovered to be an empty honor--Hinckley did his best to relieve the sufferings of the citizens. He repeatedly petitioned a deaf King for justice, he stalwartly opposed a scheme that Andros devised whereby the colonists should be taxed for the support of the Church of England. But all was in vain. During 1687 and 1688, the Colony was paralyzed. The withering tyranny of Andros taxed men into poverty and killed their ambition. Cornfields were knee deep in weeds. His administration was a fine example of belated severity. Wisdom has her own opinion of the parent who, after giving his son free rein for years and shutting both eyes to his errors, suddenly calls him to account in the woodshed and then locks him in his room. This was precisely what the British Government, in the person of Andros, was doing to New England. There is no doubt that in some cases freedom had gone to the colonists’ heads and affected them as old wine affects an abstainer. Charters had not always been obeyed; the settlers had more than once taken the law into their own hands. At such irregularities Parliament had winked for seventy years; but now, suddenly aroused to irrational severity, it acted as though the colonists were a penal settlement instead of a group of earnest experimentalists.

Happily, in 1689, James, who was no more successful in England than his agents were here, was forced to flee for his life, and with the accession of William and Mary, Andros, who had been jailed in Boston at the first whisper of the King’s flight, was officially deposed. The Plymouth Government immediately resumed its activities, with Hinckley in command. The New-Englanders learned much from their experience with Andros; the old country nothing. Almost a century later, Burke was laboring to make a stubborn House of Commons understand that a wise neglect was the only way for an empire to hold remote possessions; and the colonists, having experienced once too often the tyranny that only ignorant governments are capable of, were storing up powder and molding bullets for the Revolution.

The last year of Hinckley’s régime, 1692, was marked by an event of great importance--the merging of the Plymouth Colony with its younger neighbor, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This step was taken in spite of the strong opposition of the Old Colony, whose citizens petitioned in vain for a separate charter. William and Mary remained obdurate and would give but one charter for both Colonies, uniting them into the ‘Massachusetts Bay in New England.’ Furthermore, the Crown from now on insisted on appointing the Colonial Governors, refusing to allow the practice of electing them to continue. In 1692, Sir William Phipps (the only successful treasure-seeker outside the pages of fiction) arrived with the new charter and with his own commission as Governor. The Old Plymouth Colony was entitled to four Councilors, and promptly sent Hinckley as one of them. Two of the others also, John Walley and Barnabas Lothrop, were or had been Barnstable men; so the Cape was well represented in the new government.

There was much speculation throughout the Colony as to how far Hinckley had aided the unwelcome union, and his firmest friends had to confess that he had at least done nothing to oppose it. What his real feelings were in regard to this important transaction cannot be known, for he was wise enough to keep them to himself. If, as many believed, he favored it, he showed himself a statesman. Any one who was not blinded by sentiment could see that the days of the Plymouth Government were numbered. On the north, the Bay Colony outnumbered its population more than four to one. On the west and south, New York had already begun to angle for its annexation. The Old Colony was living on the unsubstantial basis of its past, and men of vision saw clearly that it must soon be absorbed by one or the other of these prosperous neighbors. It is more than likely that Hinckley was among this number. No one knew better than he the impoverished condition and the growing weakness of the Colony, and he was honest enough to admit that hope for future prosperity unaided was a will-o’-the-wisp. In such circumstances any conscientious Governor would work for a powerful alliance, even if it sacrificed the identity of his government and cost him his own position.

The Cape, during the hundred years or so following Governor Prince’s death, was at war with some one or other a good part of the time. First came King Philip’s conspiracy in 1675. After this had been crushed, there followed the long, intermittent French and Indian wars, which for want of better names have been called after the King or Queen who happened to be reigning at the time. Thus the 1690 fighting was known as King William’s War; when this was prolonged after the Treaty of Ryswick, it became Queen Anne’s War. Hostilities ceased for a time with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, but twenty-five years later England and Spain were at each other’s throats, and a few Cape men--who took about as much interest in the quarrel as the Madagascar Negroes did in the World War--died of fever in Cuban swamps. In 1744, the English and French were at it again, and the Cape in consequence embarked on the celebrated Louisburg Expedition. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, which followed the capture of Louisburg, was a bitter pill to the victorious Cape soldiers, but they took up arms again in 1755 and marched against the French at Fort Duquesne, Niagara, Crown Point, and in Nova Scotia. The Peace of Paris, which was signed in 1763, came just in time to give the Cape a chance to draw breath for the Revolution.

It must not be supposed that the Cape was much exercised by these wars. They were too frequent and most of them too remote to be regarded as anything more than nuisances by men whose interests were in raising good crops of corn and catching as many fish and harpooning as many whales as they could. None of the fighting took place on Cape soil, and although at one time or another a good many Cape men were in the service, their casualties were not heavy. The only conflict that touched them nearly was King Philip’s War, and even then all the fighting was off the Cape. However, the effects of such prolonged hostilities were marked, and two or three of the outstanding military figures were Cape men.

The nominal cause of the war against Philip was the supposed murder at Middleboro of an educated Indian named Sausamon. The Plymouth Court, with characteristic zeal, arrested three Indians--one of whom was a councilor of Philip--charging them with the murder; they were tried and executed, whether justly or unjustly nobody knows. Here was the pretext that Philip had been waiting for. He assembled his warriors, and the fight was on.

The ins and outs of the Sausamon affair remain mysteries. It has been alleged that he was bringing or had brought to the whites news of Philip’s hostile preparations, and that this treachery was the cause of his murder. It may very well be so. Far more doubtful is the question whether or not the Court hanged the right men as his assassins. However, these matters are of no importance. A conflict was inevitable, murder or no murder. Whenever civilized men invade the domains of savages, a fight is bound to follow, sooner or later. Philip had long been restless and alarmed; the settlers had never felt easy since their arrival more than fifty years before. Anything might have served as a spark for the inevitable explosion; Sausamon’s death was more than adequate.

The unnecessary but perfectly natural apprehensions of the Cape villages during this war have been sufficiently discussed in another chapter. Surrounded as they were by Indians who might turn hostile at any moment, it is no wonder that the townspeople felt anxious as they watched their quotas march off to Rhode Island, the departure of every detachment weakening their own defense to an alarming degree. Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth each sent about one hundred men in all; Eastham about fifty. Happily for the peace of mind of those who stayed at home, these soldiers did not leave at the same time; each town sent its quota in several installments, and many of the enlistments, following the old custom, were for very short periods of time. Even so, a wide breach was left in the Cape’s defenses, and boys who were too young to enlist were drafted into the home guard.

Owing to the cheerfully unscientific fashion in which our ancestors conducted wars, it is almost impossible to trace exactly the campaigns in which Cape-Codders were engaged. A letter from Captain John Gorham, who commanded the Yarmouth detachment, has been preserved, and indicates that he and his men were having the same experience that has been shared by many fighters of Indians: they had spent fourteen weeks in a vain attempt to find the enemy. Subsequently, Gorham succeeded in joining forces with the main body of the colonial troops, and took part in the most important battle of the war, that of Swamp Fort, near North Kingston, Rhode Island. This was not an attack against Philip but against the Narragansetts who were supporting him. This powerful tribe had withdrawn to a fortified plateau surrounded by a swamp and further protected by a rude palisade. Here were assembled not only their warriors, but their families and all their possessions as well. The Colonial Headquarters decided that this stronghold must be taken, and troops consequently set out from Wickford before daylight on a December morning, marched twenty miles through the snow, stormed Swamp Fort in a four-hour fight, killed or wounded about a thousand Indians, burned their lodges, and started back to Wickford through snow and darkness. Thomas Hinckley was in charge of the commissary department on this expedition, and managed to supply the troops with food enough to keep them going, but when they arrived at Wickford next morning, their condition may be imagined. Captain Gorham, who during this attack was in command of half the Plymouth Colony’s battalion, with Sparrow, of Eastham, as lieutenant, died two months later from an illness contracted during this twenty-four hours of toil and fighting; but no other Cape men were lost.

The Narragansetts were now out of the running, and the Colony was free to concentrate on Philip. The only other engagement that affords any record of Cape troops was at or near Seekonk (Rehoboth). Here in the early spring of 1676, Captain John Pierce, of Scituate, with a small command of about fifty whites and twenty Indians from the friendly Cape tribes, was led into ambush by the same trick that birds employ to lead enemies away from their nests--feigning injury. Too late Pierce saw his predicament; almost the entire company were killed; their lives were not thrown away, however, for the Indian losses were still heavier. The Cape casualties in this disaster numbered twenty-one. It is easy to criticize Pierce for his folly in being deceived by so ancient a trick. In fact, however, like most of the tactical errors of colonial officers, it was the result of impetuosity and zeal. The settlers knew little of the science of warfare. They distrusted the unorthodox methods of their one inspired commander, Captain Ben Church, and tied his hands so often that he resigned and was induced to take the field again only by a conscience which was powerful enough to overcome his righteous indignation. If his advice at Swamp Fort had been followed, the nightmare march back to Wickford would have been avoided, and the weary soldiers would have slept in the warm Indian huts which their commander’s folly had prompted them to burn. No group of men were ever educated at a higher price than the early New England army officers.

Philip, his allies falling away and his own tribe scattered, finally returned to Mount Hope with three hundred warriors who remained faithful to him. Church, who had resumed command, with a little band of forty men, half of whom were Indians, harassed the luckless Philip in repeated skirmishes and finally bottled him up in his stronghold. While trying to sneak away from this last entrenchment, the notorious savage was shot by one of Church’s Indians. After a few more false flashes, the settlements were again at peace.

The happy situation of the Cape during the war becomes more striking when compared with the experiences of settlements near by. A part of Plymouth called Halifax was burned; Bridgewater, Taunton, and Scituate were raided, some of them more than once; houses were destroyed in Middleboro. At Eel River, three miles on the Sandwich side of Plymouth, a fortified house that sheltered the property of a number of neighboring settlers was plundered and burned and a dozen women and children tomahawked while the garrison were at church. At such atrocities the Cape shuddered, but was safe. Even the casualties among its troops were insignificant. To set the total at fifty would be putting it high.

When it came to paying the bill, however, the case was different, and justly so. The war debt of the Plymouth Colony had reached the staggering sum of £27,000, and of this amount the towns of the Cape were naturally called upon for their full share. Every spare shilling that could be wrung out of the soil or pulled out of the sea went into taxes; frugality, always the rule on the Cape, became now an absolute necessity, and with a fortitude equal to that which their fathers had shown in paying the Merchant Adventurers, the settlers paid this huge sum to the uttermost farthing.

Scarcely were they relieved of this burden when another war cloud began to roll up ominously in the north. As early as 1631, Plymouth traders had had trouble with the French in the neighborhood of Penobscot Bay, and the skirmishes that took place then indicated clearly enough that serious trouble must come when the colonies of the two old rivals began to spread. It is not the purpose of this volume to rehearse in detail the well-known story of the long struggle which did come, and which, though broken from time to time by a series of inadequate treaties, left the Colonies small time for profitable pursuits between 1689 and 1763. Omitting all references to causes and effects, except in so far as they were reflected in the fortunes of Cape-Codders, the present narrative will confine itself to the exploits of Cape men in these French and Indian Wars.

Of these exploits the most picturesque was that of the whaleboat fleet commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel John Gorham, of Barnstable, son of the renowned Indian fighter. Shallow-draft boats of some sort were needed for carrying troops up the rivers to the settlements which the French, with a proper respect for the British navy, had established far inland. Whaleboats were the very craft for this sort of enterprise, and since the Cape was the home of the most experienced whalemen in New England, it was only natural that Captain Ben Church should look to the Cape for the man to command this branch of the expedition. These unique fleets made their first appearance in 1690, early in King William’s War, and continued to be used during Queen Anne’s War. Church in a letter to Governor Dudley gives a good description of them: he called for forty or fifty ‘good whaleboats, well fitted with good oars and twelve or fifteen good paddles to every boat. And upon the wale of each boat, five pieces of strong leather to be fastened on each side to slip five small ash bars through; so that, whenever they land the men may step overboard and slip in said bars across, and take up said boat that she may not be hurt against the rocks.’ Each carried its own camping equipment and provisions, and when turned bottom-up furnished adequate shelter at night. On a pinch, five hundred men could be floated inland on forty or fifty boats.

Young Cape whalemen, who could be dragooned into any other branch of the service only with the greatest difficulty, consented to embark in this flotilla with less reluctance. They felt more at home swinging an ash oar in a whaleboat than trooping through the woods with a musket. So the whaleboat fleets were very largely Cape Cod ventures, and to the Cape men who commanded and manned them belongs the credit for such success as they achieved.

At first this success was not great. The Canada expedition of 1689-90 ended in disaster, and Gorham’s whaleboats had to retreat as well as the land forces. That Church in no way ascribed his failure to the ‘fleet,’ appears from the fact that in subsequent expeditions the Barnstable Captain was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and was second in command of the entire campaign. But in spite of his advancement he stuck to his whaleboats, and led several fleets of them against French settlements before the Peace of Ryswick was signed in 1697.

This peace, though it put a stop to hostilities for the moment, by no means settled the differences between England and France. The respite lasted six years. Then, in 1703, Queen Anne’s War began, and the Indians, at the instigation of the French, sacked Deerfield. Again Church was given command of the New England troops, and again Gorham assembled the whaleboats. The expedition sailed north, where it ingloriously pillaged the Acadian coast. The French retaliated by sending an occasional privateer to loot the unprotected fishing village of Provincetown. Port Royal fell in 1710, but the English forces shattered themselves in vain against the natural bulwarks of Quebec. The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 came nearer being permanent than any preceding cessation of hostilities, and gave the Colonies a generation in which to recuperate.

During the lull, Church and Gorham died, but the latter handed the torch to his son Shubael, who, when the next phase of the century of warfare began, was on hand at the capture of Louisburg in 1745, with his two sons John and David. Louisburg was the headquarters of armed French vessels that for years had made fishing on the Grand Banks risky business for British subjects; and, forsaking northern waters, had even seized our merchantmen as they plied between New England and the West Indies. The Cape had money invested in both these branches of maritime enterprise, and many of her sons were in command of the ships. It was with altogether unwonted zeal, therefore, that Cape men girded up their loins for the reduction of this stronghold.

Forty recruits immediately enlisted from Yarmouth under Captain Joseph Thacher, and the other towns were equally prompt with their quotas. The freedom of the sea was a cry that touched these sailors nearly. Shubael Gorham commanded the first company of the Seventh Massachusetts Regiment, and his son John commanded the Second, and had charge of the whaleboat fleet, which had become a family tradition. Shubael’s other son, David, also served under his father. All three had the title of Colonel, and were citizens of Barnstable. As usual, numbers of friendly Indians were included in the Cape detachments. The whaleboat fleet went through the hardest fighting of the entire siege, and, though its attacks were repulsed, John Gorham and his men lived up to the reputation for valor that his ancestors had established. Tradition has it that one of the Yarmouth Indians in Thacher’s company risked his life for a bottle of brandy by crawling into the fortress through an embrasure and opening the gate to the invaders. At any rate, the stronghold fell, and in June, 1745, the city of Louisburg surrendered to Sir William Pepperell’s New-Englanders.

For the next three years, Cape-Codders, though they did little fighting, were kept in a state of apprehension by the report that a French armada was under way to avenge the fall of Louisburg by plundering the New England coast. If such a fleet had actually arrived, the Cape would certainly have been the first to suffer, for its unprotected shores were an invitation to any invader. Happily, storms and sickness took the teeth out of the expedition, and in 1748 the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle put an end to the Cape’s anxiety. But it was a bitter pill to all New-Englanders, for by its terms the fortress that they had bled to reduce was handed back to the French. This amazing piece of folly looked to the colonists like treachery pure and simple; but it was only another of the many instances in which statesmen have undone the work of soldiers.

War came again in 1755. Great Britain accused France of violating the terms of the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, and sent over a force of regulars to show colonial troops how campaigns should be conducted. Expeditions against Fort Duquesne, Crown Point, Niagara, and Nova Scotia met with varying success, but the British were at last the inglorious victors, and Canada, which for a century had been the bone of contention between the two powers, passed into their hands by the Peace of Paris in 1763.

Early in this phase of the war, the Cape was bewildered by the arrival, on the south shore of Sandwich, of seven boatloads of ‘French neutrals’ with their families. These wanderers said that they were on their way from Rhode Island to Boston, and asked to have their boats carted across to the Bay shore. Instead of granting the request, the Sandwich authorities seized the boats and sold them, and held the Frenchmen under arrest--distributing them among the neighboring towns, where they were detained until the end of the war. This was the only band of exiled Acadians whose wanderings brought them to the Cape.

The result of sending British troops to this war was very different from what the King and his Councilors had anticipated. Instead of furnishing the undisciplined local talent with a splendid example of military acumen, the regulars, who knew less about Indian warfare than the settlers did about dress parades, marched to destruction under the valiant but hidebound Braddock, while the colonial troops, watching from the shelter of tree-trunks and rocks, discovered that these invincibles were frail creatures after all. Cape-Codders who limped home after these fights brought astounding news to their fellow citizens: The British regulars were men of straw; they knew nothing of warfare as it was waged in the wilderness; their valor served only to lead them into close range of hidden muskets; a young Virginian had reassembled the remains of Braddock’s command and shown a flexible leadership that made the officers of the old country stare in amazement. Great Britain, indeed! What had she to enforce obedience with? Such was the comment of veterans at the fireside, while James Otis, the young West Barnstable orator, was preaching Independence in high places. Revolution was only twelve years away.

The wars had reduced the Colonies to financial chaos. New England had been wading through campaigns for three generations, and there was not money enough to pay for them all. Men had had small experience with money in the eighteenth century, and wise ministers of finance were too few to prevent the inflation of currency--a resort which has proved fatal as often as it has been tried. The Colonies were deluged with paper money that had nothing behind it; on the Cape the depreciation was not only tremendous, but shifted with the disconcerting unexpectedness of a feather before random zephyrs. Fishermen could not tell what their fares were worth until they had reduced the fabulous sum of paper pounds to a basis of hard cash, and in the process the profits shrank almost to invisibility. In 1707, the citizens of Falmouth, in calling a new minister, furnish an illuminating bit of evidence as to the value of a shilling. ‘We ... are ... agreed,’ they write, ‘to give you £160 in money, at weight and value it now usually passeth at, which is 15 pennyweight at six shillings.’ At that rate, a shilling had shrunk to a quarter of its normal value. Ten years later, it was worth even less. Jenkins, the historian of Falmouth, reckons that in his town in 1718 a pound was worth forty-four cents. In 1749, the Yarmouth minister was poor with a salary of £625 beside the usual perquisites of wood and salt hay. Such was the result of repeated issues of bills of credit; they served only to increase the depth of the water in which the Colonies were already floundering.

The Cape had by this time become largely a maritime region. Fishermen, whalers, and small West India trading vessels, commanded, manned, and in many cases owned, by Cape men, sailed from all the harbors alongshore. The growing commerce, however, had been seriously interfered with by the wars and was now hampered almost as badly by the chaotic state of the currency. Furthermore, whales began to be scarce in local waters; cod-fishermen wanted to be nearer the Grand Banks; Quakers wanted to be farther from the General Court; restlessness and discontent--infallible visitors of civilians in time of war--descended upon many Cape families, and exoduses took place with disturbing frequency. The emigrants offered various excuses for their departure, but behind them all lay the war with its apparently never-ending series of renewals. Besides those who actually left--and only one degree less unsettling to the rest--were the men who kept talking about moving away, but never went. Such malcontents, who lacked the courage to prove their complaints sincere, were abundant. In 1739, a group of Provincetown whalemen announced that they would depart with their families for Casco Bay the next spring and talked of little else throughout the winter; but as far as can be discovered from the records, they grumbled on to their graves in the old town.

Of those who did little talking and quietly sailed away bag and baggage, in search of a new Utopia, the Gorhams of Barnstable are the best known. Colonel Shubael Gorham, the same who took part in the capture of Louisburg, spent all his money and many years of his life in founding the town of Gorham, Maine. With him went some of the best citizens of Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Eastham, with a few from Sandwich. Among them were his brother John and other members of the family. None of these newest pioneers had the enterprise so much at heart as Colonel Shubael, however. His perseverance was largely responsible for securing grants of land from the Legislature as pensions for the descendants of the soldiers in King Philip’s War. A township called Narragansett No. 7 was assigned to old Captain John Gorham’s heirs, and Colonel Shubael, as his grandson, had an indisputable right in it. In 1736, he assembled the other claimants, chief among them his fellow townsman, Captain John Phinney, who acted throughout as his right-hand man. Some who received grants in the new township had no desire to go. The Colonel bought their shares without ever having seen the ground, and like many another land speculator, went bankrupt as a result. His command in the Louisburg Expedition switched his energies from Gorhamtown, as the settlement was usually called, and turned out to be the last act of his life, for he died the next year, 1746. The town of Gorham to-day stands as a monument to his perseverance.

Other scattering emigrants settled in various parts of Maine and Canada, but the majority of those who had no warring ancestor to justify them in claiming land at Gorham set sail for Barrington in Nova Scotia. The history of this township is inextricably interwoven with the narrative of the Cape men who left their homes for newer pastures. Such Cape names as Doane, Crowell, Knowles, Sears, and Nickerson are scattered all over the early records of Barrington and are still common there to-day.

Among the earliest Cape men to settle there were Thomas Crowell and Solomon, Jonathan and Archelaus Smith, fishermen who had grown familiar with the region on their annual voyages north. In 1761, they decided to stay at Barrington instead of wasting time on the long voyage home. They put up log cabins and were joined by their families, who made the trip with Captain Eldad Nickerson, another Cape fisherman and a veteran of Nova Scotia waters. He stayed, too, and became a prosperous trader.

Edmund Doane sailed from the Cape with the timbers of his old house lashed on deck, though he had to cut them shorter in order to get them on board. Doane also carried his furniture and live stock, but, owing to storms and exposure, most of his cattle died before the vessel reached Barrington. In 1762, the little settlement welcomed another group of newcomers from Nantucket and the Cape.

Though Barrington was the first permanent settlement that Cape men made in Nova Scotia, other Cape-Codders were scattered here and there throughout the Province before Crowell and the Smiths decided to move. Governor Lawrence, in a report dated 1760, writes: ‘... Transient fishermen from Marble head and Cape Cod, who have put in there [Liverpool, N.S.] out of curiosity, are so taken with the promising prospects of those people that they have all solicited strongly to be admitted into their township.’

Governor Lawrence, in fact, did everything in his power to make things pleasant for New England fishermen, and his many inducements reached the Cape at the psychological moment. Taxes were high, whales scarce, and the Grand Banks too far away for convenience. It looked like a fine chance to change a Province that was at swords’ points with the King for one that basked in the sunshine of the royal smile. The combination of circumstances was too strong for a good many Cape families. They sailed north and became pioneers once more.

Meanwhile, in spite of taxes, wars, and emigrations, the wheels of progress ground on. Schools were started; churches were full. Even before King Philip’s uprising--as far back, indeed, as 1670--the Plymouth Colony farmed out the Provincetown fisheries to pay for a free school at Plymouth. This was all very well for Plymouth, but it was small help to the Cape children. Plymouth apparently thought she had done her duty by outlying towns seven years before when the General Court recommended that each settlement give the question of schools ‘serious consideration.’ A more generous step was taken in 1687 under Hinckley, when the Court, instead of spending all the revenue from the fisheries to support the Plymouth school, let it be divided among the more important towns. The sum thus supplied was only half enough to pay a teacher, however, for five pounds was the most that any town might receive.

When the two colonies merged, the Cape tried a different scheme, called the ‘Squadron System,’ whereby the school went to the pupil instead of the pupil’s going to the school. It was out of the question for children who lived far out on the fringes of thinly settled towns to make long daily trips to school; it was hard enough to get them all to church once a week. The schoolmaster, therefore, following the example of the peripatetic philosophers, moved from one part of a township to another and kept school for a stated time in each. At first only one shift was needed to cover a whole town; but as the settlements grew, the pedagogue’s wanderings became more frequent, until in 1730 it took him six moves and three years and a half to make the rounds of Harwich, allowing on an average six months for each group. When he had finished the cycle, if his courage was still good, he began again and worked his way round the town once more.

The curriculum consisted of the three R’s, good measure considering the salaries the towns paid the teachers. In 1700, Eastham paid ten pence per week per child; in Sandwich, the devoted James Battersly labored from 1701 to 1704 for ten pounds a year. But for the custom of ‘boarding round’ with the families of their pupils, it would seem that schoolmasters must have starved; but Deacon Joseph Hawes, who taught in Yarmouth and Barnstable just after the Revolution, received seven dollars a month and boarded himself.

The Deacon has left an illuminating account of his experiences as a pupil in the pre-Revolutionary schools of Yarmouth. He says that the teacher

was generally placed in a great chair, at a large table before a
large fireplace. When he entered, every scholar must make a bow.
The master would make a short prayer, (this was held sacred by the
good old women). The Bible class was then called out to read one
chapter, standing in a half circle behind the master. He would
meantime be employed making pens etc., while each scholar would
mention the number and read one verse, while some might be playing
pins and others matching coppers. Then the Psalter class read in the
same manner.... The master would be writing copies, setting sums,
making and mending pens, etc., while nearly all the scholars would
be playing or idle. The most forward in Arithmetic might do one
or two sums in a day, if they could do them without the master’s
assistance;--he gave me one sum in the Single Rule of Three, which
I could not resolve for two or three days; after requesting him a
number of times to inform me, he would reply he had no time, and
I must study the answer.... As soon as the master retired from
the school, every instrument of correction or torture would by the
scholars be destroyed. At this time I lived with my aged grandfather,
who had a liberal education but in low circumstances. I could learn
more in his corner with my pine candle, in one evening, than I could
at school in a week.

Apparently Ichabod Cranes tarried in other regions besides Sleepy Hollow, but some discount should be granted the Deacon’s narrative for the unfailing exaggeration that every adult male allows himself when recounting his youthful exploits at school. Time is a magnifier that turns snub-nosed youngsters into gigantic malefactors; with the passing of the years, a single unruly episode is seen as habitual rebellion. Some muscular discipline must have been called for at times, however. Who can doubt, for example, that Nathaniel Dill, of Wellfleet, who for years taught a school for youthful Provincetown whalemen between voyages, relied on something more primitive than knowledge to inspire awe in his Herculean pupils? Our ancestors, in fact, were convinced of the beneficial effects of the rod. The citizens of Truro paid two men to act as ‘boy whipers’ when youth profaned the Sabbath, and they would certainly have supported their schoolmaster in the same robust style. But not even methods of discipline in schools can be standardized. There remains always the individual to upset the profoundest generality. While Dill with his fists was pounding obedience into lads who had harpooned whales, the widow Sarah Spencer, mindful of Satan’s delight in idle hands, gave her Barnstable pupils cotton to pick the seeds out of as they learned the Bible by heart.