Chapter II: Part 2

Many a Cape bride followed her husband to sea, undergoing the dangers and inconveniences of that life in preference to the lonely night on the Cape, where she would be forever in fear of the news that she had joined the legion of women whom the sea had made widows. Many bore their children at sea and with a somehow pathetic zeal set about making a home of their husband’s vessels. It was something to be with their men, but with their best efforts at decorating, and making things snug, the rolling vessels were a far cry from the comfortable white cottages to which they hoped some day to retire, always within sight of the sea, but no more to be upon it.

Much of Aunt Alice’s strength must have come from her mother who, in 1882, travelled to New York with her ten-year old daughter, Alice, Alice’s sister Helen, and a large assortment of luggage, to board her husband’s three-masted bark, the Obed Baxter, for a trip to the other side of the earth. The vessel was bound for the Orient, carrying kerosene and oil for the lamps of China and, as the vessel pitched in the high seas of a northern February, oil fumes constantly escaped through the hatches. This, combined with the constant lurching and rolling of the vessel, gave all of the women a bad two weeks of seasickness where there was no cure and no hope except to get over it, and gain immunity. They did--and became as seaworthy as any members of the crew.

The skipper, Aunt Alice’s father, had done everything possible to recreate a normal existence for his family aboard the vessel. The cabins were fixed up as nearly as possible like a Cape Cod parlor, even to a parlor organ, which doubled for entertainment purposes during the week, and as church organ for the regular Sunday services aboard ship. There were rugs and easy chairs and real beds, and for the children there was a dog and a bowl of goldfish. On a top shelf of the main cabin stood a row of handsome crystal jars from which the children were given a daily ration of multi-colored hard candies. Education was not neglected, and a great store of schoolbooks had been brought aboard from which the children, under the watchful tutelage of their mother and father, completed their daily lessons. Each morning the Captain conducted a short religious service and each evening there were family readings from the Bible by the light of an oil lamp that swayed with the vessel as she drove westward. When schoolwork and household duties were completed, the children would wrap themselves in blankets and watch the cold waters slip by the prow of the ship. Hungrily they would watch for another sail upon the horizon and it would be an exciting moment when other American vessels drew near to signal navigation news and gossip of the home ports and of friends from the Cape.

Aunt Alice had departed New York on Washington’s Birthday and it was over three long months before the ship sighted land. Then it was the rather grim and forbidding bulk of Christmas Island that met their eyes rather than the soft and familiar outlines of a Cape Cod shore. Like many another traveller since, they must have felt that the magic of “Christmas” was a mis-nomer. But there were other lands ahead, all with surprises of their own. At Java Head a wild and noisy lot of nearly-naked, native traders swarmed aboard the vessel with live chickens and fresh fruit to sell and once the girls had conquered their fears at the strangeness of them they were full of gratitude for the change in bill-of-fare.

The “Obed Baxter” arrived at Shanghai on June 25, four months out of New York. The tumult and confusions of that port would have been startling in any case for the Cape Cod wife and her two small daughters but it was made more trying by the fact that the Captain’s sudden illness sent him to a hospital and left his family alone. Cape Cod spunk showed itself then as it would be called upon to show itself on many another occasion. Mrs. Baxter gathered her two children and secured quarters at one of the hotels of the city. From there they visited the hospital and found time to do some sight seeing as well. What an experience it must have been, with the mother called upon to act fearlessly in order to conceal her worst fears from the children! And all in a land that was many thousands of miles from the peaceful Main Street of South Dennis and full of strange sights, sounds and smells. As they walked the streets a horde of beggars, chattering fearfully, tore at their clothes and pushed against them so that it took the greatest control not to show fear. On one occasion the first mate became so infuriated at being jostled about that he pushed a Chinaman backwards. The coolie fell into a boat, broke his neck and died, and the mate was arrested and sent to prison. While awaiting trial he contracted the dreaded cholera that raged throughout the city and died. Now the father-Captain was ill and his First Mate dead, and the three Cape women were more alone than ever.

At last the Captain, though obviously far from well, was released from hospital and the family was united once more. While lying in harbor, waiting for an outward wind, they experienced a real typhoon which raised havoc with shipping in the harbor but fortunately did no damage to the “Obed Baxter”. Seeking shelter from the typhoon, other American Captains had entered the harbor. They must have looked awfully good to the South Dennis family. There was a Mr. Thacher from Yarmouth and Mr. Andrews of Woods Hole, (Woods Hole was only a two day buggy ride from Dennis, after all), and with other Americans, joined by the camaraderie of the sea, they formed an American neighborhood in the harbor of Shanghai. There was much visiting and exchange of gossip and presents and as the favorable wind held off there was opportunity to go again ashore, this time with friends and under more favorable circumstances. There was sightseeing, and souvenir hunting for Oriental whatnots that would someday grace the little parlor mantle back home, and there were ricksha rides for a nickel that made the once-a-year advent of the carousel at Hyannis seem tame and expensive by comparison.

After picking up the remainder of the cargo at Hong Kong for the homeward journey the “Obed Baxter” set sail for home. One of the greatest volcanic eruptions of modern times had taken place in the Java Sea which lent the sky a weird, bright orange tone so that every day was like a perpetual sunset. The girls occupied themselves with scooping baskets of pumice and lava from the sea which was gray for miles with the debris of the volcano. (Aunt Alice, when last I visited her, had a piece of this pumice at her kitchen sink and reported it excellent for scouring pots and pans.) The “Obed Baxter” plowed through the South Seas, through raging storms and high seas, and through the doldrums when the ship hung silent and listless on a sea of glass. And then, while still thousands of miles from home, real tragedy struck the vessel with the death of the Captain.

Now the widowed mother and two small daughters faced a real test of courage and control. The ship was under the command of the Second Mate, who had only recently been promoted from ordinary seaman by the Captain. He had learned his lessons well, however, and there was nothing to do but go on. Aunt Alice’s mother stood fast on one point. Her husband’s remains were not to be committed to the sea but they must rest where he would have wanted to rest, on the hill at South Dennis. An understanding crew prepared the remains as best they could and, after a brief religious service, the flag-draped casket was secured upon the deck for the long voyage home. Then, after nearly a year away, “the Obed Baxter,” her flag flying at half mast for its departed skipper, made New York. Now it was left to the mother to organize the trip back to the Cape where she must begin a new kind of life ashore. They had travelled across and back a limitless and hungry sea to the other side of the earth in a small vessel that, save for the skills at the helm, was at the will of the wind. They had encountered typhoon and volcano, wild waves and listless calms, disease and death, and one hundred and one moments of the terrors of the unknown. But life went on, and you thanked your God that it had been no worse, for, in a sea-going community, the sea had claimed so many, and brought about such tragedy, that Cape people stood up to the buffets of life as bravely as their stout vessels stood up to the angry seas of the world. This was part of the strength that I had felt in Aunt Alice from our first meeting. It was a strength that came from an abiding faith in God and in His sense of the fitness of things--in an era when the living was not easy, and only the strong survived.

But along with spiritual strength Aunt Alice had many another attribute. At eighty, her one intolerance was for other people who were so concerned with being old that they had no eyes for the wonderful world about them, and particularly for the natural wonders of Cape Cod, its land and its four seas. She loved lights and laughter and music, and they were as important to her at eighty as they had been at eight, when she would dance and sing for the amusement of her sea-faring father. Once, when a play was produced by a local group in Liberty Hall at South Dennis, I foolishly expressed surprise when she told me she had attended both performances, and been among the first ones there. “Why,” she exclaimed! “Do you think I could stay to home doing nothing while all that excitement was going on right across the street?” But she could never have just “done nothing”. While she washed her dishes her mind was busy composing little verses, and when her household chores were done she would attend to a voluminous correspondence, or an item of news for the Yarmouth Register, or perhaps sort out her memories of her sea voyage as she looked at the oil painting of the “Obed Baxter” that hung in her parlor. She could reminisce about bygone days when she attended the first class of the new High School at South Dennis, or when she and her husband sang duets at the services in the old white church on Main Street, but she never dwelt upon the past, because she was too interested in what the morrow might bring.

The little house at the corner of Main Street and the High Bank at South Dennis is empty now and lonesome and soon the signs of her not being there to “put it to rights” will commence to show. I miss my visits at the old house, but I shall always remember--and thankfully--a fine friendship that gave me much to remember and an insight into the kind of character that led Cape people to achieve greatness around the world.

SOME NIGHT BEFORES

If there is one thing above another upon which a Cape man has always prided himself it is his independence. Let them take what courses of action they will on the Mainland, and let them subscribe to whatever conventions they admire, the Cape man will make his own mind up about the issues before subscribing to them. It is a tradition that has not been easily come by, which back at the beginnings of American history involved sacrifice and heroism and the expenditure of the skills and treasure of the people, on the land and on the sea. In the year 1776, several of the Cape towns met and gave their approval to a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain a month before the official Declaration was issued on that memorable and long ago July the Fourth. The news of the Declaration on the first Fourth was a cause for almost universal great joy and celebration throughout the Cape and the spirit of independence that reigned that night has reigned in succeeding celebrations right up to the present time. The Night before the Fourth took on a very special and unique flavor on the Cape. Its nearest counterpart on the Mainland would be the old-fashioned Halloween in the pre-“trick-or-treat” era, together with a celebration of Freedom and Independence that had some of the characteristics of License. This was the night when the violent ringing of church bells on midnight of the Third of July would usher in a night of revelry and pranks into which had gone a full year’s planning. At least some of the sons of the Sons of Liberty declared themselves, for one night, to be beyond the law. Vested authority became fair game on the Night before and to them and to the more grouchy or less-popular citizens of the village there always befell the dubious honor of being among the first to have their outhouses overturned amidst the boom and flare of giant firecrackers and the sound of running, revolutionary feet down the sandy streets of the village. The dawn’s early light would reveal the still-smouldering ashes of Main Street bon-fires and of gruesome figures burned in effigy. It would reveal mysteriously-displaced store signs and the incongruous sight of carriages and wagons ingeniously hoisted to a precarious position upon the rooftops of the village. The first light of the holiday would also reveal the formation of the horribles parade that would commence on Main Street and wind its way through the village to the delight of younger children whose eyes were heavy from a sleepless night of anticipation. These were now armed with hoarded firecrackers of their own and the biggest hero among them was he who had contrived the loudest explosion. The horribles wore fantastic masks and old clothes and they rode in ancient and decrepit vehicles of the town that had been borrowed or appropriated by night requisition.

The horribles parade marked the end of a night of freedom and confusion and made way for the more formal celebrations of the day. Then came the characteristic Cape clambake with the wonderful aroma of steaming sea-weed and shellfish replacing the acrid smell of punk and gunpowder. Then came the band concerts with the handsomely-uniformed bandsmen tooting the “Stars and Stripes” at its very loudest to replace the sound of exploding firecrackers. Where they failed, the inevitable speeches of visiting politicians and local patriots nearly succeeded. (It was a good time for grass-roots campaigning and the subject matter provided by the Fourth of July could not have been more popular.) As darkness fell, many of the villages supplied a formal fireworks display, sky rockets and handsome set-pieces, where suddenly out of the darkness there appeared in flaming color the unmistakable likenesses of Washington and Lincoln, of the fife and drums of the “Spirit of Seventy Six” and at last, amidst the final “ohs and ahs” of the deliciously happy and weary multitude, Old Glory herself, handsomer and prouder than ever as she wove in the mechanical breeze of the soft July night. They were great days and happy days, something to be looked forward to and talked about for many months. But however fine the day, however well-contrived the day’s celebration it was the story of the antics of the Night Before which always lived the longest. For it was then that vested authority was often enticed to look aside from the surging spirit of independence--and leadership passed, for a time, into the hands of the town’s high-spirited young men, frequently led by the Town’s Bad Boy.

Most of the villages had their Bad Boy just as they had their Fool. He was usually an over-sized, over-aged, juvenile delinquent, a perpetual adolescent who, nevertheless, had an ingenuity for thinking up unique outrages that made him the recipient of a kind of perverse admiration. In the village where I grew up the Bad Boy title was universally awarded to Henry.

Henry, in spite of a wide streak of plain badness, was a man of unquestioned charm, and the possessor, when he cared to avail himself of them, of extraordinary native wit, skill, and intelligence. He was a good hand aboard a fishing vessel, an expert mason, a better-than-average carpenter, a wit and raconteur, and to the mutual misfortune of himself and society in general, he was also a rare man with a bottle and a glass. A wise employer would pay Henry his wages only at the very completion of a job if he ever expected to see him again. This was entirely satisfactory with Henry who was aware of his own weakness and had the greatest respect for employers who treated him accordingly. For when pay day for Henry came at last, a week or more of outstanding celebration would follow, just as surely as the night the day. One such celebration ended with his return from New York in a taxi with a monkey and a parrot for fellow passengers. Directing the driver to a neat, white house, Henry requested him to wait while he went inside for the money with which to pay the fare. The driver has obviously been impressed with the easy manner and good fellowship of Henry but, after some minutes had passed without sign of his fare, the driver hurried to the door of the house. An elderly and gentile Cape lady answered the hasty knock.

“Where is your husband?”, the cabbie demanded.

“My husband?”, echoed the good lady. “My husband has been dead for twelve years!”

Of course it was so and there was nothing to do about it. Henry, knowing that his Cape neighbors were not much for locking doors, had casually let himself in at the front and, without being seen, made a quick exit out the back, into the safety of neighboring woods and familiar haunts.

Henry’s episodes generally took place during the spring and summer months because he planned on spending the cold days at Barnstable, enjoying the warmth, food and hospitality of the County Jail. He was always expected there then, and he hardly ever varied the routine. He was popular with fellow inmates and with prison personnel and, if his crimes were frequent, they were always of a comparatively minor nature. Once, though, he betrayed the rules of hospitality and it can be believed that his hosts must have taken a very dim view of it, indeed. That was the time when Henry, having completed one of many sentences, emerged into a bustling Cape springtime looking considerably stouter than usual. It was not surprising. A mile or so down the road he drew a prison blanket from under his swollen coat and sold it at a bargain price to an unsuspecting householder. With these funds he obtained a bottle and commenced the celebration of his release.

Henry, whose spirit of independence knew no limits and who knew better, nevertheless, took the attitude that a certain village constable, who then was the only force of law and order in the village, was the sole cause of his various “persecutions”. In the village for many years life became a constant kind of cat-and-mouse game between them. The constable was probably a good man, who in a town that was almost without crime was hardly called upon to be a brave one, but he had an almost overwhelming sense of the importance of his own position and it was probably that trait that made him the everlasting butt of the revellers of the Night Before the Fourth. On that night, his home, on the lonely outskirts of the village, would become an armed camp while he, with a carefully-polished badge of authority on his chest and shot-gun on his knees, prepared to withstand an assault which never failed to materialize and never failed of success. His outhouse toppled readily like a leaf before the storm, firecrackers boomed beneath his veranda and beneath the very window where he sat in the darkness. Each time he peered from behind his curtain the assault began anew. Finally, as the first gray light of Independence Day filtered across the eastern sky he would be hung in effigy in his own dooryard.

Henry was usually at the head of the attacking forces, of course, and it was Henry, of course, who conceived the idea of giving our Constable a memorable ride on one Night Before the Fourth. In the village cemetery, in those days, there rested an ancient town hearse, a curious, horse-drawn vehicle that was shaped like an elaborate coffin on wheels and whose walls and top were entirely of glass. So it happened that, on one Night-Before, the hearse was quietly pulled up to the Constable’s house and he, protesting violently but uselessly, was placed within it, listening to the heavy clasp close above him, an unwilling captive in a glass cage on wheels. Then with great ceremony, in the manner of Timberlane home from the wars, the procession and its prisoner wound through the village streets. When, at length, the conquerors tired of the sport the constable was abandoned in the middle of Main Street where the first light of day and the earliest-rising villagers discovered him in his glass prison. Law and order was restored and he was released to try to restore his lost dignity. He never really did--but he did learn that when some Cape Codders went out to celebrate their independence they really meant it. For, ever after, on the afternoon of the Night Before, our Constable could be seen driving his Model T in the general direction of the canal with never a look backward towards our village. On the morning of the fifth he would be back with us, his badge freshly shined and his billy-club at the ready to maintain law and order for another year--or, at least for another 364 days.

Henry would never have served as a model of deportment on the Cape and his good neighbors deplored his multitudinous misconducts. But his crimes were generally petty and they had a Falstaffian flavor which made him something of a legend. At one time or another you might find his counterpart in any Cape village, and in a day when bad movies had not been replaced by bad talking movies, and when radio had not even suspicioned television, Henry’s latest escapades provided pretty good conversation during long winter evenings on the Cape. Certainly the celebration of Independence Day could not have been the same without him.

SOME PURVEYORS OF NOSTRUMS

Look at any copy of the Register of fifty to seventy five years ago and you will find that, if you can believe advertisements, there was hardly any ailment then of man or beast that did not have a cure. In the old newspaper columns you would find advertisements for Hop Bitters--Invalid’s Friend and Hope (“no vile, drugged, drunken nostrum but the purest and best medicine ever made”), Hood’s Sarsaparilla (a “reliable invigorant that excites the liver to action”), Dyke’s Beard Elixir (“guaranteed to force luxuriant mustaches or grow hair on bald heads in from 20 to 30 days”), and a hundred and one sulphur tonics for females suffering from “general debility and delicate health”. For the gentlemen there was Dr. Dye’s Voltaic Belt through which “electricity” could “restore health, vigor and manhood” and for everyone, particularly in spring, there were a number of Ginger compounds. Ginger, which rode the clipper ships back from the Orient, was an especially favorite ingredient of spring tonics, which was often combined with other ingredients, enough to exhilarate anyone. For example there was Sanford’s Compound of Ginger which noted on its label that to fine ginger had been added “genuine French Brandy, rendering it very much superior to all other preparations on the market.” Inasmuch as the alcoholic content was duly listed as 67% it must have been superior indeed, and there would be little wonder if large segments of the population might not be almost excessively exhilarated come springtime.

The Cape was not left out of the race to make the greatest of all “specifics”. A Hyannis doctor contrived the formula for Fletcher’s Castoria, still a favorite household remedy which babies have been crying for--or at--these many years. And part of the memories of springtime for many a Cape Codder is the little bottle, full of an untasty, brown liquid, called Speedy Relief, that still rests at the back of many a Cape Cod medicine chest. This remarkable remedy, which, from the label, seems to have been equally effective whether used internally or externally, must have brought shudders to many a Cape child before he hustled off to the comfort of a soft feather bed and the joy of a hot soapstone in a flannel bag to drive off the spring dampness that seeped into the unheated rooms above-stairs.

Speedy Relief was the invention of William F. Kenney of South Yarmouth and many Cape people today hold a clear memory of the man with reddish side-burns who carried a black bag full of small bottles and whose calls were as regular as springtime. Of course Speedy Relief was only a sideline with Mr. Kenney who was, in addition to being a manufacturer, an inventor, the village jeweller, and in charge of the telegraph office at South Yarmouth. In addition he had a tintype studio and many a Cape scrap book is filled with pictures of belles and beaus who posed before the broken Greek column in his studio. Nevertheless, so sensitive are Cape Cod taste buds, that it is mostly the memory of Speedy Relief that has lived on.

The wide-spread popularity of the Cape’s own specific played a part in providing a new minister of the town of Yarmouth with some unpleasant moments. His first service was progressing nicely, and it was clear that he had the concentrated attention of all his parishioners. Then he launched into his prayer on which he had spent considerable preparation. All went well until he solemnly intoned, “and to all our sick, bring speedy relief”. These words nearly brought down the house with a wholly unexpected and unlooked-for reaction. The good parson must have been sorely perplexed, indeed, until he was at length let in on the fact that he had, all unwittingly, issued a kind of commercial for a local panacea.

There was another kind of commercial and it may have been the forerunner of all the terrible advertising jingles we are subjected to today. It had a kind of fascinating ring to it, and it is certain that all Cape children of the area were familiar with it:

“Speedy Relief is my belief
And so it is of many.
Put up in bottles
With little cork stopples
And sold by William F. Kenney.”

Less popular, but with its own solid core of supporters was Aunt Sophie’s Bitters which were brewed in the little house at the corner of Upper County Road and Depot Street. Aunt Sophie was a natural artist as a brewer of herbs and potions, for she was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and what more was needed to imbue anyone with all manner of special powers. Was something lost? The neighbors would ask Aunt Sophie about it, and like as not she could tell them where to look for it. Above all, she looked the part she had made for herself, and acted it also, for, as she picked herbs in her yard she would carry on serious conversations with the scraggly brood of hens that picked their way about her, and they would appear to be listening intently to her every word. Needless to say, small fry, on their way home from school made a wide detour around Aunt Sophie’s house. But young men on their way to sea--and young girls sick with love for them--would go to her for their “fortunes”, and come away with wonder at the prospect of their “futures”. Usually they would come away also with a bottle of the grim tasting bitters which found their way into many a Cape pantry in springtime.

Colorful as they may have been, the independent purveyors of nostrums were definitely out-classed by the village pharmacies which were, are, and very likely ever shall be, the heart of every Cape village. Here, on a cold, dark February night one finds the only light, and the only warmth, on an otherwise silent and deserted Main Street. Here, in summer, all is pleasant turmoil and confusion with a long line of small fry guzzling ice cream in the way that small fry always have since the beginnings of ice cream. And about the racks of multi-colored postal cards older folks gather, scantily-clad, but bronzed and happy, only momentarily perplexed by the problem of choosing the most appropriate card for Aunt Ella. Here are an endless variety of magazines with colorful covers that only slightly exaggerate the adventures to be found within. Likely as not some of them have never been sold, but there is, somewhere, someone who enjoys walking into the store to look them over each month. Many avail themselves of this benevolent library service and it is a rare Cape pharmacist who would make an objection. For the winter nights are quiet and long, and company, even intently-reading company, is not so bad. In winter, the pharmacy is a place to go, “up-street”. There you can feel the slow, hibernated pulse of the town, hear an evaluation of local and national issues, and woe to the candidate who fails to cover all the pharmacies. The Cape pharmacist is doctor, librarian, caterer, banker, after-hours post master, good listener, psychiatrist, moderator and custodian of the local Forum where the freedom for expressing an opinion is a sacred right, and where the news is born that has become stale before the daily paper is delivered. Nowadays, nearly all pharmacies have a druggist who has learned to decipher the illegible scrawl of the local doctor and prepare the life-saving wonder drugs for the sick. But this was not always so, and even now the shelves are filled with some of the old-fashioned remedies which have their zealous partisans.

Once, in a Cape village, there was a pharmacy without a druggist, and when a modern establishment opened nearby which boasted one it didn’t really make much difference. There were few, if any, defections among the established clientele. Late into the darkness of even a summer’s night it would be the only light on Main Street, and the gooey sundaes that were dispensed in its ice cream parlor were, for all small fry of the village, the very high spot of the day. By today’s standards it was a rather small and dark store. The clutter of its window displays, which hardly ever changed from year to year, held back the lights, and, from the old stove, that was a comfort in winter, the smell of kerosene lingered on well into the summer. There was an extensive library that was hardly ever disturbed by a purchase--and there was a proprietor who was my very good friend, as well as white-coated steward to our ice cream club. There was nothing he would not have done for us in all the years of our growing up, and his presence in the village drug store lent an air of stability to a community that had already begun to undergo drastic changes at the hands of more and more summer folk who had discovered its charm. He was never anything but kind and helpful and, when we were old enough to recognize the strong smell of “medicine” that he occasionally dispensed to himself in the shadows of a back room, we were careful to avoid mentioning it, and only hoped that he would soon be feeling better. Once, though, I nearly let him down.

For years he had ordered the Sunday New York Times for us, and for years we had paid fifteen cents for it. Then I discovered, by chance, that a store in a neighboring village stocked the same paper for ten cents. Five cents was then the price of an ice cream cone, and it seemed very important, indeed.

“Did you know that you get fifteen cents for the Times while so-and-so up the street only gets ten?” I asked him one day. He always acknowledged a greeting or a bit of conversation with a characteristic lift of the eye-brows so that when he didn’t feel a response necessary you would know that he had heard you just the same. This time the eye-brows raised at once, and the reply came quickly:

“That a fact?” I had a moment of weakness and was sorry that I had gone into it, for even five cents was not an excuse for hurting an old friend. But, standing my ground, I answered, “Yes, that’s a fact.”

But now I was treated to a series of facial expressions that would have done justice to a Barrymore. Commencing with the raised eye-brows his face ran through the whole gamut, from disbelief to pained surprise to complete puzzlement until, finally, scratching at his thinning hair, he looked me straight in the eye, and said,

“Well, now ... _ain’t they foolish_!” I knew when I was licked and I paid the fifteen cents then, and for many a Sunday after.

Years later, when the whole world was to have Fords in its Future, and even a fifteen cent Sunday paper was but a memory, I called on my friend for what turned out to be one of the last times, but perhaps the most satisfactory. I had been away from the Cape for four years, in faraway places across the sea, and the face of much of the earth had been changed, and much of the earth would never be the same again. Even Cape Cod had undergone a change in the war years, and it was with rather strong emotions that I walked past the cluttered drug store windows and into the establishment of my friend. Thankfully he was there, a little older and a little grayer, but nevertheless there, behind the counter in his familiar white coat. His eye-brows raised in familiar greeting, and perhaps he looked up from swishing the soda glasses for a longer instant than normally. But when, after a moment he spoke, it was with the greatest casualness. “Hello, Allan,” he said, slowly. “What’ll you have? A coke?”

Then I knew that not all of the earth had changed, and I was glad of it as I felt the memory of four ugly years slipping quietly away into the shadows of the little store. Then, as was customary, he joined me in a coke, and we picked up the threads of our conversation, exactly where we had temporarily dropped them, in August of 1941. It was good to be home again.

MODERN HEROES OF THE SEA

February, on the Cape or elsewhere in the north, is a poor month, an in-between month, throwing the weather book at you when your resistance is weakest, hurling cold winds, sleet and rain, grayness and wetness enough to almost make you forget that spring is not so far away. February can bring a vicious kind of day that is unknown in any other month, a day when Main Street is deserted and battened down, when hurricane winds lash the trees and pile huge breakers upon the shore and you huddle indoors and are thankful for warmth and dryness and an occupation that does not call you out. February brought this kind of a night and followed it with this kind of a day on the seventeenth and eighteenth of 1952. The wind howled in hurricane force and there was snow and there was rain. The telephone wires screamed their resistance and, listening to their radios which could blot out the rage of nature, Cape people, for the first time, heard the names FORT MERCER and PENDLETON.

No one who was not then on Cape Cod can appreciate the horror and the heroism of that night and morning. No one who was then on the Cape will ever forget the pride we had for the men of the Coast Guard, nor the rather special pride for those Guardsmen who were Capers, carrying on in the same great tradition as their forebears who followed the sea. Even now it is difficult to sort out the facts of that terrible night when the incredible happened, and two sister-ship tankers broke in half off Chatham to become four separate derelicts, each with a partial crew, and each at the mercy of fifty foot waves that, with each gust of angry wind, threatened to sink them.

News flashes first announced that the Fort Mercer was in trouble, thirty miles off Chatham light. Finally it was announced that she had broken in half. Meanwhile, the Chatham radar screen had shown two large objects about five miles off the beach. This, it developed, was the Pendleton, which had broken in two some hours before and because of a broken radio had been unable to wire her predicament. Even the Coast Guard, which had promptly dispatched every available vessel to the scene from as far away as Portland, could not, for a time, accept the incredible fact that two, five hundred and twenty foot tankers had broken up within an area of forty miles and a few hours. Even on the treacherous shoals of Monomoy there was no precedent for such an accident. Nor is it likely that some other macabre accidents of that night shall ever be repeated. For example, some time after the Fort Mercer had broken in two high winds caught up the truant bow and threatened to hurl it with tremendous force at the stern section. The stern section, fortunately, still had engines running and the order for “Full speed astern” was immediately given. The broken stern responded just in time to save the Mercer from a terrible and probably fatal collision with her own bow.

Of the hundreds of brave men who answered the Coast Guard’s call to duty that February night, none displayed greater courage nor greater seamanship than the personnel of the Chatham Light Station. It was they who, without hesitation, launched two of their thirty-six foot open boats into the awful nightmare of Chatham Bars. Fifty-foot waves, thirty-six foot open boats, visibility zero, near hurricane winds, bitter cold with sleet and snow and the blackness of night. The small boats were each under the command of Chatham boys, Donald H. Bangs and Bernard C. Webber. Bangs, after a monumental trip across the outer bar to the sea beyond, first made contact with the Pendleton. Webber, through sheer will power and the help of God, forced his boat through overwhelming seas to the Pendleton’s stern section. There, through the most skillful maneuvering, he took off thirty three survivors of the wreck. His trip to and from the wreck was accomplished with himself lashed to the wheel and his crew clutching the bottom of the boat to keep from being washed overboard. The windshield was broken on the way out and water washed freely over the boat and her crew. How Webber succeeded in bringing his heavily overloaded boat back to safety and shore will never be known, but he did it. And meanwhile, other vessels had been rescuing the crew of the Fort Mercer. The great storm, which could easily have claimed the lives of eighty-four, had claimed fourteen, a heavy toll, but one which would have been so much heavier without the watchful eyes and skill of the Coast Guard.

There is a long history of friendly rivalry between Cape fishermen and the Coast Guard. Capers, who are often as at home on the water as ashore are apt to be critical of the spit and polish and new-fangled methods of the government service. But there was no criticism on that February night. The hats of the fishermen were off, in tribute to the brave seamanship they had witnessed. In many a weather-beaten face of Chatham the eyes were moist when it was known at last that “the boys have made it in”.

There were medals later, presented at a Washington ceremony. But none would shine as brightly as the new place the Coast Guardsmen had found in the hearts of their Cape countrymen.

THE CAPTAINS

When the Cape Captains came home from the sea it was their realization of a dream of security and of normal family life for which they had fought the elements and endured countless hardships. Behind them stretched limitless miles of open ocean, the sea which had claimed so many friends and relatives. In the great days of the Clippers, between 1840 and 1870, the white stones in the cemeteries with the notation “Lost at Sea”, had multiplied so greatly that to a stranger today it would seem that Cape Codders hardly ever lived long enough to die of natural causes. In the year 1840 it was estimated that there were over one thousand “sea-widows” residing in the County. Those who had come home to stay ashore at last did so with humility and thanksgiving in their hearts.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that the life of a deep-water Captain was a business, and a grim and lonesome business at that, in which the Captains were engaged in order to make a living for their families. They chose such a way because the sea was at their doorstep, and in their blood, and in the direction in which their talents lay. Of course there was something in it of the strong call of adventure, and they were equal to it, for they were intelligent and brave, and true pioneers. No port in the world was beyond their reach and in the clipper ships with the wonderful names (Red Jacket, Flying Cloud, Wild Hunter and the rest) they reached them and returned, not once, but a score of times, girdling the globe and reducing its size to the glory of their country. But for most it was the vision of a final haven in some Cape village, with wife and family, and enough money for security, that kept the Captains going through all the lonely years at sea.

It is in the ship’s papers and correspondence of the Captains that the inherent homesickness shines through and in ways that, in their subtlety, make it all the more poignant. Thus a river across the world “looks a little like our own Bass River”, and a distant shoreline “makes me think of the highlands at home”. Perhaps the Captain practices penmanship on a spare page of his log. Then you will see that the names he has written over and over again are those of wife and children, or of his home village on the Cape. Many would use their spare time to dream of the home they would one day build ashore and in the notebooks are frequent drawings of dream mansions, many of which became reality in a Cape village.

Sometimes the controls are off and in some moment of nostalgia he writes from the heart, baldly. One Dennis Captain writes to his owners, “Please to send someone to take over the ship when we reach San Francisco as I have been over three years without seeing home or family and cannot be away from them longer.” Sometimes when things were going especially badly the Captain’s remarks even broke into the “Remarks” column of the ship’s Log as in this entry by a famous Cape Captain on his fortieth day at sea in the Pacific: “Oh, for a cot in some vast wilderness where I shall never see a ship again. If ever one poor fellow has tired of anything it is I that is sick and tired of going to sea.”

As you look over the yellowed pages that the Captains have left behind, you feel that they only were able to shake their haunting vision of home and family when they had the greatest reason to have overwhelming pride in their craft and the challenges they offered. Let them break a standing record for crossing a sea, or triumphantly outsail a superior vessel, or accurately guess a position in mid-ocean just “from the look of things”, or sail through tortuous straits where more timid men had said “can’t be done”, and the pride of honest achievement brought compensation for tiresome, lonesome hours away from home.

Many of the Captains never realized their dream of retirement ashore, but many did, and with the money from their voyages they built their lovely homes along Main Street. Into them went some of the most exotic woods of the tropics, molded into fine panelling by ship’s carpenters who loved the feel of fine wood, and played their own kind of music upon it. And into the panelled rooms went the relics of their hundreds of thousands of miles at sea--teakwood stands and rosewood chairs, tables inlaid with mosaic and ivory, the finest of china and crystal, wallpapers from France and carpets from Belgium, and all the countless odds and ends of curiosities that have appealed to souvenir collectors of all times and generations. Often there were so many things that they spilled out of the house and into the attic where they reposed in the Captain’s sea chests that were kept standing “at the ready” just in case. Every house had such a surfeit of Oriental silks and embroidery that many a young girl, who wanted something really different to wear to a dance, preferred to buy a bolt of calico from the village dry goods store. But when all the curios and souvenirs had been distributed about the Captain’s home, the place of honor would still be saved upon the parlor wall for the oil painting of the Captain’s vessel as it was depicted by some far away artist as it entered the Port of Naples, or Calcutta, or Singapore. For the Captains could never divorce themselves entirely from the beautiful winged ships that had brought them safely home.

From their homes the Captains took their thankfulness and humility to the white churches of the Cape, many of which they had helped to build, and to which they gave their active support. All of the Captains had held regular Sunday services aboard ship, fair weather or foul, and many had held daily readings from the Bible which they kept in their cabin and from which they found frequent solace. Hardly anyone has been so thoroughly committed to the care of the Almighty as the Cape Captain putting out to sea. Church-going brought the same kind of inspirational orderliness to their life ashore as they had taken to the helm of their winged vessels. At every Cape Meeting House one would see faces that had been long gone, but dearly remembered, as the Captains came home. These marine aristocrats were a subject of awe to the young, and their return was an occasion for joy to the adults, for there was hardly a family which did not have some connection of its own with the blue waters that stretched away from the Cape. So to the churches they came, imposing figures in Sunday black, often with magnificent beards and mustaches, always with a kind of slightly rolling gait that set them aside from their land-bound neighbors.

The Captains took their pleasure too. Fraternal orders were established in every village and they took an active part in them. There were trotting races over established courses such as the track which once ran around Wychmere Harbor, or the Trotting Park at West Dennis. And there were wild races over the snow with sleighs, such as took place over South Main Street in South Yarmouth down to the river, with horse manes flying and the beards of distinguished gentlemen thrust into the wind, while sleigh bells tinkled and the unblemished snows of yesteryear crunched beneath the racing hooves of the Captains best horse flesh. Having a fast horse was almost as important to them as a fast ship. And in every village there was a favorite gathering place where, in winter, they would sit about a sizzling stove and have a pipe, and rattle off tales of faraway places which were then so familiar that no Cape boy could have been troubled with geography. In summer there were other things to do for recreation. Then it was time to paint up, caulk, and launch the small boats that they always kept handy. From them they could fish in the bounteous home waters, and feel the old, familiar swells of the sea, and dream a little.

But the Captains had not come ashore to live in idleness. Almost at once they threw themselves into hard work ashore, putting the hard-earned money from the sea to good use. The biographies of the Cape Captains show them to have been as much masters of trade as they had been of their vessels. The list is imposing--bank presidents, and founders of banks, railroad presidents (for they sensed the wisdom of joining forces with the puny ribbons of steel that were already luring freight away from the sea), founders of manufacturies such as the mammoth salt works of the Cape and the 100 worker shoe factory at West Dennis, cranberry-growers and exporters, shipbuilders and ship owners--they were active in everything, and often they were as successful ashore as they had been at sea.

When the Captains came home from the sea they had a busy life and a good life, and it was good to be at home. And for the communities whose life they had so greatly enriched it was good that the Captains had come.

_There was the narrow land and there was the sea that washed against it and there were people that developed many of the characteristics of the homeland. They turned to building with ingenuity and with loving care, and in the clean lines of their fences, their houses, and their places of worship there was something of the land and the sea, and of the kind of people they were._

THE CAPTAINS’ HOUSES

There is often more to a Cape Cod house than meets the eye. First, there is an atmosphere, which even the most insensitive person can notice if he is left alone with the house. Once I found myself in the hands of a most unusual real estate broker who volunteered to show me a house which she insisted she would not, under any circumstances, sell to me. It was technically “For Sale”, but it was, she said, “not a happy house”, and she did not want me to have it. She could not really tell why she felt as she did, but, standing in its front parlor, in the midst of parlor organ, wax flowers, and Victorian confusion, I suddenly sensed what she had felt. It had nothing to do with a creaking door to the upstairs, which alternately opened and closed, although there seemed to be no wind outside the house. No, it was just that all the bright sunlight streaming in from the windows could simply not dispel the sensation of trouble and sadness in the poor, little house. Each heavy drapery seemed to retain the sighs and each distorted mirror to reflect the tears of an unhappy time. It had been a Captain’s house because the familiar symbol of symmetrical spruce stood in the dooryard, but something was wrong about that house and even now it seems destined never to have a permanent tenant. Fortunately, I soon found my own piece of Cape Cod with an old Half House upon it in which at least two fine Dennis Captains had found comfort with their families. I knew at once that it had been a happy house where the sun shone in through crude, old glass as if it meant it, and where there had been laughter of the young, and enough love and affection to go around and fill its little rooms. Call it atmosphere, or spirits, or what you will, there is something about the feeling of an old house.