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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 8, part 4
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 14:12:20 -0600
References: <200112191104.fBJB48Q10270@lists2.rootsweb.com>


======================================================================
Cape Cod Pilot, by Jeremiah Diggs, American Guide Series, published by
Modern Pilgrim Press, Provincetown, MA, 1937. This was a work
underwritten by the Federal Writers Project, Works Project
Administration (WPA) for the State of Massachusetts.
======================================================================

Chapter VIII - EASTHAM [part 4]

On a day in February of 1936, seven lads of the CCC camp in Brewster
went on a lark. Great sheets and blocks of ice overlay the Bay. There
was a novel thrill in climbing over the frozen crust of the harbor.
Other kids had done it, and when water-wise Cape Codders had chased
them off they had come back and told what fun it was. Out these seven
lads went. Hours later, horror spread through the camp, and wires shot
out the news that seven CCC youths were adrift on a fugitive ice floe
"somewhere on Cape Cod Bay."

That night crowds of helpless boys stood on the shore and built fires,
shivered in the ten-degree blasts that raked the beach and prayed that
their fellow workers could be reached before they were frozen to death
or drowned. And that night Coast Guard forces were mobilized from end
to end of the Cape; planes were called for; the Coast Guard cutter
"Harriet Lane" set out, despite the fact that she was not built for
icebreaking; and newspapers took the story over the nation that seven
young lives were balanced on a cake of ice off the Massachusetts coast.

Twenty hours later, after all hope had been abandoned, the "Harriet
Lane" was still grinding and crashing her way through the ice.

"Visibility was less than half a mile that morning," says Chief
Boatswain FEDDERSEN, who was skippering the cutter. "A thick snowstorm
had turned into rain and sleet. By daylight we were about a mile and a
half off Wellfleet, when a plane circled over the ship. The flyers
waved and pointed to the east and south. We followed that course, and
about 8 o'clock I raised the boys through high-powered glasses in the
pilot house.

"At first I sighted five of them, all in a clump. They were moving up
and down, which told me they were still alive and not bad off. Then I
saw the other two boys about a mile to the southwest. Then we ran into
some extra bad ice, up to ten feet thick, and piled up six to eight
feet high. Finally we got within a quarter of a mile of the five boys,
and the other two started walking towards us.

"I ordered a dory over. I did not know what condition the boys were
in, suspected they would be much worse off than they were. While they
were dragging the dory over the ice, we managed to get the ship out of
a bad jam and work her to a point within twenty yards of the boys.

"My men walked the lads - all except young Fitzsimmons, whose feet
were frozen - back to the 'Harriet Lane,' to keep them active. They
brought Fitzsimmons in the dory. The crew rubbed ice on his feet;
that's the cure for frostbite.

"The boys were crazy with joy as they climbed over the rail. They ran
around and around the deck, shouting and punching each other like
school kids. Lucky for those boys that the wind changed from south to
nor'west, or they would have been swept out to sea before we could
reach them!"

On that same Monday morning, a Washington newspaper columnist was
sitting in his office. And while the seven boys were punching each
other and yelling for joy, his fingers were punching the keys of a
typewriter:

"Treasury and Postoffice bills carry bigger allowances this year -
partly natural growth and partly fancy trimmings like airplanes for
the Coast Guard."

The career of the Coast Guard as a marine detective force to fight rum
running and other smuggling is a dramatic continued story - continued
to this day - but it is kept as far as possible from the public eye.

Now and then it does pop into the news, and of course rumors are
always afloat. There is a whole new category of modern sea yarns on
Cape Cod, half legend, half fact, spun around the "hot cargoes" of
prohibition times and the years since. When you get to Provincetown,
where most of the rum running went on, you may hear a few.

Nauset Light, a mile from the Coast Guard station, has been shining
since 1838, with a new tower set up each time the sea bowls the old
one over. The present tower was once one of twin lights of Chatham,
and now these two bright-eyed old ladies of the beach exchange quick
glances across the strands of Nauset.

Seth KNOWLES' windmill has turned modest in her later days, hiding
behind the houses that line the highway across the road from Town
Hall. When she was in her prime she was a grand worker, and even now
she can crush a lively bushel if the wind is right. But in those days
- when she sat on a hill in South Eastham and was fed by farmers for
miles around - nobody passed her by, as thousands of tourists have
been doing lately. Kids watched her in awe as the sails filled to a
brisk sou'wester and majestically cut great circles out of the sky;
and they stood for hours waiting for Miller Seth to haul taut on his
brakes and heave to; for then, if his "dispepsy" wasn't ailing him too
bad, he'd let 'em go aloft, up in the cap, and see her great fan-shaft
- bigger timber, it was, than a Grand Banker's mainboom - her giant
hand-hewn gear and the massive spindle that turned the stone down on
the grist deck.

All this machinery is still here in the old mill, and on Saturday
afternoons in the summer time, if there's a fit breeze of wind, Miller
John FULCHER sets his sails, swings her into the wind's eye, fills the
hopper and gives the lift-wheel a spin. Miller John, now nearing
eighty, sits at the helm and gravely dips his thumb into the trough to
test the "grind." He has the "miller's thumb;" he is the last of a
proud list of "dry-land sailors" of Cape Cod.

Almost to 1900 the Seth KNOWLES Mill was a going business, ready to
take any man's grist at a "pottle" of two quarts to the bushel, and
promising to have it ready on next grinding day. Then the business
fell off, and Miller John turned to selling hay. The mill was idle
many years, until at last the town of Eastham bought her, just to
"keep her in the family." And now Miller John takes the helm in the
summer time - when the wind is right - to show off-Capers "how they
did it in the old days."

Folks stop when they hear her grinding. The old windmiller has put her
through her paces before crowds of up to a thousand at such times. Yet
the best that is in her - a glimpse of the seven-foot hand-made
peg-wheel, the homely old stones, the smell, the weathering of her
oaken frame - these things are any man's for the asking. If she's
closed and locked, the key is across the road, in Town Hall.

To me, this old mill is an historical exhibit of the first rank - a
bit of the dead past which lives and breathes still, which sings at
her work and is close, endearingly close, to the earth and sky
together. I have a copy of Blunt's "American Coast Pilot," which aided
the mariners of a hundred years ago, by listing landmarks. This 1833
edition notes "a windmill on a hill over the salt mills which is near
the shore at Eastham."

The date 1793 is nailed into a board inside the mill, but this might
have been placed upon her arrival in Eastham, and does not necessarily
mark her real age. The history of the individual wind mills of this
type is not clearly set forth, and accounts of the Eastham relic vary.
The truth is that nobody knows on good evidence when she was first
built or where she came from. She is of the type that Millwright Tom
PAINE designed. Millwright PAINE was an Eastham man, and he was wanted
all over the Cape by towns that clamored for mills. You could buy a
mill then for £75 - something less than the price of a new Ford car
today; but nobody could build a mill as taut and trim as Tom Paine's.
In 1683, he put up two such plants in Eastham. The mills were bought
and sold, "dismasted" and moved, traded back and forth. For all we
know of her, these old timbers may have braced older machinery, that
once was grinding corn for the "sumpy" on a great table around which
sat Sam'l and Eliza TREAT and their eleven children.

Continuing Bay-ward from the mill, the Samoset Road leads to a slight
rise by the beach, and a tablet here marks the "First Encounter" the
"Mayflower" company had with hostile Indians. Let William BRADFORD
tell it at first hand:

"But presently, all on ye sudain, they heard a great & strange crie,
which they knew to be the same voyces they heard in ye night, though
they varied their notes, & one of their company being abroad came
runing in, & cried, 'Men, Indeans, Indeans'; and wthall, their arrowes
came flying amongst them. Their men rane with all speed to recover
their armes, as by ye good providence of God they did. . . . The crie
of ye Indeans was dreadfull, espetially when they saw ther men rune
out of ye randevoue towourds ye shallop, to recover their armes, the
Indieans wheeling aboute upon them. But some runing out with coats of
malle on, & cutlasses in their hands, they soone got their armes, &
let flye amongs them, and quickly stopped their violence."

BRADFORD also explains, though the memorial tablet doesn't, that the
reason the Indians were hostile was that "one Hunt, a mr. of a ship"
had been there six years before and had seized twenty-four of the
Indians and carried them to Spain, where he "sold those silly savages
for rials of eight."


[more to come]
transcribed by and all errors attributed to
Bobbie Hall









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