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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 8, part 5
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 14:12:35 -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 5]

There is a story, too - a long and involved one that has taken on much
verbal avoirdupois in the telling and retelling - about a schooner
that went aground on the nearby flats during the War of 1812.

The vessel was one of the prizes of the British ship-o'-the-line
"Spencer", Richard RAGGETT in command. Other prizes were an Eastham
skipper, Hoppy MAYO by name, and two barrels of rum that had been
taken from his whaleboat. Commodore RAGGETT, every other inch a
gentleman, liked the simple, forthright cut of the Yankee's jib, and
Hoppy's innocence and the Commodore's own liquor invited confidences.

For these bloody silt-harbors, the Commodore said, a man wanted a
pilot who knew the shoals and the deeps. How the devil was a man to
carry out orders when he couldn't make in close enough to land a
two-pound ball? Hoppy nodded, sympathy beclouding his round face.
Another drink, and he offered to pilot the schooner.

She left Provincetown, with Hoppy MAYO and twenty-three Britishers
aboard. So was Hoppy's rum, and to pass the time, he broke it out for
Lieutenant FoTHERINGAY, who was in command of the prize. When Hoppy
had drunk the Britisher under the table, he took a couple of pistols,
heaved the rest of the ship's arms overboard, battened down the hatch
on twenty-one sailors in the fo'cs'le, took over the helm at gunpoint,
and steered the schooner for home. On the Eastham flats he grounded
her, and when a crowd of townsmen came out to the aid of a stranded
Marblehead schooner, they were greeted by neighbor Hoppy MAYO with
twenty-three infuriated British prisoners.

Northward again on the highway, you are going through the asparagus
country-acres of the "Truro grass," as Cape Codders call this
vegetable, which has become an important source of income in Eastham's
later days. All sorts of truck gardening are done in Eastham, but
asparagus is the big crop. You can get a field of asparagus under way
in three or four years, at a cost of about $500 an acre. I have read
that the returns after that may run as high, in good times, as 25 per
cent on the investment. But every time I have talked with a "Truro
grass man," I have been told that times were "still pretty bad." On
the acres which are now spread with commercial fertilizer, the Indians
once spread fish - principally horseshoe crabs, chopped up - and
seaweed and sometimes oyster shells. When the land "ran out," they let
it grow to timber, then burned it off and started all over again.
Their crops were the "corne & beans of various collours" which the
needy Pilgrims found cached.

A short distance north of Eastham Center the highway passes a
cemetery, where one of the hardest-driving shipmasters of the Cape has
gone to his just reward. When Captain Freeman HATCH took his clipper
ship, the "Northern Light," out of San Francisco on a return voyage to
Boston in 1853, he had been offered a new suit of clothes if he could
beat the "Trade Wind," which had sailed three days before.

Captain HATCH not only won his suit of clothes, but reached home in 76
days, 8 hours, a sailing record never equalled. When he arrived in
Boston, he admitted that he had "strained the ship dreadfully." He
said nothing about straining the ship's people, nor does the stone in
this cemetery have any word of the crew, in its commemoration of the
"Astonishing Passage," an "Achievement Won By No Other Mortal Before
Or Since."

[End of Eastham, Wellfleet next]

transcribed by and all errors attributed to
Bobbie Hall










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