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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 8, part 1A
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 05:17:06 -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 1A]

Beyond admitting that I am in love with her, I shall not try to list
the colors of her dunes or paint you the surf and the sunset. The
sailing ships that Thoreau watched are now gone beyond all horizons,
but the thirty-mile beachscape which he sketched is otherwise little
changed. To tell you to read Thoreau, for such descriptions, would be
far wiser than to expect you to read me; but to tell you to go see,
and hear and smell and feel the beach, is wisest of all. While surf
rolls up to break on sand, this will ever be so.

The pear blossoms blow each spring over a spot in Eastham, just as
they were blowing soon after a band of Plymouth adventurers had left
their "poore church, like an ancient mother, growne old and forsaken
of her children," to come to "a place called Nawsett." And in the
flowering of a tree in that place, a story is kept alive from the time
a little ship, well named the "Fortune," sailed into Plymouth Harbor.

Thomas PRENCE was in his beginning twenties when he stepped ashore in
1621. Most of the "Fortune's" people were "lusty yonge men, and many
of them wilde enough, who little considered whither or aboute what
they went," but Thomas PRENCE was neither wild nor reckless. Like the
others, he had neither "pot nor pan to drese any meate in," but unlike
them, his eyes were on a single star, which shone coldly bright and
was unclouded by either fear for himself or pity for others.

Perhaps for love, or perhaps with an eye on the star, he
moved auspiciously from the beginning, chose his friends and courted
and married the preacher's daughter. "August 5, 1624 - The ninth
marriage at New Plymouth is of Mr. Thomas Prence with Mrs. [Miss]
Patience Brewster."

Thomas was quite as religious as was required of him by his
father-in-law's "singuler good gift of prayer," but "ye parsimonie of
ye adventurers" aboard the "Fortune" was still fresh in his mind and
"ye conceit of greate returne" brought out a strange hardness at times
which Patience did not find it easy to understand. Thomas was not a
simple man. Patience lived to see him take his place quickly among the
leaders, and to celebrate his election as Governor of the Colony
before he was 35. But she died in the interval between election and
the day she would have become the little colony's First Lady.

A year after the death of Patience was added to the "sorrows, troubls
&c." of old William BREWSTER, Thomas married again. Also, about that
time, he began dubiously comparing his fortune in the new world with
the dream-castles he had brought with him from the old. And at the end
of ten years, 1644, he followed Edmund FREEMAN down the Cape, but not
to stop at the settlement in Sandwich, nor in Barnstable, nor
Yarmouth, but on to a land of "richest soyle, for ye most part a
blakish & deep mould, much like that wher groweth ye best Tobaco in
Virginia."

The land at Nauset had already been "bought" of the Indians - at the
wonderful prices our ancestors paid to these people - but Thomas
PRENCE, John DOANE and the other shrewd young men saw more open fields
to the northward, and inspiration came with the view. They went to the
Indians, demanding of them "who laid claim to Billingsgate
[Wellfleet]." The red men looked at them. They thought of the Pamits
(in Truro) who hunted and fished in "Billingsgate" when it pleased
them; but so did they, the Nausets, hunt there.

Still hazy about the white man's use of this word "owned," the Indians
answered that there was not any who "owned" it. "Then the land," said
the young men, "is ours." and the Indians nodded and for lack of
anything more illuminating to add, replied that "it was."

The young men went back to Plymouth, and there was plenty of time on
the way to unite on a story. On their return, they told the other
ambitious colonists that Nauset "would prove so straite, as it would
not be competente to receive ye whole body, much less be capable of
any addition or increase."

But half of Plymouth still shared Thomas PRENCE's hopes of enrichment
and insisted on going with him. The April thaw had softened Nauset
fields when the company arrived. There was time to plant corn and
beans and to build snugly for the next winter. And there was timber
for that in abundance. The rich soil needed only to be dug, and trees
hewn.

Nauset prospered and in 1651 was named Eastham. Thomas PRENCE
built his house near Fort Hill and one day, after a journey up-Cape,
brought to his new wife, Mary, a little pear tree which some ship
had fetched from the old country. He planted it near the house, and
Mary cared for it.

Seven years after his removal to Cape Cod, Thomas was again
elected Governor of the Colony. But if this must mean leaving Eastham,
the Governor-elect, now middle-aged and well settled, declared he
would forego the office. There was nothing the General Court could do
but to let him govern from Eastham. It was a feather in the cap of the
Lower Cape. There he served for seventeen years, until his death in 1673.

Among his numerous children, the Governor had two beautiful girls.
Down from Sandwich, one day, came a young man who fancied one of the
PRENCE girls, and under a pear tree whose blossoms flickered silver on
a clear night, a troth was plighted. The young man went home and told
his brother about a girl and a pear tree, a marvelous clear night, and
blossoms of silver. He said the girl had a sister. And so, down from
Sandwich hurried another young man, and under the now riotous
flowering of the tree, a second troth was plighted. The names of the
young men were Edmund Freeman Junior and John Freeman.

You will find this note in Henry Thoreau's book:
"There was recently standing, on what was once his [PRENCE's] farm, in
this town, a pear tree which is said to have been brought from
England, and planted there by him, about two hundred years ago. It was
blown down a few months before we were there. A late account says that
it was recently in a vigorous state; the fruit small, but excellent;
and it yielded on an average fifteen bushels. Some appropriate lines
have been addressed to it, by a Mr. Heman DOANE, from which I will
quote, partly because they are the only specimen of Cape Cod verse
which I remember to have seen (ah, lucky Thoreau!) and partly because
they are not bad." One of the passages he quotes:

"That exiled band long since have passed away,
And still, old Tree! Thou standest in the place
Where Prence's hand did plant thee in his day, --
An undesigned memorial of his race."

But as you pass that place today, you will find on the spot where
Thomas PRENCE set down his sapling, a pear tree flourishing still. For
the link in the story that Thoreau missed, in his preoccupation with
the poetry, was a cutting from the old tree, after it had been blown
down in the gale he mentions.

The DOANEs of Eastham, who owned the farm in Thoreau's time, were like
other Cape Codders; they wasted not the good things of the earth -
particularly when such things had a place in the tradition of a
household. And so, a pear tree, descendant of English stock and the
work once removed of the Governor's hand, still is on the Eastham farm
where Thomas PRENCE lived. In South Eastham you will find an old
cemetery at the right of the highway. There is a fork about
three-tenths of a mile beyond this burying ground. Bearing right, just
a few feet from the fork you are brought before a small white house,
the home of a man who is in his eighties at this writing, and whose
name is Abalino DOANE. On Abalino's acres stood the Governor's house,
and a few rods northeast, in a field, the pear tree still stands.

Abalino is a descendant of Deacon John DOANE. Of the Deacon it is
written that he lived to be 110 and had to be rocked in a cradle in
his old age. However, the patient members of the family who had to
rock him through the years got their satisfaction at long last - they
buried him standing up!

The Deacon had left a brother, Daniel, in Plymouth. When Deacon John
saw Eastham prosper, he sent for Daniel, who was a physician. One of
Daniel's descendants (possibly in payment of an overdue doctor bill)
acquired the PRENCE homestead. Abalino DOANE inherited it a few
generations later.

Timbers taken from the PRENCE house went into a barn, which stood as
Eastham's oldest building until another northeast gale swept across
the duneland and took it apart like the wonderful one-hoss shay. The
stone doorstep was given to Provincetown for the Pilgrim Memorial, and
is set at the base of that structure today.

About the time that Thoreau stopped at the DOANE place, Captain
Lincoln DAWSON had just returned from a voyage in his trading schooner
to Italy. Captain DAWSON, a down-easter, had married a DOANE, and when
he came to visit at EAstham, he told all the folks about an opera he
had attended abroad. It was a grand tale, and a grand, grand opera,
and he wasn't certain of the title, but he sad it sounded like
"Rosemandel and Abalino." And so, he first two grandchildren born
after the Captain's return - conveniently a girl and a boy - were
Rosemandel DOANE and Abalino DOANE.


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


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