n by a sea that grumbles when it does
not cry aloud. At the time of year when Standish and his men
patrolled its beaches, it is no wonder they saw savages behind
every liliputian pitch pine and heard them shouting in the wind
and sea. So far as the records go the Icelanders came first of all
and Thorfinn Karlsefne, who set sail about 1000 A.D., called the
place "Furdurstandir," or wonderstrands, perhaps because of the
immense stretches of sea beach along the outside, but quite as
likely on account of the mirage which so often greets one in the
region thereabouts. A much later explorer tells how the curious
atmospheric effects made the land seem to tip up in front of him
in whichever direction he walked, making level land and even
downhill look like uphill, so uplifting is the Cape air.

Gosnold was perhaps the first Englishman to set foot there, doing
it first in 1602 and coming again, as we all must, once we know
the region. Gosnold and his men got the eerie feel of the place
too when the winter approached. They colonized Cuttyhunk and did
very well through the summer, digging sassafras by day and
retreating to their fort on the little island in the pond on the
bigger island every time the goblins chased them: But the shouting
of warlocks in the autumn gales was too much for them and they
reembarked for England, glad to get away from the land which was
so beautiful and so strange.

A dozen years later came Captain John Smith, who feared neither
man nor devil, and who saw nothing unprosaic about the place. As
mariner and cartographer to him it was a cape, and nothing more.
"Cape Cod," he writes, "which next presents itself, is only a
headland of hills of sand, overgrown with scrubby pines, hurts and
such trash, but an excellent harbor in all weathers. The Cape is
made of the main sea on one side, and a great bay on the other in
the form of a sickle. On it doth inhabit the people of Pawmet, and
in the bottom of the Bay those of Chawum."

The bottom of the bay means the region of Barnstable and west, and
the people of "Chawum" were the Indians of that region. The word
sounds dangerous and suggests cannibals, which I do not believe
the Indians were, even in those days. Perhaps it refers to their
chief, who may well have been an aboriginal Dr. Fletcher. The word
"hurts" is more difficult to dispose of but I find it was just his
way--and indeed the way of the English of his time--of saying
huckleberry. That delectable f