e Cape was at first thickly settled
by Indians on account of the abundance of these and other fish. We saw
many traces of their occupancy, after this, in Truro, near Great Hollow,
and at High-Head, near East-Harbor River,--oysters, clams, cockles, and
other shells, mingled with ashes and the bones of deer and other
quadrupeds. I picked up half a dozen arrow-heads, and in an hour or two
could have filled my pockets with them. The Indians lived about the
edges of the swamps, then probably in some instances ponds, for shelter
and water. Moreover, Champlain, in the edition of his "Voyages" printed
in 1613, says that in the year 1606 he and Poitrincourt explored a
harbor (Barnstable Harbor?) in the southerly part of what is now called
Massachusetts Bay, in latitude 42 deg., about five leagues south, one point
west of _Cap Blanc_, (Cape Cod,) and there they found many good oysters,
and they named it _Le Port aux Huistres_ (Oyster-Harbor). In one edition
of his map, (1632,) the "_R. aux Escailles_" is drawn emptying into the
same part of the Bay, and on the map "_Novi Belgii_" in Ogilby's
"America," (1670,) the words "_Port aux Huistres_" are set against the
same place. Also William Wood, who left New England in 1633, speaks, in
his "New England's Prospect," published in 1634, of "a great
oyster-bank" in Charles River, and of another in the Mystic, each of
which obstructed the navigation. "The oysters," he says, "be great ones,
in form of a shoe-horn; some be a foot long; these breed on certain
banks that are bare every spring-tide. This fish without the shell is so
big that it must admit of a division before you can well get it into
your mouth." Oysters are still found there. (See, also, Thomas Morton's
"New English Canaan," page 90.)

Our host told us that the sea-clam, or hen, was not easily obtained; it
was raked up, but never on the Atlantic side, only cast ashore there in
small quantities in storms. The fisherman sometimes wades in water
several feet deep, and thrusts a pointed stick into the sand before him.
When this enters between the valves of a clam, he closes them on it, and
is drawn out. The clam has been known to catch and hold coot and teal
which were preying on it. I chanced to be on the bank of the Acushnet at
New Bedford one day, watching some ducks, when a man informed me, that,
having let out his young ducks to seek their food amid the samphire
(_Salicornia_) and other weeds along the river-side at low tide