Old Plymouth Trails Part 1

Old Plymouth Trails.

by Winthrop Packard.

CHAPTER I

OLD PLYMOUTH TRAILS

"The breaking waves dashed high On a stern and rock-bound coast And the woods against a stormy sky Their giant branches tossed."

So sang Felicia D. Hemans in the early years of the last century and she has been much derided by the thoughtless and irreverent who have said that the landing of the Pilgrims was not on a stern and rock-bound coast. Such scoffers evidently never sailed in by White Horse beach and "Hither Manomet" when a winter northeaster was shouldering the deep sea tides up against the cliff and a surly gale s.n.a.t.c.hed the foam from high-crested waves and sent it singing and stinging inland. Could they have done this it would have been easy to understand that the coast here is stern and rock-bound in very truth. The rocks are not those of solid granite ledges, continuous portions of the great earth's lithosphere of which the coast is built farther north, at Scituate, Nahant, Rockport and farther on; but it is rock-bound with ma.s.sed granite boulders, glacier rounded, water-worn, but inexpressibly stern.

All Plymouth is made up of the results of pilgrimage. How many scores of fathoms deep the real Plymouth sh.o.r.e lies I do not know.

It is down there somewhere where it cooled into bathylithic crust back in the gray dawn of time when the earth was made. There it is part of the same ledge of which Scituate and Coha.s.set are built.

All above that is terminal moraine, rock detritus piled upon rock foundation by the glacier. Plymouth Rock itself thus came joy riding from some ledge up Boston way, alighting from this first and greatest New England Transportation System only a few hundred thousand years before Mary Chilton arrived to set foot upon it.

Tide and tempest grind pebbles to shifting sand and give and take away beach and bar yearly, but they do not move the boulders very fast. Manomet sh.o.r.e and even Plymouth beach are rock-bound with these, large and small, today as they were when the Pilgrims fought their desperate, sea-beset way by them through the dusk of a winter northeaster and froze in safety under the lee of Clark's Island.

He who would see Plymouth and the Pilgrim land about it as the Pilgrims saw it may do so. Nature holds grimly onto her own and sedulously heals the scars that man makes. Beat to windward in the December twilight following that first trail of the Pilgrim pinnace, listen to the sullen boom of the breakers on the cliff, hear the growl of the surf-mauled pebbles on Plymouth beach, feel the sting of the freezing spray and the bitter grip of the north wind and you shall find this first Pilgrim trail the same today as it was three hundred years ago.

Plymouth is a manufacturing city, a residence town, a resort and a thriving business centre all in one. Except in its carefully preserved shrines you shall find little suggestion of the Pilgrims themselves, but you have only to step out of town to find their very land all about you, traces of their occupancy, the very marks of their feet, worn in the earth itself. A trail cuts easily into the forest mould. Once well worn there centuries fail to remove it. The paths the Pilgrims trod radiate from Plymouth to a score of places far and near. They tramped to Sandwich and the ca.n.a.l region, to Middleboro, Bridgewater and Duxbury as we know them now, to Boston; sooner or later to all the world. Some of the trails they trod may be forgotten, some of them are main-travelled highways, others remain narrow footpath ways through a country beautiful and often as unsophisticated as it was when the feet of the first Pilgrims pressed them. Therein lies for all the world the chief charm of the Old Colony region. Along the old Pilgrim trails you may step from modern culture and its acme of civilization through the pasture lands of the Pilgrims into glimpses of the forest primeval. The Pilgrims' boulders, their kettle-hole ponds, mossy swamps and ferny hillsides, here and there their very forest trees, await you still. For Indian and panther you need not look; wolf or bear you will hardly see; the wild turkeys are gone; otherwise the wild life of the forest remains.

The first Pilgrim land trail is today Leyden street, leading from the water's edge to their fort on Burial Hill. You may follow it, though the marks of Pilgrim feet are buried beneath city pavement, save perhaps on the crest of the hill itself, and though bluebird and robin flutter shyly to its upper end in spring as did their pilgrim fathers before them, the arbutus, from earliest days to this the Plymouth flower, no longer grows on its margin. He who has not longed to pick a mayflower in Plymouth on Mayday is not a New Englander. That is perhaps why the arbutus no longer grows along byways of the old town as once it did. Instead you must seek the Pilgrim paths out of town to find it.

One of these leads down along sh.o.r.e, over Manomet and on through Plymouth woods toward the old trysting place with the Dutch traders. The men of New Amsterdam, journeying in boats along Long Island Sound and up Buzzards Bay met the Plymouth men yearly and held a most decorous carnival of barter. Tradition has it that the Plymouth men made the trip by sea to the nearest point on the Bay sh.o.r.e. I do not know if the meeting place is known, but I know a moss-grown and gnarled red cedar on the margin of b.u.t.termilk Bay, as we now call it, which I am sure was growing there when the first swapping of commodities took place and in the shade of whose branches the grave and st.u.r.dy traders may have sat.

Here and there in Pilgrim land you find a tree like that, one that by some chance the axe of the woodman has spared as one generation of wood cutters followed another, that still stands where the seed fell, no man knows how many centuries ago. We have trees in eastern Ma.s.sachusetts to whom a thousand years is but as yesterday when it is pa.s.sed, many on which the centuries have rested lightly. I think this Onset cedar one of these.

The road that leads from Plymouth to it is vexed daily by innumerable wheels; of a summer holiday the wayside watcher may count the motors by the thousand; yet you have but to step a rod or two off its tarred, tire-beaten surface to find wild woodland as primitive as it was three hundred years ago. The spring seeking motorist finds his first mayflowers there as the grade leads up Manomet heights and may expect them by the roadside anywhere, after that. The old trail to Sandwich saunters along here, but those who built for modern traffic took little heed of old-time footpath ways. They gouged the hills, they filled the hollows and drew their long black scar behind for mile after mile.

Like the deer and the wild fowl the old trails care little for this. They wander on their own gentle, untrammelled way, hither and yon, here beset by heavy forest growth, there a tangle of greenbrier and scrub oaks, losing you often, picking you up again when you least expect it, but always leading you off the humdrum highway of today into the gentle wildernesses of old time romance.

You find them margined with marks of the pioneer. It may be just a hollow which was once his tiny cellar-hole or a rectangular mound where the logs of his cabin tumbled into the mould, perhaps a moss-grown, weather-beaten house itself with its barberry bush or its lilac still holding firmly where the pioneer householder set it. These old trails of the Plymouth woods may be just of one family's making, leading from house to pasture and woodlot, or they may be bits of an old-time footpath way first worked out by the Indians themselves no one knows how many centuries ago. Find me an eskar in Plymouth county, a "hogback ridge" as our forbears were wont to call it, and the chances are fair that along its narrow summit edge I'll show you an Indian trail. Sometimes the Pilgrim paths adopted these and later made them roadways.

As you go southward in this region you find traces of an ancient type of fencing that I have not seen elsewhere. It may have been a hedgemaker's trick, brought from the old country. The Cape pioneers slashed young white oaks growing along the road margin, bent them, say two feet above the ground, without severing, and laid them level, the tops bound tight with withes to the next trunk. Thus they had a fence that would restrain cattle and that grew stouter as the years went by. You find these trees growing thus today, their trunks a foot or two in diameter, bending at right angles just above ground and stretching horizontally, while what were once limbs now grow trunks from the grotesque b.u.t.t. A remnant of fence like this along an almost obliterated trail in an ancient wood gives a hobgoblin character to the place.

The heath family, all the way from clethra which begins it to cranberry which ends it, dwells in beauty and diversity all about in the Plymouth woods, making them fragrant the year round. Some of them help feed the world, notably the cranberries and the huckleberries of a score of varieties from the pale, inch high, earliest sweet blueberries growing on the dry hillsides to the giants of the deep swamp, hanging out of reach above your head sometimes and as big as a thumb end. These provide manna for all who will gather it, from late June till early September, when the checkerberries ripen, to hang on all winter. Others make the world better for their beauty and fragrance and of these the ground laurel, the trailing arbutus, the mayflower, is best known and loved.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The First Pilgrim Trail]

It is easy to fancy some sombre Pilgrim, weary with the woes of that first winter, his heart hungry for "the may" of English hedgerows, stepping forth some raw April morning which as yet showed no sign of opening spring buds, stopping as his feet rustled in brown oak leaves up Town Brook way, puzzled by the endearing, enticing fragrance on the wings of the raw wind. I always think of him as stopping for a moment to dream of home, looking about in a discouraged way for hawthorn which he knows is not there, then spying the little cl.u.s.ter of evergreen leaves with their pink and white blossoms nestling among the oak leaves at his very feet and kneeling to pluck and sniff them in some thing like adoration. It may not have been that way at all, but someone found that first mayflower and loved and named it.

The world at large, hurtling through Plymouth in its high-powered motor cars, stops along the road over Manomet and finds its arbutus there each May. I like to look for mine along the path that Billington took to his "sea," a way that leads out of Leyden street and up along Town Brook. I think the second oldest of the Plymouth land trails lies up that way. If the first was to and from the fort the second surely lay up along the brook, and I have an idea the Indians had preceded them in the making of this.

A great terminal moraine once blocked off Billington sea from the ocean, but Town Brook released it. Long before the Pilgrims came it had cut its valley through the great wall of gravel and occupied it in peace till latter day highways and factories came to vex it. In spite of these, unhampered bits of the original brook show in Plymouth itself and you are not far out of town before you see more of it.

It flows out of the "sea" unhindered now save by pickerel weed and sagittaria, rush and meadow gra.s.ses, and in woodsy places by brook alder, clethra, huckleberry and spice-bush that lean into it as they wrestle with greenbrier and clematis. The mayflower snuggles into the leaves along its drier upper margins, here and there, and is to be found on the borders of the "sea" more plentifully.

Plymouth has done well in making of this region a park, beautifying it mainly by letting it alone, merely cutting new Pilgrim trails through it. Billington's path along the pond sh.o.r.e is thus made easy for your feet and is marked with his name that you may not miss it. But if you would see the real Billington path, made for him by generations of Indians before his day but the one that I believe he trod, you will look nearer the water's edge. There, tangled amidst undergrowth now, buried deep in brown autumn leaves, it is yet visible enough, cut into the soft sand of the pond bank. In places it is cut deep. In places it is all but obliterated or vanishes altogether for a little way, perhaps divides into two or three as the local needs of moccasined travellers called for, but all along the pond margin it goes. This is an old Plymouth trail indeed, linking the Plymouth of today with that of the time of the Pilgrims, and long before. There are many such that lead out of Plymouth, glimpsing for us the world of three hundred years ago mirrored in the eyes, the ideas, the ideals of today. Let us search them out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plymouth as the Pilgrims made it]

CHAPTER II

PLYMOUTH MAYFLOWERS

The first day on which one might hope for mayflowers came to Plymouth in late April. The day before a bitter northeaster had swept through the town, a gale like the December one in which the Pilgrim's shallop first weathered Manomet head and with broken mast limped in under the lee of Clark's Island. No promise of May had been in this wild storm that keened the dead on Burial Hill, yet this day that followed was to be better than a promise. It was May itself, come a few days ahead of the calendar, so changeful is April in Pilgrim land. This gale, ashamed of itself, ceased its outcry in the darkness of full night and the chill of a white frost followed on all the land.

In the darkest hour of this night, I saw a thin point of light rise out of the mystery of the sea far to the eastward, the tiny sail of the shallop of the old moon, blown landward by little winds of dawn, making port on the sh.o.r.e of "hither Manomet." In the velvety blackness of this ultimate hour of night the slender sail curved sweetly backward toward the sea, and the shallop seemed drawn to the land by a lodestone, as was the ship of Sindbad the Sailor, and when it magically climbed the dark headland and sailed away into the sky above, it drew out of the sea behind it the first light of glorious morning. From Manomet head to the Gurnet the horizon showed a level sea line of palest garnet that deepened, moment by moment, till the coming sun arched it with rose and bounded from it, a flattened globule of ruby fire. I like to think that the path of gold with which the sun glorified the stippled steel of the sea was the very one by which the first Mayflower came in from Provincetown, the sails n.o.bly set and the ship pressing onward to that memorable anchorage within the protecting white arm of the sandspit.

I like to think that the sweet curve of the old moon's slender sail sways in by Manomet each month in loving remembrance of that other shallop that so magically won by the roar of the breakers on the dark point and brought the simple record of faith and courage for our loving remembrance. But whether these things are so or not I know that the very first rays of the morning sun pa.s.s in level neglect over the bay and the town to lay a wreath of light on the brow of Burial Hill and touch with celestial gold the simple granite shaft that stands over the grave of William Bradford, historian of Plymouth Colony and writer of the first American book. Such is the unfailing ceremony of sunrise in Plymouth, and such it has been since the first Pilgrim was laid to rest on the hill which lifts its head above the roofs and spires to the free winds of the world.

Plymouth is fortunate in this hill. It bears the very presence of its founders above the enterprise and ferment of a modern town which grows rapidly toward city conditions, a hill which is set upon a city and cannot be hid. Factories and city blocks and all the wonders of steam and electrical contrivance which would have astounded and amazed Bradford and his fellows are common in Plymouth today as they are common to all cities and towns of a vast country, yet the graves of the simple pioneers rise above them as the story of their lives transcends in interest that of all others that have come after them. The book that Bradford wrote, as the tales that Homer told, will last as long as books are read. Plymouth may pa.s.s, as Troy did, but the story of its heroes will remain. Bradford's book, which was our first, may well, at the end of time, be rated our greatest.

The trailing arbutus is peculiarly the flower of Plymouth. Not that it grows there alone, indeed within easy reach of the landing place of the Pilgrims it is not easy now to find it. Once, no doubt, it blossomed about the feet of the pioneers, sending up its fragrance to them as they trod st.u.r.dily along their first street and through their new found fields that first spring after their arrival. My, but their hearts must have been homesick for the English May they had left behind! and in memory of the pink and white of the hawthorn hedges they called this pink and white flower which peered from the oval-leaved vines trailed about their feet, mayflower. It surely must have grown on the slopes of Burial Hill, down toward Town Brook, but now one will look in vain for it there. I found my first blossom of the year by following the brook up to its headwaters in Billington Sea. The brook itself is greatly changed since Bradford's day. Its waters are now held back by dams where it winds through the sand hills and one mill after another sits by the side of the ponds thus formed. Yet the "sea"

itself must be much the same in itself and its surroundings as it was in Billington's time. Nor do I wholly believe the legend which has it that Billington thought it was a sea in very truth. It is too obviously a pond to have deceived even this unsophisticated wanderer. It covers but little over three hundred acres including its islands and winding coves.

I think, rather, its name was given in good natured derision of Billington and his idea of the importance of his discovery, a form of quaint humor not unknown in the descendants to the Pilgrims of this day. Yet the waters of the little winding pond are as clear as those of the sea which breaks on the rocks of Manomet or the Gurnet, and the hilly sh.o.r.es, close set with deciduous growth, are almost as wild as they were then. The robins that greeted the dawn on Burial Hill sang here at midday, blackbirds chorused, and song sparrows sent forth their tinkling songs from the shrubby growths.

Plymouth woods, here at least, are a monotony of oaks. Yet here and there in the low places a maple has become a burning bush of ruby flame, and along the bog edges the willows are in the full glory of their yellow plumes. The richest ma.s.sed coloring one can see in the region today, though, is that of the cranberry bogs.

Looking away from the sun the thick-set vines are a level floor of rich maroon, not a level color but a background showing the brush marks of a master painter's hand. Toward the sun this color lightens and silvers to tiny jewel points where the light glances from glossy leaf tips. The later spring growth will fleck the bogs with greens, but the maroon background will still be there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Leyden Street To-day from Burial Hill]

The arbutus does not trail in all spots beneath the oaks, even in this secluded wilderness. Sometimes one thinks he sees broad stretches green with its rounded leaves only to find last year's checkerberries grinning coral red at him, instead of the soft pink tints and spicy odor of the Epigaea blooms. Sometimes the pyrola simulates it and cracks the gloss on its leaves with a wan wintergreen smile at the success of the deception. But after a little the eye learns to discriminate in winter greens and to know the outline of the arbutus leaf and its grouping from that of the others. Then success in the hunt should come rapidly. After all Epigaea and Gaultheria are vines closely allied, and it is no wonder that there is a family resemblance. The checkerberry's spicy flavor permeates leaves, stem and fruit. That of the arbutus seems more volatile and ethereal. It concentrates in the blossom and lifts from that to course the air invisibly an aromatic fragrance that the little winds of the woods sometimes carry far to those who love it, over hill and dale. Given a day of bright sun and slow moving soft air and one may easily hunt the Plymouth mayflower by scent. Even after the grouped leaves are surely sighted the flowers are still to be found. The winds of winter have strewn the ground deep with oak leaves and half buried the vines in them for safety from the cold. Out from among these the blossoms seem to peer shyly, like sweet little Pilgrim children, ready to draw back behind their mother's ap.r.o.ns if they do not like the appearance of the coming stranger. Perhaps they do withdraw at discretion, and this is very likely why some people who come from far to hunt find many mayflowers, while others get few or none.

Just as the Mayflower in which the Pilgrims sailed to Plymouth seems to have been but one of many English ships of that name, so the trailing arbutus is not the only flower to be called mayflower in New England. The mayflower of the English fields and hedgerows was preeminently the hawthorn, known often just as "the may." But there is a species of bitter cress in England with showy flowers, Cardamine pratensis, which is also called mayflower and the name is given to the yellow bloom of the marsh marigold, Caltha pal.u.s.tria, often known, less lovingly, as "blobs." The Caltha is common to both Europe and America and, though it is often hereabout known by the nickname of "cowslip" which the early English settlers seem to have given it, I do not hear it called mayflower. In localities where the arbutus is not common the name mayflower is here most commonly given to the pink and white Anemone nemorosa, the wind flower of the meadow margins and low woods, and to the rock saxifrage, Saxifraga virginiensis, both of which are among the earliest blossoms of the month.

None can visit Plymouth without wishing to climb the bold promontory of "hither Manomet." The legend has it that Eric the Red, the Viking who explored New England sh.o.r.es centuries before the first Englishman heard of them, made this his burial hill and that somewhere beneath its forests his bones lie to this day. I sought long for mayflowers on the seaward slopes and in the rough gullies of these "highlands of Plymouth," I did not find them there.

On the landward slopes, gentler and less windswept, down toward the "sweet waters" that flow from inland to the sea, you may with patient search find many. But the heights shall reward you, if not with mayflowers with greater and more lasting joys. The woods of Manomet were full of b.u.t.terflies. Splendid specimens of Vanessa antiopa danced together by twos and threes in every sunny glade, the gold edging of bright raiment showing beneath their "mourning cloaks" of rich seal brown. Here in the rich sunshine Launcelot might well have said:

Myself beheld three spirits, mad with joy, Come dashing down on a tall wayside flower.

Here Grapta interrogationis carried his ever present question mark from one dry leaf to another asking always that unanswerable "why?" Here Pyrameis huntera, well named the hunter's b.u.t.terfly, flashed red through the woodland, scouting silently and becoming invisible in ambush as a hunter should. Here a tiny fleck of sky, the spirit bluebird of the spring which the entomologists have woefully named Lycaema pseudargiolus, fluttered along the ground as if a new born flower tried quivering flight, and brown Hesperiidae, "bedouins of the pathless air," buzzed in vanishing eccentricity. But it was not for these that I lingered long on the seaward crest. There below me lay the bay that the exploring Pilgrims entered at such hazard, that but the day before had been blotted out with a freezing storm and gray with snow, now smiling in unforgettable beauty at my feet, bringing irresistibly to mind the one who sang,

My soul today is far away, Sailing the blue Vesuvian bay.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Birds of the Plymouth Woods, Wise and Otherwise]

At Naples indeed could be no softer, fairer skies than this June day of late April brought to Plymouth Bay and spread over the waters that nestled within the curve of that splendid young moon of white sand that sweeps from Manomet to the tip of the sandspit, with the Gurnet far to the right and Plymouth's white houses rising in the middle distance. It lacked only the cone of Vesuvius smoking beyond to make the memory complete.

Nor has the Bay of Naples bluer waters than those that danced below me. Some stray current of the Gulf Stream must have curled about the tip of Cape Cod and spread its wonder bloom over them.

Here were the same exquisite soft blues, shoaling into tender green, that I have seen among the Florida keys. Surely it was like a transformation scene. The day before the torn sea wild with wind and the dun clouds of a northeast gale hiding the distance with a mystery of dread, a wind that beat the forest with snow and chilled to the marrow; and this day the warmth of an Italian spring and the blue Vesuvian Bay.