Cape Cod

by William Martin

The world had turned many times since he had seen the Hilyards on that sad day at Aptucxet.

  Jack and Christopher served at the Kennebec trading post for seventeen years while Jonathan reached manhood in the home of a devout Plymouth Saint and boatwright. Jonathan visited his father each summer, but as his apprenticeship came to demand more of him, his visits grew shorter. As his training in the faith revealed his father’s failings and his brother’s profane ways, his visits grew shorter still.

  By 1644, Jonathan had grown into a fine boatwright and an upright member of the church. In that year, young Plymouth men formed a parish in Nauset, which they renamed Eastham, and Jonathan bought forty acres of white cedar marsh from Autumnsquam. Not long after, in hope of bringing his father back to the breast of the church, Jonathan invited him to Eastham. And Jack dreamed once more of the whales.

  “ ’Tis time for thee to go,” Christopher told Jack, “afore thou grows too old for the hunt.” But Christopher would not go back to Plymouth with his father. He left the trading post and disappeared into the Maine wilderness.

  Little was known of Christopher’s doings after that. From time to time, he appeared at trading posts with pelts, but soon disappeared again. It was said that he pursued Indian beliefs and lay with Indian women, though none had conceived by him. It was even whispered that he had taken an Abenaki wife. This was the truth, and it was good that it could not be proved, or he might have been hanged.

  On Cape Cod, Jack Hilyard began as a drift whaler, flensing humpbacks that floated ashore or blackfish that beached in herds like cows. But as more men wandered the wrack line, carving their initials into stranded blubber, there were fewer whales to go around. Then Cape towns put a tax on drifters, because ministers, with the inspired logic of holy men, declared such whales to be gifts of God, thus the property of God’s church. And Nauseiput Island, where pilot whales most often stranded, now belonged to Ezra Bigelow.

  But each fall, a man could stand anywhere on the bay and count spouts the day through. All he needed was a boat and the courage to use it.

  Jack had the courage, and Jonathan built him the boat. It had to be light because it would be launched from the beach, so Jonathan made it of white cedar, light yet tough. It had to be maneuverable, because a wounded whale was a dangerous creature, so Jonathan gave it double ends to change direction in an instant. And it had to be big enough to stand up to the waves that roiled the bay in whaling season, so Jonathan made it a full twenty-four feet long, with five thwarts for five oarsmen and a fore-and-aft sail for swift running.

  Then Jack raised a tower on the tip of Billingsgate Island, the place promised him that sad day at Aptucxet, and from there he watched the horizon for whales. One morning in 1650, as he shielded his eyes from the sun, he saw a familiar brawny figure striding over the sand.

  It was Christopher, wearing two feathers in his hat and a necklace of wampum around his neck. He said his Abenaki wife had died and it was time for the Hilyards to hunt the whale together. The first day that Christopher and Jonathan hunted with their father, tears nearly ran down Jack’s cheeks, but he looked at the sea and blinked them away.

  Autumnsquam envied Jack his sons, even if one was too holy and the other not holy enough. He had only his niece, who dressed now in a man’s clothes so that the elders would not know of her doings with Christopher.

  “Me bloody good heathen, Jack Bloody Christian Hilyard. Me no need no bloody redeemin’.”

  “That’s foul talk, Autie,” said Jonathan.

  “Aye.” Jack laughed. “Foul talk from a foul old pinse—”

  “Who needs no redeemin’,” said Christopher, “so long’s he can dart the iron and bring his niece whalin’.”

  Amapoo glanced over her shoulder and gave him a smile. They were both in their forties, had both lost spouses, and had come once more to care for each other, though they were now old enough to be circumspect in their affections.

  Jack held the steering oar and watched the whale. “A big ’n, lads, awesome big. I swear, if God come back tomorrow, he’d come as a whale, not some holy man.”

  “God’s come already,” said Jonathan, “as a simple carpenter.”

  Autumnsquam grunted.

  At the oars they kept the cadence. The gentle swell rolled, the gulls circled, the smooth black body surfaced and spouted and sank again. Then the water ahead of them went rough, the dark blue beneath it turning to green, then to a milky white.

  “Stoppin’ for a little lunch, he is,” said Jack.

  Autumnsquam shipped his oar and looked over the side. “Silversides come!”

  “Amapoo, fill your bucket,” said Jack, his voice now tightening. “The rest mind your tasks.”

  “Mind the line!” added Christopher calmly.

  “Big mouth come,” Autumnsquam hefted his harpoon.

  Jack peered into water. “Aye, a big ’n for certain!”

  The whale was rising through a green cloud of sand. The great maw was open. The surface was boiling with thousands of fish driven upward. And then—

  “He breaches!”

  A hole opened in the sea, curtained with living baleen fabric, alive with sand eels. The water splattered and danced with silver panic, and the hole in the sea made a sound, a great snort that resounded in the chests of every person aboard. Then the curtain closed over the fish and the whale showed himself full to the boat.

  There was a smell about the beast, rank and fresh at once, a smell of land and of sea, of past and future. And there was a majesty about him, for certain. Like a king reclining after a meal, he settled back and set his eye upon his tiny subjects.

  This was the moment to fill Jack Hilyard with awe. What madmen they were to challenge His Majesty the Whale. What fools… Then he shouted, “Strike ’er, Autie!”

  And the Indian darted his iron deep into the rich black blubber.

  For a moment, the whale stopped, as though shocked by the arrogance of such an attack. He swung his long armlike flipper to pluck out the harpoon. Then he raised his flukes and slammed the water in insult, sending up a wave to capsize the boat and chastise the boatmen.

  Then he sounded in a forty-ton dive.

  The harpoon line screamed around the loggerhead at the stern, slapped over the thwarts, and tore through the chock like a saw hacking the boat in half. It played out with such speed that the loggerhead began to smoke. Jack shouted for Amapoo to wet it and she splashed water everywhere.

  In an instant, two hundred feet of line went as taut as a bowstring. Then it began to play a strange groaning tune as the boat was pulled from a northeast heading due north. Then they were off. The flying spume soaked them all. The air rushed past like a gale. And as the little boat pounded against the waves, every backbone pounded against the base of every skull.

  The whale hauled them north eight miles, all the way to the tip of the Cape. Then he stopped. The long, low rays of the October sun burnished the sandhills and glistened on the back of the beast. When he spouted, a little rainbow danced in the mist above him.

  “Out with the oars,” said Jack. “Now, he be ourn.”

  Then the whale gave another great snort and sounded with such force that Jack nearly tumbled overboard. The loggerhead was torn from the cuddy board and flew down the length of the boat, smashing this way and that, knocking Amapoo senseless and cutting a deep gash beneath Jonathan’s eye. Then the whale was gone, line, loggerhead, and all.

  “Bloody Christ,” said Jack Hilyard.

  “Bloody Christ no redeem us, Jack Bloody Christian Hilyard. Me throw good, me stick good. But thee make damn bad boat.” Autumnsquam put his hand under the cuddy board and waved his fingers through the loggerhead hole.

  “ ’Twas God, not the boat. God wished the whale to live.” Jonathan wet a cloth and held it to his cheek while his brother splashed water onto Amapoo’s face to bring her around.

  “I suppose God wished us to live on Billins’gate ’stead of Nauseiput,” muttered Jack.

  “I know not
God’s mind on that matter,” said Jonathan, “though he saw fit to give the island to Ezra Bigelow.”

  Autumnsquam’s eyes shifted from father to elder son. Talk of Nauseiput often came after they failed to catch a whale, or missed a stranding, or spent a day hauling wood to barren Billingsgate. And such talk brought out an old anger. But today, Christopher was not listening. He was studying a curl of smoke at the tip of the Cape.

  It was a wild and a desolate place where men cut wood and ran cattle, but where none chose to live. Still, the harbor it encircled was the safest refuge between French Acadia and Dutch New Amsterdam, and many flags had been seen there, among them the fleur-de-lis of the French privateer… and the skull and crossbones.

  Jack called for his glass.

  “No pirate would want us,” said Christopher. “We got nothin’.”

  “We got a damn good boat.”

  “We got damn no-loggerhead boat,” said Autumnsquam.

  Jack swept the glass over the harbor but saw not a single mast. Then he settled on the smoke. “Bloody Christ.”

  “Pirates?”

  “Men pilin’ green brush to make smoke.”

  “How many?”

  “Four. Two in breeches and two… in dresses!”

  “Men in dresses?” said Jonathan. “Sodomists?”

  “Frenchmen, methinks.”

  French papists is what they were, two sailors and two shipwrecked Jesuits in black robes. Jack had never seen papist priests before and was greatly surprised that they smiled and shook hands like ordinary men. Their leader, Father Gabriel Druillettes, said they were on diplomatic mission when blown off course, and he begged passage to the place he called Pleymout.

  “It be twenty mile to Plymouth,” whispered Jack to his sons, who stood by the boat, “and I don’t much trust papists, or men in dresses.”

  “Master Bigelow says the robe covers a forked tail,” muttered Jonathan.

  “And some Eastham Protestants spend more time manurin’ their brains than their corn rows,” said Christopher.

  Jonathan gave his brother a hard look. They were no more alike in appearance than in beliefs. The younger shaved his face smooth and wore his clothes for no more than a week at a time. The older hid his face behind his black beard and had not removed his greasy leather jerkin since spring.

  “I simply ask if they can be trusted,” said Jonathan.

  “They be men,” said Christopher. “And shipwrecked. I say we show ’em charity. Right, Autie?”

  Autumnsquam stood on a dune and studied the staff that the priests had planted in the sand. It was topped by a crucifix on which Christ writhed in agony. Though he had heard plenty about God’s son, he had never before seen him, as the Saints did not permit the worship of godlike images. “They know good torture. Give ’em ride.”

  “We save our baggage,” said Father Druillettes, “but only the box that Père Daladier ’olds do we want.”

  Jack glanced at the younger priest, who clutched a metal box like the first Gospel. Daladier was tall and ghostly, with reddened stumps for thumbs and forefingers, ugly scars where his fingernails should have been. As Jack stared at the hands and wondered what strange rite of self-flagellation this had been, he noticed a foundry stamp on the corner of the box.

  His eyes were no longer sharp, nor could he read, but the symbol seemed strangely familiar. Jack touched the damaged fingers, pretending sympathy while moving them to better see the stamp.

  “Torture,” explained Father Druillettes. “Iroquois devils.”

  With great pride, Father Daladier said, “Jésus-Christ give me strength. Jésus-Christ do not desert me.”

  The hands now had Autumnsquam’s attention. “Why Iroquois do this?”

  “I try to bring them the true faith.”

  “More holy men. More true faiths.”

  “T.W.” Jack remembered. This symbol stood for a name. His first harpoon showed the same mark. And his memory had been marked for many years by the man who made it. T.W. Thomas Weston.

  “I guess Plymouth ain’t so far after all.”

  ii.

  The Community of Saints that the Old Comers had envisioned had existed for only a brief time at Plymouth. True, William Bradford and his favored assistants were regularly elected. They made laws and meted out punishments as good scholars of the Bible, and they still oversaw all land purchases. But Plymouth had grown so quickly that it had long ago burst its boundaries, both physical and spiritual.

  Where once the people worked on communal farms and small plots, they now owned acreages stretching north to Scituate and south to Cape Cod. Where once the settlements had hugged the coast, they now reached far into the New England forest.

  Most roads still led to Plymouth, but new ones went to a town forty miles north, near the mouth of the river Charles. There, a far richer group of religious rebels had arrived in 1630. Within a year, they had brought thirty shiploads of followers to the place they named Boston, and their population had created a fine market for the fruits of Plymouth farming and husbandry. This meant more substantial homes and a better life for most everyone in Plymouth. But by 1640, Puritan Boston had surpassed Plymouth in all save longevity.

  Moreover, Bradford and his assistants had determined that they could no longer restrain settlement of Cape Cod. The Indians were docile, the patents secure, and the people already moving there of their own will. The towns of Sandwich, Barnstable, and Yarmouth were founded around the first parishes. Then a ten-mile stretch was reserved for those like Ezra Bigelow, who had assumed the colony’s debts to the London Adventurers. This was known as the Old Comers’ Tract, and within its boundaries was the island that Jack Hilyard had coveted but Ezra Bigelow had claimed.

  By 1644, the fortunes of Plymouth had sunk so low and the population had dwindled so far that there was talk of moving the First Church itself to the fertile plains of Nauset. Though the idea was deemed too radical to carry out, enough of the newer generation left that Bradford was moved to call Plymouth “an ancient mother, grown old and forsaken of her children.”

  Nevertheless, to do business with the colony, men still paid their respects to the ancient mother, and two priests paid theirs at the home of the governor.

  Extra logs made the fire blaze on Bradford’s hearth on the night that the priests arrived. Whale oil lanterns were lit instead of rush candles. An Araby rug was laid upon the table. The governor’s pewter and Venetian glassware were brought out. And he wore his finest red cloak and waistcoat.

  As it was a Friday, Mrs. Bradford served striped bass, the nut-sweet staple of late fall. Ordinarily the good Protestants of Plymouth made special effort to eat meat on Fridays, having no use for the superstitions of Romanism, but they always showed respect to men of faith.

  And when the meal was finished, Bradford brought out one of his small treasures, a bottle of brandy given him by Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Jack Hilyard had not tasted brandy in many a year. Had Father Druillettes not insisted that his rescuer join the feast, Jack would not have tasted it on this night, either.

  Seated with Bradford were the proprietors of the Kennebec Trading Post, William Paddy, Thomas Prence, Thomas Willett, and John Winslow. Myles Standish was there to lend his opinion on military matters. And the long, pinched face of Governor’s Assistant Ezra Bigelow glowered across the table at Jack.

  Bradford and Standish were now graybeards, worn down by time and the cares of the colony. Merely to look at them made Jack feel like a stubborn old fool for shore whaling at the age of sixty.

  But Ezra had aged little, perhaps because he did not take a wife until he was forty, perhaps because his life had been, in most things, a success. He had fathered two daughters and two sons, prospered in farming and trade, kept to his faith and kept others to it as well. And if he carried some dark secret from the days of the Mayflower, it did not show. His hair was chimney-black, and the more colorful clothes he now wore considerably softened his aspect. But his talk wi
th Jack began sharply. “Hast thou trespassed upon my island of late?”

  “I’d not touch it with me longest harpoon.”

  “I know thou covet it, but my Indian tenants keep good eye there.”

  “Good prayin’ Indians they are,” said Jack.

  “Aye, who hear the preachments of my brother Simeon. Others on Cape Cod still resist. I disdain congress with such heathens till they be converted.”

  Jack knew the intent of this remark. He wondered what Bigelow might say, should he learn that one of the “men” in his whaleboat was a woman.

  Their pleasantries were interrupted when John Winslow rose to introduce the guests. “Gentlemen of Plymouth, I have come to know Father Gabriel Druillettes as a good man and true. He well deserves the name by which he is known through all Acadia—the Patriarch.”

  Father Druillettes gave a little bow. Though it was said that he worked as hard as any man in the French missions, neither his round belly, his somnolent eyes, nor the new black cloak he wore over his cassock suggested privation. And he conducted himself with diplomatic grace, even among men whom tradition had made enemies of his nation and his faith.

  “The Jesuits,” continued Winslow, “have undertaken to bring Christ to the Abenakis on the Kennebec. We must approve.”

  “Indeed,” said William Bradford.

  “Aye,” added Ezra Bigelow. “Knowledge of Christ from the papist is better than no knowledge at all.”

  Whatever the priests had come for, thought Jack, they would not get it from Bigelow, unless it was the book they had brought in that metal box on the sideboard. All through the meal he had tried to keep his mind off the things the book might contain. But for twenty-seven years, he had wondered.

  After introductory compliments, the priest begged permission for the Jesuits to continue missionary work near the Kennebec trading house.

  “And if we say nay?” asked Myles Standish.

  Ezra Bigelow tugged thoughtfully at one of his eyebrows. “Perhaps you will send ships from Acadia and seize our Kennebec house, as you did the house at Penobscot.”

  “Excusez-moi, mais… but that is fifteen years ago,” answered Father Druillettes, “and the jésuites, we ’ad no part of it.”