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    GRAVEYARD SHIFT

    The Lifesaving Legacy of Capt. David H. Atkins

    A historian lifts the shadow cast by anonymous critics and unfounded reporting

    By

    Edward Rowe Snow, the master chronicler of New England sea stories, wrote a letter to the Provincetown Advocate in February 1964, seeking information about descendants of Capt. David H. Atkins, whom Snow called an “outstanding Life Saver of a former generation.”

    Snow mentioned, enigmatically, “a shadow” over Atkins’s name, and wrote that his purpose was “to right a wrong of eighty years.” What were Advocate readers to make of Snow’s letter and what was the “wrong” to which he alluded?

    David Henry Atkins, the son of Henry and Esther, was born in Provincetown in 1834. When the Peaked Hill Life Saving Station — one of the original nine Cape Cod stations — was completed and equipped in January 1873, Atkins, who had spent a decade in service with the Humane Society (the forerunner to the Lifesaving Service), was appointed its first keeper.

    On the morning of Nov. 30, 1880, a northerly gale swept across Massachusetts Bay, tightening its grip on the C.E. Trumbull, a sloop from Cape Ann. Built in 1870 and of a sturdy design to carry granite paving stones, the C.E. Trumbull, with its crew of six including the captain, was homeward bound in ballast from New Bedford when it stranded at Peaked Hill.

    The six-man crew of the Peaked Hill Station sprang into action, launching a surfboat, rescuing four from the sloop, and landing them safely ashore. Returning to the sloop to rescue the captain and pilot, who, it was reported, had initially refused to leave without their personal effects, the surfboat was capsized by the sloop’s swinging boom, flinging its crew into the churning seas. Three of the lifesaving crew managed to swim ashore in the numbing cold, but Capt. Atkins, Stephen Frank Mayo, and Elisha N. Taylor, desperately clinging to the surfboat, were washed off. All three bodies were eventually recovered.

    A map of the Outer Cape’s lifesaving stations in 1899. (U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey)

    As the tide turned and the sandbar loosened its grip on the C.E. Trumbull, the captain and pilot, still on board, were able to float her off. They were outfitted with new sails at Chatham and returned to Rockport, from where the sloop continued to sail for several years. Provincetown was left with its losses.

    In Provincetown’s Gifford Cemetery, a handsome monument with an anchor motif — a symbol of safety and hope — stands To the Memory of David H. Atkins. He was, reads the inscription, “a devoted husband and father, a good citizen and sealed his fidelity to duty with his life,” a tribute that offers no hint of earlier events that haunted Atkins, casting the shadow to which Edward Rowe Snow had alluded.

    An anchor motif decorates the monument to Capt. David Atkins in Provincetown’s Gifford Cemetery. (Photo by Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    Five years earlier, on the morning of March 4, 1875, the bark Giovanni, bound for Boston from Palermo, Italy with a crew of 16 and a cargo of sumac, nuts, and brimstone (sulfur), encountered a raging nor’easter. In blinding snow, with sails shredded, mountainous seas sweeping the deck, and soundings confirming the lessening water depths, all eyes searched for guidance from the Highland Light. By early afternoon the crippled vessel had stranded at Peaked Hill.

    The crew from the Peaked Hill Station, under the direction of Keeper Atkins, as well as the crew from Highland Station led by Keeper Edwin P. Worthen, responded promptly. Given the ferocious conditions, no attempt was made to launch the surfboats. Three attempts to shoot a line from the mortar apparatus to the foundering vessel were unsuccessful. Only one Giovanni crew member, the steward, survived the wreck. He had fastened himself to a plank and let the surf convulse him ashore. Fifteen others perished, a devastating loss of life for the nascent lifesaving service.

    Anonymous criticism weighed on Capt. Atkins afterwards, with newspapers reporting his cowardice, tactical shortcomings, and the worthlessness of his equipment.

    Salacious stories circulated that a mob of salvagers had consumed cases of wine washing ashore (it could not be determined if the wine was part of the cargo or the ship’s stores), and that a frenzied, drunken orgy ensued, resulting in the bodies of drowned crew members being robbed and four deaths — murder being insinuated — among the wreckers.

    A full investigation of the tragedy found that “every exertion within their power to rescue the crew” had been made by the lifesaving crews and that the vessel had been “beyond the reach of any life-saving apparatus.”

    Capt. Atkins’s gravestone inscription says he “sealed his fidelity to duty with his life.”

    The shadow lengthened for Capt. Atkins in April 1879, when the three-masted schooner Sarah J. Fort wrecked at Peaked Hill. For 12 exhausting hours, Atkins’s crew attempted the rescue with both surfboat and the line-throwing Parrott gun, only to watch as the rescue of four sailors (two had drowned) was accomplished by a volunteer crew, fresh from town, led by Capt. Isaac F. Mayo.

    Mayo was later awarded a gold medal for his service. Meanwhile, Atkins again felt the sting of criticism that he had failed to employ the newer model Lyle gun that could have established line communication with the wreck and completed the rescue hours earlier.

    In the aftermath of the C.E. Trumbull tragedy, a Lifesaving Service report suggested that the earlier criticism aimed at Atkins had made him determined to “spare no hazard, however desperate, in the future discharge of duty.” It was in this spirit, concluded the report, “and with this resolution, that he found his duty, and met his death.”

    A trusted and dedicated veteran of the Service, Atkins was called upon time and time again to confront dangers before which most men would wither. None but his fellow lifesaving crew members could know those dangers, and they stood by him, never questioning his courage.

    In his 1964 book The Fury of the Seas, Edward Rowe Snow added his voice to theirs, and lifted the cloud over Capt. David H. Atkins — one that “never should have been allowed to gather around either his name or his actions.”

    GRAVEYARD SHIFT

    Mr. Greenough’s Tea

    A wreck at Race Point plunged the Outer Cape into Revolutionary politics

    By

    In Wellfleet’s Duck Creek Cemetery, three remarkably well-preserved colonial headstones with classic iconography are a tangible reminder of the John Greenough family. The stones, like too many in Cape Cod’s cemeteries, speak of the sadness of young lives lost, but they offer no hint of the drama that engulfed the Greenough family and the Outer Cape in 1774.

    Headstone of John Greenough Jr., who also died in 1789, in Duck Creek Cemetery. (Photo Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    On the stormy morning of Dec. 11, 1773, when the brigantine William, bound from London to Boston, ran ashore near Race Point, one might have forgiven the townspeople for thinking it a routine event, that the William was yet another victim of the treacherous Peaked Hill bars that had claimed countless vessels and lives over the years. Routine, that is, until its cargo was identified. In addition to carrying streetlights for Boston, the William — one of a convoy of seven ships destined for Atlantic ports — was laden with British East India Company (EIC) tea from China. Of the four vessels due to arrive in Boston, the Beaver, Dartmouth, and Eleanor had managed to outmaneuver the storm, anchoring in the harbor where, on Dec. 16, their cargo of 342 chests of tea touched off a political protest that came to be known as the Boston Tea Party.

    After the destruction of the tea — the protest ignited by oppressive taxes and the subsequent decision by colonists to boycott tea, over which EIC had a monopoly — all that remained of the shipment bound for Boston were the 58 chests aboard the William, amounting to 12,000 pounds of tea.

    The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, Nathaniel Currier, 1846. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

    Residents of the Outer Cape, with their long, cherished tradition of salvaging cargo from wrecked vessels for personal use or profit, participated in rescuing the tea, not fully understanding how unpopular the rescue would be. At the heart of the erupting anger and unrest was the question of whether the “detestable” tea, on which the tax had not yet been paid, could, in good conscience, be consumed or resold or must be boycotted. Was it the tea itself that was odious, or was it the tax on the tea? After all, tea-loving colonists, including Cape Codders, regularly purchased their favorite beverage smuggled in from Holland, on which no duty was paid.

    The central figure in the controversy was a Wellfleet resident named John Greenough, whose father, the prominent Boston merchant Deacon Thomas Greenough, was a member of the Committees of Correspondence, groups appointed to provide colonial leadership in response to British policy. At the behest of the Loyalist Clarke family, distant cousins and owners of the William, John Greenough organized the salvage of the cargo and rescue of crew members at Provincetown, engaging locals to assist with the recovery and paying them with tea from a damaged chest. For his efforts, Greenough kept two chests of tea, a portion of which he sold to Willard Knowles (1711-1786), Eastham’s militia colonel, and Provincetown Selectman Stephen Atwood (1733-1802), both of whom, like Greenough, supported the cause of American liberty.

    Detail of the gravestone of John Greenough Jr. (Photo Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    Cape Codders were sharply divided about the unexpected windfall of untaxed tea. Those who eschewed EIC tea regardless of its tax status targeted the men. Atwood’s home was raided and his tea burned. Residents who purchased the tea and laborers who had aided the salvage efforts were also harassed.

    Other townspeople, however, were more than happy to purchase tea as word of its availability spread, arguing that no duty had been paid to enrich government coffers. Knowles, who was maligned by some as an enemy and untrustworthy, was protected from the anti-tea mob by his prominence in the community. Greenough, accused of selling out his country, defiantly tried to defend himself, and as the tumult of 1774 waned, managed to reconcile with both family and neighbors by apologizing for his involvement with the “cursed” tea.

    Born in 1742, John Greenough had earned his B.A. from Yale in 1759 and his M.A. in 1762. In 1763, he was awarded a courtesy degree, known as an ad eundem, from Harvard. In 1766, he married Mehitable Dillingham (1747-1798) of Harwich and soon thereafter arrived in Wellfleet, where he opened a grammar school for Greek and Latin instruction that continued until the fateful events of 1774. He was also a successful merchant and was appointed justice of the peace. Seven children were born to the Greenoughs in Wellfleet, three of whom — an infant daughter who lived for only a day; a son, John, who died at 19; and a daughter, Abigail “Nabby,” who died at 13 — are buried at Duck Creek. Another daughter, Sarah, drowned when she was 20 after falling from a vessel bound from Boston to Wellfleet.

    Detail of the headstone of Abigail “Nabby” Greenough in Duck Creek Cemetery, 1789. (Photo Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    After returning to the good graces of his neighbors, John Greenough again took an active role in the affairs of the town, serving in the General Court and appointed in 1778 by the Board of War to secure the “appurtenances” of the British man-o-war Somerset, wrecked in nearly the same place as the William had been five years earlier. By September 1780, Greenough had moved his family to Boston, where he bought a house and land in the North End.

    John Greenough did not live to see the patriot cause fully realized. He died in July 1781, just weeks after the death of two-year-old Mehitable and the birth of his eighth child. John’s widow, Mehitable, returned to Wellfleet, where she is listed as the head of household on the 1790 census. Tragically, her son John and daughters Nabby and Sarah had all died within six months of one another, between December 1788 and June 1789. In 1798, just two days after the death of another teenage daughter, Mehitable Greenough died, broken-hearted perhaps by her compounded losses. Of her eight children, only two sons, David and William, survived her.

    GRAVEYARD SHIFT

    The Schooner Rienzi and the ‘Mystery Brig’

    A 15-month voyage in 1859 and 1860 was long remembered for a strange encounter

    By

    During Provincetown’s fishing and whaling heyday, the Bowly brothers — Joshua Elsbury (1813-1883) and Gideon (1816-1893) — were among the town’s most prominent owners and outfitters of vessels. In 1849, J.E. & G. Bowly constructed a wharf and chandlery at the foot of Court Street, later extending the wharf and renaming it Steamboat Wharf to accommodate passenger steamships in which the Bowlys also had a financial stake.

    In March 1859, as the Bowlys’ 108-ton whaling schooner Rienzi was outfitting for an Atlantic whaling voyage, few could have imagined the prize it would find at sea a year later. Capt. Liberty Gilbert Milliken had taken command for the voyage. A New Hampshire native, he married Hannah Nickerson Oakman of Provincetown, the daughter of Joseph Oakman and Provincetown-born Mary Nickerson. Hannah’s sister Mary Wheeler Oakman was married to Gideon Bowly. Beginning in 1850, five children were born in Provincetown to Liberty and Hannah, the last in 1859 while Liberty was at sea.

    The family plot of Gideon Bowly in Provincetown’s Cemetery No. 2. (Photos Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    On Sunday, April 1, 1860, the Rienzi was cruising the waters of the West Indies near Puerto Rico. Ship keeper Freeman Atkins Smith noted in Rienzi’s journal (now in the collection of the Mystic Seaport Museum) that the “day commenced with fine and pleasant weather.” At 11 a.m., crewmembers saw a sail ahead and by 4 the “sail that was in our sight is off our weather beam. … Her maneuvering was rather singular. She layed all aback with her spanker boom hauled over to the weather side. She had all sail set.” At 4:30 the Rienzi “hauled up for her. At 5 p.m. Mr. [Francis] Godfrey went on board of her.”

    Notified that the vessel was abandoned, Capt. Milliken launched a whaleboat and joined Godfrey onboard. Painted black and with a heavy copper hull, the brig bore no name or flag. Amply stocked with rice, beans, fish, and jerked beef, as well as water, wine, and rum, she appeared to have been fitted out recently. Well-appointed staterooms finished in mahogany and boxwood showed evidence of a violent confrontation. Walls were scarred with ax and crowbar marks and bloodstains darkened the floors. The ship’s hold bore shameful witness to the vessel’s purpose: lumber for a slave deck, shackles, ring-bolts fastened to the ceiling, boxes of wooden spoons and wide-headed tacks — to be cast across the floor to prevent escape — indicated that the brig was a slaver for the transatlantic trade.

    After sailing alongside the brig for days, Smith noted in the log for Thursday, April 12 that “we have concluded to send the brig home under the command of Capt. Josiah Hill, Jr. [the Rienzi’s second mate] She is to leave here this afternoon.”

    The Joshua E. Bowly monument in Provincetown’s Gifford Cemetery.

    On the evening of May 10, 1860, the mystery brig, described by the Barnstable Patriot as a “noble looking craft” and “full of provisions,” rounded Long Point and arrived at Bowly’s Wharf. In time, particulars about the brig began to emerge. A receipt found onboard identified her as the Spanish-built Don Juan from Havana. There had been no account of her after March 11, and her crew, it was reported, had mutinied and murdered the captain for the $30,000 he carried to purchase slaves in Africa. Crewmembers were later found in Havana and Puerto Rico. Condemned and seized by the U.S. government as a slaver, the brig was sold at auction to Charles W. Adams of Boston, who renamed her Charles W. Jordan and outfitted her for legitimate work. Most of the cargo, it was reported, was sold to Messrs. J.E. & G. Bowly for $1,800.

    On June 14, 1860, after a 15-month voyage, the Rienzi returned home. Smith’s entry in the ship’s log reads: “We passed Long Point Light and so we came to an anchor in Provincetown Harbor. Nothing more worthy of note. So ends this day.”

    The Rienzi returned without Capt. Milliken, who had died at sea of yellow fever, surrounded by his crew. In the log for June 5, Smith had written that “at 12½ o’clock, Capt. Milliken expired. He is no more. He did not seem any distressed at all.” The next day, Rienzi crewmembers were joined onboard by crews from other Provincetown vessels. Smith read passages of Scripture, after which the body of “our beloved Captain” was committed to the ocean’s depths.

    The grave of Freeman A. Smith, the ship keeper of the whaling schooner Rienzi, in Cemetery No. 2.

    As for the Rienzi, she continued whaling during the Civil War years until July 8, 1863, when Capt. Peter Avery was homeward bound with a cargo of whale oil. Sailing 75 miles southeast of Gay Head, Avery spotted a vessel later identified as the Confederate privateer Florida cruising toward the brig W.B. Nash, bound from New York. Witnessing the brig being set on fire and the Florida steering toward them, the Rienzi crew abandoned ship. Taking to the whaleboats and pulling away, they watched helplessly as their vessel, too, was burned. Rescued by a passing vessel, the crew was landed safely at Woods Hole. Capt. Avery continued at sea until April 9, 1873, when the three-masted schooner under his command, William H. Andrews, sailing from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine, foundered off Barnegat, N.J. with the loss of all hands.

    In Provincetown, the Rienzi and the “mystery brig” remained in the town’s collective memory long after the events of 1860. In 1910, when Freeman A. Smith died at the age of 78, his obituary noted not only his Civil War service but that he was one of the last survivors of the whaler that had found the “tenantless slaver brig sailing erratically in the mid-Atlantic.” In 1917, the Provincetown Advocate, reporting the illness of Cushing Emery (1841-1918), made mention of Emery and Jesse Ghen being the “only surviving members of the crew that brought to this port the slaver brig found abandoned at sea many years ago.” Ghen, who had celebrated his 19th birthday during the voyage, died in Melrose in 1919, ending living memory of the Rienzi.

    GRAVEYARD SHIFT

    Isaiah Hatch and the Wreck of the Franklin

    By

    On his first excursion to Cape Cod in October 1849, Henry David Thoreau stopped in Cohasset to view the gut-wrenching aftermath of the wreck of the brig St. John, carrying destitute refugees from Galway to what should have been a new life in America. Caught in a storm approaching Boston, the St. John sought refuge in Scituate, only to be dashed on the Grampus Ledge. Of the more than 160 people on board, only an estimated 20 survived.

    Resuming his journey, Thoreau reached the Great Beach, where the only humans along the lonely stretch were wreckers, who made a living — or at least a sideline — off shipwreck salvage, “looking for driftwood and fragments of wrecked vessels.” From one of those wreckers, he learned about another shipwreck, that of the full-rigged Franklin, lost at Newcomb Hollow on March 1.

    The Hatch family plot in the South Wellfleet Cemetery. (Photos Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    Sailing from Deal, England under the command of Capt. Charles Smith, the Franklin was a Boston vessel owned by John W. Crafts and James W. Wilson. Carrying passengers and cargo, the Franklin appeared to have ventured too close to the bars off Wellfleet on that fateful Thursday morning, and though the winds were moderate, the weather fair, and the anchorage good, she slipped her chains and was driven ashore, breaking into pieces. Among those who witnessed the tragedy was John Young Newcomb, the “Wellfleet Oysterman” of Thoreau’s Cape Cod. Historian Edward Rowe Snow writes that 33 souls were aboard the Franklin, 11 of whom — including the captain and first mate — perished when their lifeboat lurched in the heavy surf and pitched them into the breakers. Those who stayed with the Franklin were rescued. The ship’s valuable cargo, including wool, linseed oil, nutmegs, and a coarse, heavy linen known as tow cloth, was strewn along the shore. At the time of Thoreau’s October visit, the sea was still heaving up treasure for the Wellfleet wreckers.

    Were it not for a valise, hauled in from the surf by Isaiah H. Hatch, the Franklin may have been relegated to history as yet another vessel gone to a watery grave and not the focus of a sensational conspiracy case that played out in a Boston court.

    Capt. Isaiah Holbrook Hatch was born in 1798 to George Hatch and Drusilla Parker of Truro. In 1820, he married Eliza Smith Young of Wellfleet, the daughter of Benjamin Young and Elizabeth Arey. By all accounts, Hatch, who had owned the vessel Aurora and spent 30 years as a seaman, was a respectable citizen and a devout member of the Congregational Church, where he owned a pew. At the time of the Franklin wreck, he was retired from the sea, farming and making the most of whatever the tides cast up.

    The grave of Capt. Isaiah Holbrook Hatch, who outlived all five of his daughters.

    Having retrieved the water-logged valise, Hatch carried it home, where he dried and read the letters contained within. He quickly realized that the valise belonged to Capt. Smith, and that the letters, signed with the initials J.W.C. and J.W.W. — John W. Crafts and James W. Wilson — revealed a plan to deliberately scuttle the Franklin to collect insurance money. Days later, Hatch contacted Truro-born Capt. Ebenezer Davis, a retired mariner who knew the coast intimately. Then living in Boston and working as a marine inspector, he arrived in Wellfleet as the underwriters’ investigator. The valise was delivered to Davis, who delivered it to prosecutors.

    In mid-April, the trial for conspiracy commenced. Despite testimony by numerous witnesses, including Isaiah H. Hatch, and the damning “wrecking letters” being admitted into evidence, the proceedings came down to a he said-he said between Wilson and Crafts. Wilson, who pleaded not guilty to two charges and guilty to one — while claiming to have been a patsy for the mastermind Crafts — became a government witness. Crafts denied all charges, asserting that Wilson alone had written the letters and that he was a perjurer and a swindler. After a 30-day trial and one day of deliberation, Crafts was acquitted on all counts. Wilson also did not serve any time.

    Civil proceedings were initiated to collect the Franklin’s insurance, said to have been twice what the vessel and cargo were worth. Despite daily newspaper coverage of the trial, virtually nothing was said about the lives lost.

    Included in the salvage from the Franklin was nursery stock bought in England and Scotland by a South Boston man named Bell, who hoped to establish the varieties in New England. Thoreau references the pear and plum trees that he saw growing in the garden of Isaiah Hatch, specimens from the Franklin, and notes that Hatch’s turnip seed also came from the wreck. Might that seed have been the source of the famous Eastham turnip, believed by some to be related to the Scottish turnip?

    The South Wellfleet Cemetery is at the site of the 1833 Meeting House, which was moved to the center to become the town hall, then burned in 1960.

    Isaiah H. Hatch lived a long life tinged with heartbreak. Five daughters and one son were born to Isaiah and Eliza, who outlived all their daughters. Two of them, Elisa and Minerva, died within days of each other in 1865 of typhoid fever. The son, Isaiah Adams Hatch (1832-1894), who was exactly four feet tall, became a well-known traveling merchant who enjoyed the hospitality of friends from Truro to Hyannis. Known as “The Colonel” and “The Little Man,” his sorrowful story of having lost his mother and five sisters was told in broadsides, printed in 1879 and 1889, which he sold for five cents along with other goods.

    Isaiah, Eliza, Isaiah Jr., and Minerva Hatch rest together in a family plot in the South Wellfleet Cemetery on Route 6. First laid out in the 1770s, the cemetery was the site of the Congregational Meeting House (Second Congregational Society), built in 1833. No longer active by 1917, the building was sold in the 1930s and moved to Wellfleet village, becoming the Town Hall until it was destroyed by fire in 1960.

    Editor’s note: “The Little Man” broadsides can be viewed online at Brown University’s John Hay Library Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays — Broadsides.

    GRAVEYARD SHIFT

    Rediscovering Eastham’s Elijah Knowles

    A trusted public servant and justice of the peace

    By

    Excitement rippled through Eastham with the recent rediscovery in the archives of the historical society of a document signed by Samuel Adams. Adams, born in 1722, was one of the architects of the Revolution, and, in 1794, succeeded John Hancock as governor of Massachusetts. On June 16, 1795, he affixed his signature to the document appointing Elijah Knowles justice of the peace. The document was donated to the Eastham Historical Society in 1979 by Mr. and Mrs. George C. Myrick, then of Delmar, N.Y.

    The 1795 document signed by Gov. Samuel Adams.

    The roots of the Knowles and Myrick (or Merrick) families are deeply intertwined in Eastham, dating to the 1640s and 1650s. In 1803, Jesse Myrick (1782-1872) married Elizabeth Knowles (1784-1855), one of seven children of Elijah Knowles and Rebecca Harding. Jesse and Elizabeth had 11 children. Two years after the birth of their youngest child, Elisha, they left Eastham and joined the Shaker community in Harvard, Mass.

    The Shakers proselytized throughout New England in the 1820s and 1830s, sending missionaries to Methodist camp meetings, or outdoor worship gatherings, including one in South Wellfleet in 1819 and later on Bound Brook Island. From 1828 to 1863, camp meetings were held at Eastham’s 10-acre Millennium Grove. The Myricks were, no doubt, moved to join the Shakers after hearing members at an early meeting.

    All of the Myrick children and their parents, with the exception of Elisha, are buried in Harvard’s Shaker Cemetery. They were not the only Myrick relatives to trade Eastham for the industrious, entrepreneurial, celibate community founded in 1792. Buried with them are Jesse’s brother Isaac; Elizabeth’s unmarried sister Lucy Knowles; her married sister Anna Knowles Mayo and husband Joseph Mayo; and Betsy Doane Knowles (1802-1882), who left Eastham after the death of her husband, Henry Mayo Knowles, in 1854.

    The Eastham family of Godfrey Sparrow (1805-1865) also joined the Shaker community. Godfrey’s wife, Mercy Higgins, had died in 1833 and was buried in the Orleans Cemetery. It is likely that, in 1834, Godfrey took at least four of his motherless children to Harvard, where he is buried with his three daughters. His son, Warren, renounced the Shakers in 1862.

    Elijah Myrick, the second youngest of Jesse and Elizabeth’s children, was an esteemed member of the Shaker community, patenting a metal chimney cap, bottling and marketing medicinal spring water, and eventually becoming a prominent elder. In Elijah’s obituary, his younger brother Elisha was described as “one of the world’s people.” Elisha renounced Shakerism in 1859 at age 33, and, in 1861, married Sarah Godbold, with whom he had two sons.

    The grave of Deacon Edward Knowles (16711740), grandfather of Elijah Knowles, in the Cove Burying Ground. (Photos Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    Elisha had worked in the Shakers’ lucrative medicinal herb industry. Their medical practices paralleled the botanical remedies developed by Samuel Thomson, who had visited Eastham with his herbal health care system during the 1816 epidemic. Two of Elisha’s sisters, Susan and Anna, became Shaker physicians. Elisha Myrick later established himself as a druggist, associated with the Boston firm Cheney & Myrick, whose specialty was pressed herbs and hops. He lived in Chelsea and later in Melrose, where he died in 1892, having “endeared himself to all by his genial and social qualities.”

    In Eastham, the family of Elijah Knowles was prominent and respected. His grandfather, Deacon Edward Knowles (1671-1740), was a tanner and served as selectman and town treasurer. Edward Knowles Jr. (1713-1799) followed in his footsteps, serving as deacon of the north meetinghouse, as town clerk, and, for two terms, as treasurer. It is said that he was among the first to manufacture salt by solar evaporation in Eastham. Married three times, Edward Knowles and his first wife, Ann Doane Knowles — the widow of a Knowles cousin — were the parents of Elijah, born in 1747.

    Elijah’s short life was full of honors. Continuing a family tradition of community service, he was appointed in 1790 to a committee tasked with drafting a petition to the General Court to regulate fisheries. He served in the General Court from 1785 to 1795 and was Eastham town treasurer and clerk for several years until his death. In May 1795, he helped complete a survey of the town that now resides in the state archives. That same year, he was appointed justice of the peace by Gov. Adams.

    Detail of Elijah Knowles’s gravestone in the Bridge Road Cemetery.

    Just months later, Elijah Knowles died at age 48. In compiling his 1844 history of Eastham, Wellfleet, and Orleans, the Rev. Enoch Pratt included a notice from town records on Elijah Knowles’s death: “He had represented the town nine years in succession in the General Court and was one of the most distinguished men of the town, being often employed in other public offices of trust and importance. His death was deeply lamented by all who knew him.” Elijah Knowles is buried, with his parents and his son Harding, at the Bridge Road Cemetery, the site of the north meetinghouse from 1720 to 1830. His grandfather, Deacon Edward Knowles, rests in Cove Burying Ground.

    Editor’s note: Amy McGuiggan’s article “The Mysterious Cape Cod Epidemic of 1816” was published in our issue of April 30, 2020.

    GRAVEYARD SHIFT

    Eastham Looks Back at Its First Preacher

    Samuel Treat Day will ask ‘emotional questions posed by our history’

    By

    EASTHAM — The grave marker in the Cove Burying Ground is plain: “Rev. Samuel Treat died Mar. 18, 1716, aged 69 years,” it reads. But the story of Eastham’s first ordained minister, who served as pastor of the Outer Cape’s oldest town for 45 years, is anything but simple.

    The grave of the Rev. Samuel Treat (not the original headstone) in Eastham’s Cove Burying Ground. Because of a calendar change, the year of his death is now recorded as 1717. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

    On March 18, as part of the continuing observance of Eastham 400, the town will recognize the legacy of the Rev. Samuel Treat with a series of online events and self-led actual visits to local sites related to his life here. The day’s events will culminate in a talk by a prominent scholar of Native American history on the indigenous Wampanoag and Nauset people of Outer Cape Cod.

    “This day will give local focus to the emotional questions posed by our history,” according to an announcement from the Eastham Public Library, which is sponsoring the observance with Eastham 400. “Were the Mayflower’s Pilgrims dedicated families seeking religious freedom, arriving at an unknown destination, still reeling from a pandemic? Or were they [the first] wave of the European invaders, taking land from Natives and forcing Indian conversions to their English ways of life?”

    Born in 1648 into a prominent Connecticut family (his father, Robert Treat, was governor of the colony), Samuel Treat was a 1669 graduate of Harvard College. He began to preach in Eastham in 1672 and was ordained in 1675.

    To begin to understand the life and work of the Rev. Samuel Treat, a strict Calvinist, it is helpful to understand the doctrine by which he lived: a matrix of attitudes and superstitions quite alien to modern systems of belief and perhaps impossible to reconcile with them.

    Four centuries ago, Puritan theology and authority informed every aspect — religious, cultural, and political — of daily life. Individuals were deemed inherently sinful, but they could have their souls saved by being in a covenant relationship with God that involved a profound examination of one’s faith. This binding agreement with God and his “elected” was proof of the divine right of Puritans to settle the lands of the New World, where, in 1630, they began arriving by the thousands from England during a time of religious turmoil. Divine right, in turn, justified the frontier wars of the 17th century.

    Agents of Satan

    Despite a deep faith in God and a rigid, disciplined adherence to Scripture, 17th-century daily life was fraught with anxieties, insecurities, and uncertainties, not the least of which was the constant search for signs of God’s favor — or disapproval. Many anxieties were quite real: beasts, scarcity, pest infestations, and drought. Others were perceived, including those “prodigious spirits” that lurked in the vast wildernesses that separated swaths of cultivated land. Those wildernesses, Satan’s domain, were understood to be the abode of a mysterious race of men — Indians — whom colonists saw as hostile and feared as agents of Satan.

    For Puritans, God may have been ruling the universe, but he was in a cosmic struggle with the omnipresent Satan for control of the human soul. Ministers, who played a central role in their communities as transmitters of God’s word, did little to allay the fears of their flocks. Rather, they stoked the wilds of the imagination and instilled terror with thundering fire-and-brimstone jeremiads from the pulpit, warning of God’s wrath as well as Satan’s temptations, supernatural powers, and diabolical skills, thereby maintaining community solidarity and spiritual conformity. The Rev. Mr. Treat was every bit a product of the Puritan century and a man of his generation.

    Eastham, originally known as Nauset, was settled in 1644 by seven families who had removed from Plymouth. The township, then 15 miles long, included the area to the north, set off as Wellfleet in 1762, and the area to the south, set off as Orleans in 1797.

    “For half a century after its founding,” wrote Donald Trayser in his 1951 history of the town, “Eastham was the only town on Cape Cod east of Yarmouth…. Francis Baylies called Eastham the ‘common mother of all towns below Yarmouth.’ Old Eastham unquestionably was mother to Wellfleet and Orleans. And foster mother at least to Truro, Chatham, and Harwich-Brewster.”

    Though the small number of original settlers could not support the services of an ordained minister, the Rev. John Mayo went from Barnstable to Eastham in 1646, perhaps in the capacity of a teaching elder, to minister until 1655. During that time, the first meetinghouse was built, and the burial ground (now Cove Burying Ground) was laid out adjacent to it.

    Treat arrived in Eastham as a 24-year-old graduate of Harvard, founded by Puritans in 1636 to provide a learned ministry to the colonies. As zealous promoters of education, the Puritans believed that the ability to read would thwart Satan’s efforts to keep people from the Bible, their ignorance of Scripture making them susceptible to his temptations.

    Compensated handsomely with a salary, parcels of upland, marsh, and meadow, as well as a woodpile to heat the home the townspeople built for him at Fort Hill, Treat was tireless in his mission to grow his congregation and spread the Gospel. In 1674 he married Elizabeth Mayo, the daughter of John Mayo. They had 11 children. After her death in 1696, Treat married the widow Abigail Easterbrook, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Willard of Boston, and they had two more children. At a time when the population of Eastham was expanding to outlying areas, making it more and more difficult to hold his single church together, Treat’s ministry lasted a remarkable 45 years, to the moment of his death during the Great Snow of 1717, a historic storm.

    His voice, and the manner of his delivery, was said to be so loud and ungraceful that it “could be heard at a great distance from the meeting-house, even amidst the shrieks of hysterical women, and the winds that howled over the plains of Nauset.” But Eastham history remembers Treat fondly for his otherwise mild and cheerful manner, his piety and earnestness, and a compassion that endeared him to his flock, including the many Nauset people whom he Christianized.

    Preaching to the Natives

    He was among a group of Puritan missionaries, perhaps the most prominent being John Eliot at Roxbury and Thomas Mayhew at Martha’s Vineyard, who recognized that language was the chief barrier to preaching the Gospel among natives. Having mastered the spoken language of the Nausets, Treat encouraged literacy by preparing alphabets, grammar books, and translations of the Bible and other theological works.

    The 1605 Samuel de Champlain map of Nauset shows planted fields, wigwams, and a fishing weir. It predates the time of Samuel Treat but is a snapshot of the area when explorers first visited.

    When Treat himself was not preaching to his converts in their villages, his “pupils” served as teachers, ministering to their congregations using sermons prepared by Treat. The conversion of Natives to “Praying Indians” was central to a godly society, the fulfillment of the Puritan utopian theocracy envisioned by the Great Migration of Congregationalists led by John Winthrop in 1630.

    By the time of Treat’s death in 1717, change was already in the air. Puritanism, or at least its fervor, was in decline. Dissident religious groups had begun to proliferate, challenging religious authority and undermining community solidarity. The worldview was radically reoriented during the Age of Reason known as the Enlightenment. The blazing star in the night sky or the drought that ruined crops, once explained as the diabolical work of Satan, could now be understood by science.

    Samuel Treat Day in Eastham on the 304th anniversary of his death will begin at 10 a.m. with a panel presentation by Patty Donohoe of the Eastham Historical Society, Ron Petersen of the Orleans Historical Commission, Tom Ryan of Eastham 400, and journalist Bob Seay. Visits to outdoor sites will follow. At 3 p.m., Prof. David Silverman will speak on the topic “When Things Fall Apart: Samuel Treat, the Wampanoags, and the Place of Christian Indians in Colonial New England.”

    For more information and to register for Zoom events, visit easthamlibrary.org/400.asp.

    GRAVEYARD SHIFT

    ‘White Bronze’ Monuments Speak of a Forgotten Fashion

    Made of cast zinc, they adorn the graves of Victorian-era notables

    By

    When the sun is shining, they glow with a bluish hue, standing out from the luminous white marbles, polished granites, and matte-black slates. There are not many of them in the Lower Cape cemeteries, but once one becomes familiar with their look, these grave markers are hard to miss.

    The Beneiah Higgins family monument in Eastham’s Evergreen Cemetery. (Photos Amy Whorf McGuiggan)

    Briefly popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, cast zinc monuments — marketed with the fancy-sounding name “white bronze” — were popular for about 40 years, from 1874 to the beginning of World War I, and were a less expensive alternative to stone. Detractors considered them cheap imitations of natural stone and hardly a suitable way to honor a loved one.

    Only one firm, the Monumental Bronze Company in Bridgeport, Conn., did original casting of white bronze grave markers, but numerous subsidiaries, including those in Chicago, Des Moines, New Orleans, and Canada, did assembly work and distribution.

    Sold by salesmen using illustrated catalogues that offered customers an array of sizes, shapes, and prices, the monuments could be built from stock panels that featured popular religious, fraternal, animal, patriotic, and military emblems. Because each section of the monument was cast individually and joined with molten zinc, the combinations were limited only by one’s imagination.

    The monument’s base was often finished to look like a block of rough stone. Custom panels with favorite religious verses could also be cast, thus personalizing the monument and adding to the variety of designs. It is safe to say that no two zinc monuments were alike. Resistant to rust, moss, and lichen, most zinc monuments have weathered the elements better than natural stone, though they are prone to stress fractures and a bulging at the base from top-heaviness. Because they are hollow, urban myths tell of family members hiding personal items, money, and, during Prohibition, supplies of liquor behind the panels.

    Detail from Charles Giles’s panel on the Isaac Lewis family monument.

    Interesting examples of these monuments can be found in several of Provincetown’s three contiguous cemeteries, Wellfleet’s Oakdale Cemetery, and Eastham’s Evergreen Cemetery. Perhaps one day a full inventory of these once trendy headstones might be taken.

    In Provincetown’s Old Alden cemetery, a smallish zinc marker just off Cemetery Road draws one in with the epigraph “We have no home but Heaven.” Here is buried George Washington Readey (1833-1920), one of Provincetown’s more memorable characters, who, after a long life of adventure at sea beginning at age 11, came ashore where he worked odd jobs, married for the first time at age 56 to Mary Parks (it was her third marriage) and became town crier in 1885. Known as Professor Readey, his sea stories were legendary, none more so than the tale of his harrowing encounter with a sea serpent, a 300-foot creature covered in scales, with six eyes the size of dinner plates and an eight-foot horn crowning its head. Emerging from the surf at Herring Cove, it ambled up and over the dune past where Readey was hiding behind a bush and disappeared.

    Detail from Noah Swett Higgins’s marker in Wellfleet’s Oakdale Cemetery.

    Readey signed an affidavit swearing to the veracity of his encounter and that he had not been “unduly excited by liquor or otherwise.” A 1915 Boston newspaper profile of Readey may, however, have cast some doubt on the story when it noted that he had “sprung” the tale on an innocent world some 20 years earlier.

    In Provincetown’s Gifford Cemetery, an elaborate zinc headstone marks the grave of Capt. Isaac Baker Lewis, born here in 1831. One of 10 children born to Nathaniel Lewis and Azubah Snow, he was the brother of Capt. Thomas Lewis, who also has a white bronze headstone in the cemetery, and Bangs Atwood Lewis, owner of Lewis Wharf, purchased by Mary Heaton Vorse in 1913. Theatre fans know the wharf as the site where modern American theater began in 1916 with Eugene O’Neill’s one-act play Bound East for Cardiff.

    The headstone for the Isaac Lewis family includes a panel for Isaac and his two wives, and a panel for the two young Betsys, who did not survive. A third panel remembers a young man, Charles H. Giles (1859-1889), who worked for Isaac Lewis and died of tuberculosis. The panel features a customized crown motif encircled by what appear to be crosses. Embedded in the crown are the letters V.M.C. An inscription, “A kind brother and a faithful friend,” suggests a fraternal affiliation and, indeed, the motto V.M.C. — Virtue, Mercy, Charity — indicates membership in the organization Royal Arcanum, a fraternal benefit society founded in Boston in 1877 and still active today.

    The Lewis family grave.

    In Wellfleet’s Oakdale Cemetery, a white bronze monument remembers Capt. Noah Swett Higgins (1829-1894) and his wife, Abigail Newcomb (1831-1916). Both families had deep Wellfleet-Eastham roots, the Newcombs beginning with Thomas Newcomb’s marriage to Elizabeth Cook in 1693, and the Higginses beginning with Richard Higgins, one of the pioneer settlers of Eastham.

    The headstone features motifs reflecting affiliations — the Masonic compass and an anchor — that were available to families to “personalize” their headstones. Having followed the sea from the age of eight, Noah S. Higgins spent decades as the master or owner of fishing and coastal vessels and in 1882 took command of the 100-ton schooner Freddie A. Higgins, a packet running between Wellfleet and Boston. Thereafter he retired to a farmer’s life.

    Noah Swett Higgins’s gravestone.

    A prominent zinc monument in Eastham’s Evergreen Cemetery is an example of the “rough stone” technique used to mimic natural stone. It memorializes another branch of the Higgins family, that of mariner Beneiah Gill Higgins (1830-1876) and his wife, Maria Theresa Dill (1835-1902). The Dill family in Eastham originates with Medford-born Thomas Dill (1708-1761) who married Eastham-born Mehitable Brown in 1733. The Gill family on the Lower Cape appears to begin with the Eastham marriage of Scarlet Gill of Boston to Tabitha Nickerson of Chatham in 1747. The Dill-Gill family ties continue, just steps away from the Higgins monument, where a zinc headstone marks the grave of Maria’s brother, Theophilus Knowles Dill (1837-1890), a Civil War veteran. His monument features a motif of three chain links — signifying friendship, love, and truth — representing the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.

    Though the era of white bronze monuments was short and the monuments are thinly scattered across the Lower Cape, their uniqueness may catch a visitor’s eye and encourage a closer examination of their workmanship and inquiry into the lives buried beneath. The “proof test,” a knock on the monument to determine if it is hollow, will confirm one’s discovery, though be prepared for the possibility that someone knocks back!

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