The Enduring Shore: A History of Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket

CHAPTER 1

CAPAWACK

It was too good to be true. But there he was, back among his friends and family on Chappaquiddick. Back on Edgartown Harbor. Back on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in the indescribably exquisite month of July, with the rest of his life stretched out before him.

Giant schools of striped bass crashed nightly along the beaches during that month, gulping into flickering clouds of sand eels. Bluefish blitzed in broad daylight in the outer harbor, under flocks of screaming and diving terns and along the heaving rip out at Wasque Point. Up-island, all over the woods, the small green nuggets that hung where the blueberry blossoms had fallen off a month before were softening now, and darkening. The last of the strawberries were ripe. The corn was waist high. How many times had he thought about the last lobster he had eaten, the last clambake on the beach before a warm fire, the sloppy hands and cool air? How many times had he wondered when, or if ever, such perfect days would come again?

For three years, most of them spent in the miserable city of London, he had worked hard for various bosses who occasionally tried to be polite but always managed to say no when the right thing to say would have been yes. Never was he away so far or for so long before. But despite all that, it now felt as it always did whenever he got back on-island; he felt as if he had never left.

Or maybe he didn’t feel that way at all. Maybe he felt as if things could never be the same again. Maybe it wasn’t Edgartown Harbor, but up the Lagoon Pond in Vineyard Haven. There’s no way, really, to know. All that is known is that the year was 1614—twelve years since the first English attempt to establish a year-round presence in the neighborhood of Cape Cod and the Islands had failed, and six years before the Pilgrims would succeed. It was 1614, and Epenow, the prized Wampanoag slave of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, was back home. Back home, having swum with all his formidable might for shore with the sound of muskets firing over his head.

Out on the ship from which he had just escaped, the English tended to their injured. The captain, Nicholas Hobson, was struck by an arrow, as were many of his company. They may additionally have been in a state of shock. Only the day before, the deck of their little vessel was crowded with friendly Wampanoag, many of them brothers and sisters of Epenow. The principal inhabitants of the place came aboard, wrote Ferdinando Gorges (who wasn’t actually there) in his memoir many years later. They were kindly entertained by the Captain, [and] departed in their canoes promising the next morning to come aboard again and bring some trade with them.

When the roughly twenty dugout canoes arrived the next day at the appointed hour, the men who paddled them were standoffish, remaining at a certain distance with their bows ready. They refused to come nearer no matter how much Captain Hobson talked and gestured. Hobson called Epenow up from the middle of the ship, where he was being held, to the forecastle, in order to have him speak some reason to his countrymen. He came forward immediately, leaving behind the two men who were supposed to guard him, and called out to his friends in the canoes. He spoke English, encouraging his old neighbors to come aboard in a language none of them understood. He also spoke in his native tongue, giving his relatives quite different instructions in a language that none of his captors understood. Then, according to Gorges, in the interim [he] slips himself overboard, and although he was taken hold of by one of the company, yet being a strong, heavy man, could not be stayed. As soon as Epenow was in the water, his relatives let fly a shower of arrows, under the cover of which he swam away from captivity. Epenow privately (as it appeared) had contracted with his friends how he might make his escape without performing what he had undertaken, Gorges sulkily reported.

According to at least one informed source, Epenow had planned his dramatic return to the Vineyard long before the family reunion the day before on the deck of Captain Hobson’s boat. Gorges’s mention of Epenow not performing what he had undertaken is typically coy in regard to the purpose of the visit to the island. Even though he was writing thirty years after the event, Gorges wrote only obliquely about my pretended designs, perhaps because he still harbored them. And he mentioned what Epenow had contracted to do without saying what that was particularly, and how Epenow was risking getting his brains knocked out as soon as he came ashore if his friends found out he had disclosed what Gorges called the secrets of his country.

But Captain John Smith—of Virginia fame—had no motive to hold back what he knew. (Though he may have had his reasons for embarrassing Gorges, who had apparently decided that Smith was at least one of the causes of his spate of bad luck and had consequently stopped sending him on voyages to the New World.) According to Smith, Epenow laid the groundwork for his escape using the same strategy that another enslaved Native American used almost a century before on Coronado: he simply told the master what he wanted to hear. Hobson and his crew were in search for a mine of Gold about an Isle called Capawick, Southwards of the shoals of Cape James (Cod), as they were informed by a savage called Epenow. Epenow, it turned out, had not been unobservant of the hopes and aspirations of Gorges and his colleagues during his years in London. He deluded them, said Smith, thus to get home.

In fairness to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, he was not a cold-blooded Pizarro. Nor was he, by historical standards, an abusive slave driver. He had no plantations, factories, or gold mines in which his human acquisitions toiled (though he was looking for the latter). In fact, it’s not clear what work, if any, Epenow and the other Indians in Gorges’s household actually performed; sources tend to describe them as in his retinue, or even in his family. Sir Ferdinando was, one might say, something of a collector of the New England natives who periodically showed up in Old England in the decades before the Pilgrims arrived at Provincetown.

A self-interested collector, to be sure. After Walter Raleigh’s final fall from influence with the ascension of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, Gorges and his partners in the Plymouth Company acquired the rights to develop a vast tract of real estate stretching from Delaware to Maine. For them, owning Native Americans was a kind of industrial espionage, a cheaper way to find out about their theoretical holdings than blindly funding voyages. In Gorges’s case, such voyages had a discouraging tendency to turn up nothing in the way of profits.

While I was laboring by what means I might best continue life in my languishing hopes, he wrote, there comes one Captain Henry Harley unto me, bringing with him a native of the island of Capawick, a place seated to the southward of Cape Cod, whose name was Epenowe. Gorges was a little fuzzy on the details of Epenow’s capture and previous life, other than that some earlier master had used the Vineyarder as a sideshow attraction in London. It is true, Gorges wrote, he was a goodly man, of a brave aspect, stout, and sober in his demeanor, and had learned so much English as to bid those that wondered at him ‘Welcome! Welcome!’

Gorges put Epenow up in London with Assacumet, one of five sachems of Pemaquid that had been taken from the shores of Maine in 1605. Like the vast majority of native New Englanders, both men spoke languages from the Eastern Algonquian linguistic family, and Assacumet plied Epenow for information about Cape Cod and the Islands. Whether it was his experience of the Spanish slave market or of the London street carnivals that inspired Epenow’s story of gold back home on Martha’s Vineyard is unknown. There’s some possibility it was Assacumet’s suggestion, or that Gorges himself helped put the idea in Epenow’s head by asking a little too anxiously about the copper that many New England natives had been observed wearing. In his roundabout way, however, Gorges implied that Harley already had gold fever when he brought Epenow to him. Gorges’s usual partner, the earl of Southampton, agreed to invest one hundred pounds and introduced Gorges to Hobson, whose own willingness to put up one hundred pounds no doubt went a long way toward ensuring him the job as commander of the expedition.

When the ship sailed in June of 1614, Epenow wasn’t the only Native American expatriate on board. Assacumet and Wenape (another native of those parts, sent me [Gorges] out of the Isle of Wight for my better information) were included in the crew as well. For the most part, the three Indians did as they were asked, and Gorges reported that Captain Hobson was piloted from place to place by the natives as well as their hearts could desire. Until, that is, they got to the Vineyard.

Gorges apparently was not entirely without his suspicions about Epenow’s story.* His crew was specifically instructed to keep a good eye on the man: I gave the Captain strict charge to endeavor by all means to prevent his escape, he wrote later, and for the more surety, I gave order to have three gentlemen of my own kindred (two brothers of Sturton’s and Master Matthews) to be ever at hand with him, clothing him with long garments fitly to be laid hold on if occasion should require. Captain Hobson and his crew had reason therefore to worry about what Sir Ferdinando would say if he found out that Epenow had escaped unharmed; Epenow was killed in the fracas, they agreed to tell him.

Near the guildhall in the city of London was a bar called the Mermaid. In the first decades of the 1600s it was the favorite gathering place for people interested in the New World. John Smith went there when he was in town, as did Captain Barlowe of Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1584 expeditions to the coast of America. Many of the plans regarding the founding of the Virginia Colony were discussed at the bar, as were more than a few decisions regarding New England. Bartholomew Gosnold, Bartholomew Gilbert, and others from the 1602 voyage to Cape Cod and the Islands visited occasionally, as later did Miles Standish, John Winthrop, and, when he was in town, William Bradford. The earl of Southampton and his good friend William Shakespeare were known to drink occasionally at the Mermaid, as were Ben Jonson and the famous enslaved New England native Squanto.

In all likelihood Epenow spent some evenings there during his years as a professional curiosity. Bar owners loved the crowds that Indians inevitably brought. Trinculo complains in Shakespeare’s The Tempest that in England, when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian. And if Epenow himself didn’t actually get to the Mermaid, many who knew and remembered his cries of Welcome! Welcome! certainly did.

Some of the talk at the bar after Hobson’s crew returned from Martha’s Vineyard in 1614, with their battle scars and tales of volleys of arrows, was no doubt about how things were getting tougher in America, how it wasn’t like in the old days when Bartholomew Gosnold returned from Cape Cod and the Islands with his market-crashing load of sassafras and his side-splitting stories about sitting around the campfire with Wampanoags, who screwed up their faces and howled at the taste of mustard and tried to buy the Englishmen’s beards right off their faces.

By 1614, even good old Gosnold himself was dead and buried in Jamestown, along with nearly a thousand other unlucky colonists and Indians. With the news that Epenow, too, was dead, many probably agreed with Gorges’s grim assessment of the situation in New England. Only a dozen years had passed since Gosnold’s voyage, and yet there was, said Gorges, a war now new begun between the inhabitants of those parts, and us.

Yet Epenow wasn’t dead at all, as Thomas Dermer, another Englishman who crossed the Atlantic in the employ of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, would find out the hard way a few years later.

CHAPTER 2

CUTTYHUNK

The first Europeans to arrive on the coast of New England with the intention of founding a year-round colony were greeted by a Native American wearing imported shoes. About twelve of the clock the same day, we came to an anchor, where eight Indians in a Basque shallop with mast and sail, an iron grapple and a kettle of copper, came boldly aboard of us, wrote John Brereton, one of the thirty-one members of Bartholomew Gosnold’s 1602 expedition. They were north of their ultimate destination of Cape Cod and the Islands, probably near the mouth of the Penobscot River in southern Maine. One of [the Indians was] appareled with a waistcoat and breeches of black serge, made after our sea fashion, hose and shoes on his feet.

The rest of the natives were dressed more as we typically imagine precolonial Americans, in little but sealskins tied at their waists, which reminded Brereton of a look he’d seen before in Ireland. They were all of tall stature, broad and grim visage, of a black swart complexion, their eyebrows painted white; their weapons bows and arrows. But one Indian in a waistcoat is enough to show that though they may have been the first Europeans with plans to stay year-round in the region, Gosnold and his crew were not the first visitors from across the ocean.

There had been a century of contact between the Old and New Worlds. The vast majority of these voyages were unrecorded, which makes definitive statements about North America before and after colonization impossible. In 1498, only six years after Columbus’s first crossing, John and Sebastian Cabot sailed from Nova Scotia to Hatteras. Four years later, Miguel Cortereal may or may not have washed up in Narragansett Bay, shipwrecked while looking for his brother Gaspar, who had disappeared along the coast the year before. He may or may not have carved M. CORTEREAL 1511 V. DEI DUX IND—king of the Indians—onto a rock in Dighton, Massachusetts. Verrazano visited in 1526, and his subsequent reports to the French government stirred the Spanish into sending Estevan Gomez in 1525. Gomez named Cape Cod Cape James, presumably after the saint, and called Nantucket Cape Shoals after its treacherous waters.

The most unlikely pre-Pilgrim Europeans of all didn’t come to the region in a ship, but supposedly walked through New England on their way from Mexico to Canada. In 1568, David Ingram and two companions were among the crew of a caravan of six English slavers waiting out a storm in a harbor near Vera Cruz, Mexico, when an armada of thirteen Spanish warships pulled into the same port. Slave traders in good standing with the pope were welcome in New Spain, but heretical English slavers were most definitely not, and the armada opened fire. Four of the slave smugglers’ vessels were quickly sunk. One of the two that escaped, overloaded with more than three hundred survivors, was the Judith, under the command of a twenty-three-year-old novice named Francis Drake. For two weeks the badly damaged ship slunk around the Mexican coast looking for provisions without success before a hundred men agreed to try their luck ashore. Of the five known survivors, two escaped to England after serving as slaves to the Spanish for decades. The other three came out of the woods near today’s U.S. border with Canada and were picked up by French fur traders, having walked, David Ingram later reported, up the entire coast of North America. It was an outrageous undertaking, made even harder to believe by Ingram’s reports of having run into elephants in the vicinity of North Carolina.

In all likelihood, however, it wasn’t from any of these Europeans that the Indian gentleman Gosnold and his crew met off the coast of Maine got his waistcoat, pants, and shoes. Brereton’s account mentions that the boat the Indians met them in was a Basque shallop, and by some words and signs they made it became clear that the Indians had been trading with Basque fishermen. Depending on how the price of fish in late medieval Bilbao and Bristol is interpreted, there’s evidence of anywhere from several hundred voyages total to hundreds of trips per year by Basque, Portuguese, French, and English fishermen and fur traders to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Maine, beginning before Columbus’s 1492 voyage. There were fifty European ships off Newfoundland in 1517 alone. In 1534 Jacques Cartier saw what he thought were a thousand Basque fishing vessels off the Gaspé Peninsula. One French mariner named Savalet claimed in 1607 to have already made forty-two voyages to the Cape Breton area. And John Smith, in his 1614 description of New England, noted 800 sayle of ships a year from Portugal and Biscay off Newfoundland.

It’s not clear how many of these fishing voyages made it as far south as Cape Cod. Those that did probably returned: there’s anecdotal evidence of temporary fishing camps at Provincetown in the decades before the Mayflower. Brereton wrote that he was persuaded that there is upon this coast better fishing than in Newfoundland, wherefore we named the place ‘Cape Cod.’

But Gosnold didn’t choose to stay at the Cape. A letter he wrote to his father implies that he may have been searching the region, then known to Europeans as Norumbega, in hopes of finding Refugio, a plentiful river valley that Verrazano had glowingly described. Also, given the smallness of his party, setting up his outpost on an island—preferably a deserted one—may have seemed to offer more security than a crowded peninsula. At several points on the Cape the Concord traded with locals who came out in canoes, but the English found them more thievish than those they met farther north. The Coast is very full of people, wrote Gabriel Archer, an officer on the voyage. Specifically, the upper Cape, the Elizabeth Islands, and Martha’s Vineyard were a part of the Wampanoag nation that stretched from the eastern reaches of Narragansett Bay to the Massachusett lands north of Plymouth. The lower Cape and most of Nantucket, meanwhile, were populated by Nausets, a semi-autonomous client state of the more powerful Wampanoag.

Whether out of fear of the locals or hope of finding richer grounds farther south, Gosnold ordered a course around Provincetown. They passed Monomoy, which they aptly called Point Care, and after almost a week successfully navigated the famously treacherous shoals of Nantucket Sound to the Vineyard.* There they spent two days sampling the local strawberries, which they thought were bigger and sweeter than those back home. There are also on this island great store of deer, which we saw, and other beasts, as appeared by their tracks; as also divers fowls … in great plenty; also great store of pease, which grow in certain plots all the island over, wrote Brereton.

The Vineyard, too, was rejected as a site for their trading post. Part of the reason may have been the thirteen fast running savages they met, possibly at Lambert’s Cove. Archer, who called himself a gentleman in the said voyage, described the Vineyarders as armed with Bows and arrows without any fear. They were, according to Brereton, tall big boned men, all naked, saving they cover their privy parts with a black tewed skin, much like a Black smith’s apron, tied about their middle and betweene their legs behinde. They were perfectly friendly, bringing tobacco, deer skins, and cooked fish as gifts; also, they came more rich in Copper than any before.

This island is sound, and hath no danger about it, wrote Archer, but Gosnold nevertheless wanted to look further, perhaps for something more secluded. They sailed up-island toward Aquinnah (Gay Head), which we called Dover Cliff, and spent the night in Vineyard Sound. The next morning, May 25, they rounded the Sow and Pigs reef, entering Buzzards Bay, which Archer described as one of the stateliest sounds that ever I was in. They named it Gosnold’s Hope, and after a few more days of exploring landed at Cuttyhunk, which they called Elizabeth’s Island.*

According to Archer’s and Brereton’s accounts, it was a place of high timbered oaks, along with beech, elm, walnut, hazelnut (hickory), witch hazel, sassafras, cedars, and various trees they didn’t recognize. The middle story was young sassafras, cherry trees, vines, eglantines, gooseberry bushes, hawthorn, honeysuckles, with others of like quality. The herbs and roots are strawberries, raspberries, ground-nuts, alexander, surrin, tansy, etc. without count. Also for the taking on Cuttyhunk and the nearby islands (at that time Cuttyhunk and Nashawena were a single island) were scallops, mussels, cockles, lobsters, crabs, oysters and wilks, exceedingly good and very great.

The greatest of these was the sassafras, which was something of a rage in Europe as a cure for the French Pox. But syphilis wasn’t the only thing the root in root beer supposedly could fix. Not long after their arrival, when one of the crew had taken a great surfeit by eating the bellies of dog fish, a very delicious meat, he was cured by powdered sassafras root.

Most important, though, given the smallness of the party, Cuttyhunk was altogether unpeopled and disinhabited. Even better, at its western end they found a small freshwater lake in the middle of which lay a tiny island. Gosnold and his cocaptain, Bartholomew Gilbert, put one crew to work constructing a fort on that island. Others began cutting and stacking a cargo of sassafras. A few samples of European grains and vegetables were planted as a test. The commanders, meanwhile, went with the remaining men to nearby Penikese Island and stole a dugout canoe.*

This seems an odd first strategic move for a small group of uninvited strangers in a well-populated land, some of whom hoped to stay the winter—the more so since the English at that point didn’t have any real idea of the strength of the neighboring Wampanoag owners of the place. Since leaving the Vineyard, the only locals Gosnold and his men had encountered were an Indian and two women, the one we supposed to be his wife, the other his daughter, both clean and straight-bodied, with countenance sweet and pleasant.

Archer wrote that the women were very forward and friendly with the visitors, and that the Wampanoag man, therefore, kept a close eye on them. But, Archer added, the women would not admit of any immodest touch. Someone among the English, perhaps in pursuit of a greater understanding of local cultural mores, was rebuffed.

The outer Elizabeths may have been unpopulated, but the islands were nonetheless used regularly for fishing and lobstering by a few families who lived on Naushon, as well as by a far more sizable population of Wampanoag from Woods Hole and Falmouth (Succonessitt). In all likelihood, the four Indians who left their canoe behind and fled into the woods as soon as they saw the strangers approaching Hill’s Hap, as the English called Penikese, were from one or the other of those two places. They no doubt watched as the newcomers hefted their boat aboard the strange big vessel and sailed back across the half mile or so of water to Cuttyhunk. And they were presumably unhappy to be left without a paddle on an island the remoteness of which later induced the state of Massachusetts to use it as a leper colony.

Now when a group of Indians have at great pains chopped down a huge tree with stone axes and, by dint of two or three weeks of firing and scraping, have hollowed it out to make a boat big enough to carry five or six men safely across the tide rips of Buzzards Bay, can anyone suppose that they should accept the theft of it lightly? one historian of precolonial New England asked and then promptly answered: The Indians obviously did not, for within three or four days they appeared in force with their sachem to investigate matters.…

There is a more charitable explanation for the June 5 arrival on Cuttyhunk of a large contingent of armed Wampanoag. Immediately after the canoe caper, a party of English sailed across Buzzards Bay to the mainland, probably landing near New Bedford. There they met men, women and children, who, with all courteous kindness, entertained [us], giving [Gosnold] certain skins of wild beasts, which may be rich furs, tobacco, turtles, hemp, artificial strings colored, chains and such like things as at the instant they had about them. It is likely that the large party of Indians were some of these, come for more trade, rather than a squad of canoe avengers. Brereton, at any rate, was later certain he recognized one of the visitors as a man he had made friends with on the mainland. But it is also clear that Gabriel Archer and the skeleton crew of eight men cutting sedge for the new building on Cuttyhunk were not at first overjoyed to see fifty savages, stout and lusty men, with their bows and arrows … [who] … in a hasty manner came toward us. Gosnold and his cocaptain, Gilbert, were, as usual, off somewhere in the ship. This left Archer, as the presiding officer, to engage in a high-stakes game of charades.

He didn’t want the Wampanoag to see the construction project, so he went toward them on the beach. He clapped himself on the head, and then again on his chest, in a gesture he described as an offer of peace. Then he struck up a tough pose: presented my musket with a threatening countenance, thereby to signify to them either a choice of peace or war. It was a tense moment, but it passed quickly. Archer reported that when the leader of the visiting Wampanoag responded with mine own signs of peace, I stepped forth and embraced him; his company then all sat down in a manner like greyhounds, upon their heels, with whom my company fell a bartering. At this point Gosnold came back ashore and gave the chief a straw hat and a pair of shiny knives; thus our courtesy made them all in love with us.

This love-and-fur fest continued off and on for the better part of a week, with a break in the middle to allow the Wampanoag to return to the mainland for more beavers, luzernes, martins, otters, wildcat skins, very large and deep fur; black foxes, coney skins of the color of our hares, deer skins, very large; seal skins and other beasts’ skins to us unknown. Like their cousins on Martha’s Vineyard, these people also had an abundance of copper, which they used primarily for jewelry—none of them, but have chains, earrings or collars of this metal … four hundred pieces in a collar, very fine and evenly set together. They also had copper pipes and large copper drinking cups, and manufactured some of their arrowheads out of the metal.

Through sign language, one of the Wampanoag explained that the copper came from a hole in the ground on the mainland.* They also had a word for gold, wessador, which the Englishmen took as a very good sign. In the end, both sides seemed pleased with the prices, especially Brereton, who was surprised that the Indians traded their fairest collars or chains for a knife or such like trifle.

When it was time to leave, the Wampanoag got in their dugouts and set off across the bay. A few dozen yards offshore they stopped paddling, Brereton remembered, and turned and raised a loud cheer. The English standing on the beach, in response, blew their trumpets and cornets, and casting our caps up in the air, made them the best farewell we could. It felt, no doubt to both sides, like an auspicious beginning to a long relationship.

Within a few days, however, the English changed their minds about staying permanently on Cuttyhunk. Once again, Gosnold and the other senior officers were away in the ship when the conflict began, having gone to Penikese again, this time to harvest cedar logs. Back on Cuttyhunk, Gabriel Archer and nine others were left with three meals’ worth of food, so when Gosnold didn’t reappear the next day as promised, Archer sent four men to seek out for crabs, lobsters, turtles, etc. for sustaining us till the ship returned, which was gone clean out of sight.

These four would-be hunter-gatherers divided themselves into two groups of two, one of which was shortly assaulted by four Indians. Whether these were the same four seen running into the woods on Penikese the day their canoe was stolen by the English a week and a half before is not clear, though it seems plausible. Nobody was killed: one Englishman was hit by an arrow, the other ran up and cut the Indians’ bowstrings, whereupon they ran off. The two Englishmen, however, had completely lost their bearings in the scuffle, and, after traipsing pointlessly around in circles for a few hours, they spent the night in the woods, not knowing the way home through the thick rubbish.

Back at the camp they were sorely missed: The want of these sorrowed us much, as not able to conjecture anything of them unless very evil, Archer later recalled. But by the time they stumbled into camp the next day, their fellow Cuttyhunk inmates were far too obsessed with the continued absence of the Concord to fully appreciate their safe return. The fact that Gosnold was not back, Archer said, struck us in a dumpish terror for that he performed not the same in the space of almost three days. Contrary to the glowing reports of plenty later written for investors back home, the foraging was not overwhelmingly successful. They survived on salad and groundnuts. Their only comfort was that there was tobacco for after-dinner smokes.

Gosnold finally did sail back to Cuttyhunk. There was no explanation for the delay; nothing had gone wrong. But seventy-two hours of living off the land was enough for a critical majority of the aspiring Elizabeth Islanders. The men had invested three weeks collecting sedge for their abode; they had had mostly good times with the neighboring inhabitants. But the foretaste of the pioneer’s life was enough, and several who were expected to stay behind announced that under no circumstances would they agree to be left behind when the Concord returned to England.

Brereton, for one, bitterly thought the faintheartedness had more to do with the price of sassafras than anything else. After our bark had taken in so much sassafras, cedar, furs, skins and other commodities as were thought convenient, some of our company that had promised Captain Gosnold to stay, having nothing but a [profitable] voyage in their minds, made our company of inhabitants (which was small enough before) much smaller. There were still twelve men willing to winter over, but Gosnold overruled them. After a stay of only six weeks, he ordered the crew of the Concord to set their sails for England, leaving this island (which he called Elizabeths Island) with as many true sorrowful eyes as were before desirous to see it.

CHAPTER 3

VINEYARD SOUND

Crossings make convenient starting points for American histories: Asiatic mammoth hunters crossing the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago or thirty thousand years ago, or maybe both. Then crossing to fill the continent, arriving in New England by nine to twelve thousand years ago. Norsemen crossing to Greenland in 1000 and then (some people believe with as much circumstantial evidence as they can muster) passing all the way down the coast of North America to the wonderstrands of Cape Cod and the currents of Nantucket and Vineyard Sounds. Columbus across the Atlantic. Cortes across the Caribbean. Raleigh to Roanoke. Gosnold to Cuttyhunk. Pilgrims first to Provincetown and then across Cape Cod Bay to Plymouth, where their survival was largely assured by Squanto’s reverse voyage of a few years before. Mayhews to the Vineyard in the 1640s; Thomas and Sarah Macy and their friends to Nantucket nearly two decades later. African, Portuguese, and Polynesian sailors on returning whalers and merchantmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slaves on slavers. Tourists and summer people by the millions over the canal to the Cape and over the water to the Islands. Most stories begin with a crossing.

In my case, in this instance, on a late May dawn, the beginning is a modest passage by plastic kayak. From the north shore of Martha’s Vineyard, where due to unparalleled good fortune in the form of love and marriage I now live, I’m bound across Vineyard Sound to the Elizabeth Islands, which stretch from Woods Hole on the Cape’s southwest corner like the disjointed backbone of some mythical sea monster out toward the mouth of Buzzards Bay.* The westernmost of them is Cuttyhunk, where Gosnold’s hope of founding a colony faltered, and where I am headed.

From Cuttyhunk my thought is to paddle up the eastern coast of Buzzards Bay and through the Cape Cod Canal to Plymouth, where, as every New England schoolchild knows, the first successful New English colony was planted in 1620. Historically, and to a lesser degree geologically, Plymouth belongs with the Cape, which was converted from Indian to English under the jurisdiction of the Old Colony of the separatist Pilgrims at Plymouth, as opposed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the Puritans. But I may decide to skip Plymouth proper, since no one on the Cape or Islands today considers it a part of the region any more than New Bedford, which was founded by Nantucketers. Maybe I’ll take a right at the mouth of the canal and head down the long inside arm of Cape Cod toward Provincetown, where the Pilgrims first landed. Or I may just turn around, come back home, and save those stretches of water and land for another trip. It’s a relatively good job I have, if you don’t think too long about the famously convoluted currents of Vineyard Sound.

I’ve never kayaked across the sound before. So even though I’ve spent many hours paddling up and down and around the local coast in all kinds of weather and water, I’m officially something of a novice among local paddlers. The distance where I’m crossing is not far, only about four and a half miles. In fact, just half a mile down the beach from where I plan to put in is Cedar Tree Neck, where the first signal corps cables were strung across the sound in 1885 because it is the closest spot between the Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands, and from thence to the mainland. But a shorter passage is really only half a blessing; as with a pinched hose, constricted water tends to flow faster.

According to Charles Banks’s three-volume 1916 history of Martha’s Vineyard, the original residents called the island Noe-pe, which he translated as "a compound term consisting of the radical Noe, signifying, middle of, midst, amid, and the generic -pe, which in all Algonquian dialects signifies ‘water,’—and thus we have the full and free definition, ‘amid the waters.’ Banks’s command of the Wampanoag language wasn’t what it might have been, which is unfortunate, because amid the waters evokes nicely the contortions of the local tides. The Vikings, say those who believe they actually sailed this far south, called the whole Buzzards Bay–Vineyard Sound area Straumfiord, or Bay of Currents." During the age of sail, when the number of vessels traveling around Cape Cod and around or through Nantucket and Vineyard Sounds was second only to those in the English Channel,* the southern coast of the Elizabeth Islands was one of several places in the region called the graveyard because so many ships were piled up there by the confusing currents.

In 1854, George W. Eldridge pointed out in his first tide-and-pilot book that most of the sailing vessels that wound up in the Elizabethan graveyard probably got into trouble because they assumed the flooding tide flowed east throughout the length of the two sounds, which for the most part it does, and then reversed on the ebb. But Eldridge, an obsessive measurer who compiled intricate maps of the currents, discovered that at the western entrance to Vineyard Sound, during the first few hours of the incoming tide the water actually flows north, straight toward the rocky southern shores of the Elizabeths.

This current doesn’t bother me. Where I’m starting is far enough down-island—which is to say east—to avoid the strong northerly push. More to the point, running aground on the Elizabeth Islands is precisely my goal: at Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon, I hope. What I’m more concerned about is an area approximately three-quarters of the way across, where when the tide is falling strongly from the east and the prevailing winds of summer are blowing even moderately from the southwest, the water can get piled up into rather messy waves. My brother-in-law calls the area simply the zone, and I’ve seen it in action from various small fishing boats, including his. I’d sincerely like to avoid the zone.

Waves can actually be quite fun in a kayak, a lot more fun than flat water, in fact; I just prefer them closer to shore, and warmer. When my wife’s father heard of my intention to paddle across the sound, he very nearly insisted on following me in his Boston Whaler. He has probably spent as much time exploring Vineyard Sound in small motorized boats as anyone alive; he knows it still occasionally claims lives. I took his opinion very seriously, but I declined the offer.

I did bring along my marine radio in its waterproof case, with which I can call out the Coast Guard from Woods Hole or Menemsha. If that fails, I’ve also got a cell phone, though I’m not optimistic about its ability to work underwater. I have an inflatable float that fits over the paddle to create a kind of pontoon to help me get back into the boat should I need to self-rescue. I’ve got a backup inflatable float in case I lose the first one trying to attach it to the paddle. I’ve got a pump to bail out the kayak, and a bailer if I lose the pump. I’ve got a spare paddle attached with a bungee cord to the deck, and I’m wearing a newfangled outfit that feels like lightweight polar fleece and keeps the body warm whether in or out of the