Chapter 1: Early Years on Cape Cod

CAPE COD. THE SEA. Since the last Ice Age they have always gone together, one sculpted by the other after the glaciers retreated until it resembles a giant arm bent upwards at the elbow—or in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts.” Adorning the bicep of this metaphorical arm is the picturesque village of Yarmouth Port, with gray-shingled cottages and white-clapboard colonials lining its gently meandering main street. Founded in 1639, the village is one of the oldest in New England, and lies almost exactly at the midpoint of today’s Old King’s Highway Historic District. At thirty-two miles long this is the largest such district in the country. Many of the houses in the village carry a distinctive oval plaque, with a schooner silhouetted in gold against a black background. The plaque identifies the former homes of sea captains, and is a particularly common sight along a section of Main Street known as the “Captains’ Mile.” With good reason: a recent survey of historical records confirmed that fifty-five houses in and around the village center once belonged to shipmasters. One plaque-bearing house at the western end of the village is of special significance for this narrative. At the turn of the nineteenth century it was the home of a captain named John Eldridge and his wife, the former Betty Hallet. The Eldridges had many children, the first and the last of whom—John and Oliver—became well-known international seafarers. Neither, however, could match the fame of a third seafaring brother born almost halfway between them, eleven years younger than John, nine years older than Oliver. His name was Asa. And in the view of Cape historian Henry Kittredge, he became “the most distinguished shipmaster that the Cape ever produced… among the world’s half-dozen greatest shipmasters.” A strong spirit of adventure clearly ran in the family, dating back to the earliest days of the village. Two of the first settlers in the 1600s were direct ancestors of Asa and his siblings who had made the grueling journey from England. The boys’ fifth great grandfather on their mother’s side, Andrew Hallet, first appeared in the village in March 1639, just a few months after it was established as an offshoot of the Plymouth Colony founded by the Pilgrims. On their father’s side the first ancestor to arrive was William Eldridge, who was definitely a resident by 1645, and possibly before that. For these early adventurers in the family, their one great move from England was enough. Once they had settled in Yarmouth they stayed there. So too did multiple generations thereafter, showing little inclination to wander. Indeed, when Betty Hallet married John Eldridge over a hundred and fifty years later they made their home in exactly the same neighborhood as the original settlers, less than a quarter mile from the site of the village’s first dwelling. That dwelling had been erected in 1638 by a man named Stephen Hopkins, one of the secular “Strangers” who had arrived with the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. He had since become so important to Plymouth Colony that its General Court would not allow him to move permanently to Cape Cod. The Court authorized him to build a house there only “provided it be not to withdraw him from the town of Plymouth.” He thus became the first of a great many people to own a second home on the Cape. The site Hopkins chose was on the raised bank of a sheltered tidal pond connected to Cape Cod Bay by a broad inlet. Easy access by sea was essential, since that was the only feasible means of travel to and from Plymouth, about thirty-five miles up the coast. Conveniently, the house he erected was also just off the main trail used by the local Wampanoag tribe to travel along the north side of the Cape. Over time, this trail evolved into the road now known as the Old King’s Highway (or more prosaically as Route 6A). Between Hopkins’ arrival and Asa Eldridge’s birth in 1809, the village had evolved in a manner typical of many coastal communities in New England. Thus the issues that shaped it were initially local—the basic need to subsist and establish a workable community—but gradually became broader as the regional economy developed and tensions with England grew. And throughout its development the waters off its shore played a key role, serving as the main highway for commerce and communication, and as a source of important products for the local economy. The first generation of settlers—including the Hallets—were farmers, who prospered more quickly than the colonists they had left behind in Plymouth. They raised cattle, pigs, and sheep, grew corn and vegetables, and found abundant fish and game in the local waters and woods. In due course, their prosperity attracted a full range of craftsmen to service their needs: blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, coopers and cobblers, among others. By the late 1600s the new village—which had been named Yarmouth, after the port of Great Yarmouth on the east coast of England—had grown into a flourishing community of about a thousand people. The settlement also expanded southwards, so that it spanned the full five miles between Cape Cod Bay on the north and Nantucket Sound on the south. It also encompassed large areas that later became separate towns: Dennis, Harwich, Chatham, Brewster and the village of Cummaquid in Barnstable. With two long borders consisting of coastline, the growing town inevitably conducted much of its business with the outside world by sea. Travel for any distance by land was simply too slow and difficult. Even to reach Plymouth, the main port of call in the settlement’s early days, would have been a major trial for horse and man, requiring many long hours on rough trails through thick woods. And as new destinations beyond Plymouth gained importance, the advantages of maritime travel became even greater. One new destination in particular stood out: Boston, the principal port and town of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The latter had been founded in 1628 to the north of the Plymouth Colony, and soon surpassed it. By 1660 its population was already three to four times larger than the Plymouth Colony’s, whose entire population of three thousand was matched by Boston alone. Boston quickly became the busiest port not just in Massachusetts but in all of the American colonies, largely because it was the first town to build its economy around maritime trade rather than agriculture. Bostonians therefore had the most at stake when England first tried to prevent its colonies from trading directly with other countries in the latter half of the seventeenth century......