Artifacts of the Cape's call to sea
HYANNIS - Looking out the windows of the Cape Cod Maritime Museum at the boats bobbing in Hyannis Harbor, it's easy to think that the Cape is all about the sea. But the museum tells quite another tale. The first Europeans to settle the area were land-lubber farmers "who detested the sea and stayed well away from it," as a wall placard explains.
Founded in 2004, the little museum sits on a stretch of the harbor between the Hy-Line and Steamship Authority docks. The two main exhibitions this season complement each other in a powerful way. The marine archeological display of the remains of the 40-foot-long Sparrow-Hawk, on loan from Plymouth's Pilgrim Hall Museum, demonstrates how shockingly small some of the vessels were that brought settlers to the New World.
The Sparrow-Hawk sailed from England bound for Virginia in 1626 but foundered off Orleans in a winter gale. An 1862 storm exposed the timbers, long-buried in the mud and sand of Old Ship Harbor, and they were recovered and reassembled. Only the keel and timbers from below the waterline survive, yet this ghost of a ship is a poignant touchstone of the incredible bravery (or foolhardiness) of European settlers of nearly four centuries past. Few ships as large as the Mayflower brought colonists to these shores; most of the vessels were cramped little boats like the Sparrow-Hawk. Walking around the exhibit, one appreciates why Europeans who had survived an Atlantic passage in such a vessel were in no hurry to go back to sea.
But Cape Codders eventually changed their minds, as shown in "Transformations: From Farmer to Seafarer; Cape Cod in the 17th and 18th Centuries." The exhibition opens with depictions of Wampanoag aquaculture and weir-fishing. The original peoples of Cape Cod "had a 7,000-year record of being incredible stewards of the environment," says Mark Wilkins, museum director and curator. "Until recently, historians glossed over that, so we've tried to let [Native Americans] tell their story as much as possible in their own words." In fact, Wilkins hopes to install a fish weir at the harbor's edge next summer to demonstrate the ingenuity of traditional ways.
While the Europeans were happy to adopt some of the Native American farming practices (growing corn and pumpkins, for example), they kept to their English ways as dairymen. The first Europeans to venture onto the Cape were attracted by the rich hay that they could harvest from the salt marshes to feed their cattle. A few carefully chosen artifacts - a sickle, a 17th-century matchlock musket, a stoneware whiskey jug - enliven the wall texts that relate early Colonial life. Corn whiskey was an everyday essential, for example. "It helped comfort the settlers during hard times and was enjoyed at the end of a rough day," the text explains.
But whales ultimately drew Cape Codders back to the sea. Early settlers exploited dead whales that washed up on their beaches, stripping the carcasses and rendering the blubber for oil, which turned a quick profit. The exhibition sketches this history with artifacts, models, and art, often drawing parallels between European and Native American approaches to such tasks as boatbuilding. It doesn't take a history text to explain which culture came to dominate, and the chronology inevitably leads to the development of bay whaling in cedar clinker rowboats, and to the larger ships equipped for deepwater whaling. As the "Transformation" exhibition makes clear, by the 1750s Cape Codders had returned to the sea they had shunned.
Patricia Harris and David Lyon can be reached at harris.lyon@verizon.net. 