Barnstable County, Massachusetts Historical Sketch | 5KB | Ray Sears - LRSears@CapeCod.net

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prepared for the 1880 Atlas of Barnstable County
by John B. D.Cogswell   [transcribed by Ray Sears  LRSears@CapeCod.net]

IIIt seems to be now generally conceded that the Northmen visited Cape Cod
 I  and the adjacent shores, nearly nine hundred years ago.  Professor Rafn, of
III Copenhagen, the learned editor of the "Antiquitates Americanae," adduces
analogies between certain Cape names (of localities) and Norse words, which
appear; to say the least, sufficiently conjectural.  But, in the year 1000,
Leif the Lucky, son of Earl Eric the Red, was at Newfoundland and Nova Scotia,
and skirted the coast of New England, spending the winter in a region called 
by him Vinland (Vineland).  This is supposed to be within the present limits
of Rhode Island.  An earlier landing-place had been found upon an island 
conjectured to be either Nantucket, or an island called Nauset, between Orleans
and Chatham, on the back of Cape Cod, which long since disappeared.  In the
spring of 1004, Thorwald, the brother of Leif, was driven ashore on Cape Cod,
perhaps at Race Point and remained long enough to repair damages, putting in
a new keel.  The old keel was set up in the sand, and the place was called
Kjalarnes (Keel-ness, or Keel Cape).  Another expedition, under Thorfinn,
sailed by Keel Cape in 1007, and called it Cape Cod Furdurstrands, or 
Wonderstrands, "because it was long to sail by."

     Bryant, the latest historian of the United States, thinks that Sebastian
Cabot, in his voyage of 1798,made under the patronage of Henry the Seventh,
doubled Cape Cod, and sailed as far south as Cape Hatteras.

     Bancroft asserts that Cape Cod was the first spot in New England ever
trod by Englishmen.  This was the company of Bartholomew Gosnold, an intrepid
navigator, who sailed from Falmouth, England, March 25, 1602, in a vessel called
the "Concord."  Some time in the latter part of May, he anchored off Cape Cod,
about a league from Provincetown.  His men at first called the place Shoal Hope,
but afterwards Cape Cod, for "we took great store of codfish."  They found pease,
strawberries, whortleberries, cypress, birch, and beech trees.  The shoals back
of the Cape were then peninsulas, which have been wasted away by the action of
the sea.  The vessel was actually "pestered" by codfish.  Martin Pring, Gosnold's
mate, sailed again from Cape Ann to Cape Cod in 1603.

     In August, 1609, Henry Hudson, an Englishman, voyaging under the auspices of
The Dutch East India Company, coasted the north headland of Cape Cod, calling the
region New Holland, before he knew it was "Gosnold's Cape."

     Previously, however, - i.e., in the summer of 1606,- Poutrincourt, a French
navigator, had his ship stranded upon a shoal near Cape Cod, whence he returned
to Port Royal.

    Two French navigators- DeMonts and Champlain- were here in 1605. On Champlain's
map the peninsula is called Cap Blanc, or the White Cape, from the color of its
sands, and Nauset (Eastham) Harbor is called Malle Barre, or the Bad Bar.  In 1614,
John Smith explored the whole coast from Penobscot to the Cape, and made a map of the
country, which he named New England.  Prince Charles, afterwards King Charles I, 
changed the name of the peninsula to Cape James; but the royal caprice could not
efface the homely Cape Cod, "which name," said Cotton Mather, "I suppose it will never
lose till shoals of codfish  be seen swimming on its highest hills."

     Most unfortunately, Smith re-embarked for England, leaving his vessel under the 
command of Thomas Hunt, to load with fish.  When the ship was laden and ready to sail,
Hunt enticed sundry Indians of Nauset and other places on board, under the pretense of
trade, and perfidiously and most unwisely carried them off - twenty-seven in number -
to Malaga, in Spain, where he sold the most of them for twenty pounds a man.  This cruel
and treacherous deed was never forgotten by their countrymen; and the first hostile
passage between the Pilgrims and the Indians was at Nauset, ever known in the Plymouth
annals as the "First Encounter." 

[to be continued]