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Updated: May 14, 2025
The spring seeking motorist finds his first mayflowers there as the grade leads up Manomet heights and may expect them by the roadside anywhere, after that. The old trail to Sandwich saunters along here, but those who built for modern traffic took little heed of old-time footpath ways. They gouged the hills, they filled the hollows and drew their long black scar behind for mile after mile.
To see Manomet in stormy December is to know how grim it is. The wooded headland which the little shallop so desperately won by in the gloom of that December twilight and storm has changed little if any since that time. Stern and rock-bound it certainly is. The sea of centuries has beaten against the great drumlins of boulder-till and has not moved the boulders that bind them together.
How they battled by Manomet Point in the half gale and high sea, the night already upon them and the harbor unknown to any aboard, their rudder gone and their mast "broken in three places," we know from Bradford's graphic description. On Saturday they rested on their island and dried their clothes and their gunpowder. On Sunday they prayed and otherwise kept the Sabbath as was their want.
"Trevor saith, sir, that a ship of not over sixty ton is drawing around Manomet, and that she flieth no colors as yet." "Ha! Let us see then, let us see!" cried the captain, and two minutes later was at the top of the hill, glass in hand. "Hm! Square rigged, slender built what say you, Trevor, is she a Frenchman?" "More like a Dutchman to my mind, sir."
Mistress Brewster was lying upon her bed, Mary Chilton had taken her knitting and gone to sit awhile with Desire Minter and Elizabeth Tilley, and Priscilla drawing her quaintly carved spinning-wheel into the middle of the room so that she could look out of the window giving upon the brook and distant Manomet, was spinning some exquisitely fine linen thread, with which she purposed to weave cambric delicate enough for kerchiefs and caps.
Manomet shore and even Plymouth beach are rock-bound with these, large and small, today as they were when the Pilgrims fought their desperate, sea-beset way by them through the dusk of a winter northeaster and froze in safety under the lee of Clark's Island. He who would see Plymouth and the Pilgrim land about it as the Pilgrims saw it may do so.
He was followed by William Trevor, one of the seamen hired by the colony for a year, a fellow of quick eyesight and undaunted courage. The Captain silently and carefully adjusted his lenses, and then handed the glass to Trevor. "Now you, Bill, clap your eye to that and get it on yon headland, Farther Manomet, d' ye see?" "Ay, Captain, I have it, and can count the squirrels on the tree tops."
Thou knowest how in my journeyings last month I bought and stored corn at Nauset, and Manomet, and Barnstable, and now that we have a moment's breathing space, it were well that some one should take the pinnace and fetch it. At the same time there will be good occasion to feel the pulse of the various chiefs, and determine what is their intended course and so settle our own."
"Not one," replied the elder exultantly; and like the breaking of a great wave upon the Rock a score of deep-throated voices echoed back the boast, The next morning broke clear and lovely, and with the sun rose a southwest wind, best of all winds for those who would extricate themselves from the somewhat tyrannous triple embrace of Plymouth Beach, The Gurnet, and Manomet.
It was afterward discovered, however, that Pratt's flight was at once discovered, and an Indian dispatched to overtake and kill him, a catastrophe averted by the carpenter's straying from the path in the darkness, so that his pursuer reached Plymouth, and went on to Manomet before the village was astir.
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