ere, for almost every family has
lost some of its members at sea. "Who lives in that house?" I inquired.
"Three widows," was the reply. The stranger and the inhabitant view the
shore with very different eyes. The former may have come to see and
admire the ocean in a storm; but the latter looks on it as the scene
where his nearest relatives were wrecked. When I remarked to an old
wrecker, partially blind, who was sitting on the edge of the bank
smoking a pipe, which he had just lit with a match of dried beach-grass,
that I supposed he liked to hear the sound of the surf, he answered,
"No, I do not like to hear the sound of the surf." He had lost at least
one son in "the memorable gale," and could tell many a tale of the
shipwrecks which he had witnessed there.

In the year 1717, a noted pirate named Bellamy was led on to the bar off
Wellfleet by the captain of a snow which he had taken, to whom he had
offered his vessel again, if he would pilot him into Provincetown
Harbor. Tradition says that the latter threw over a burning tar-barrel
in the night, which drifted ashore, and the pirates followed it. A storm
coming on, their whole fleet was wrecked, and more than a hundred dead
bodies lay along the shore. Six who escaped shipwreck were executed. "At
times to this day," (1793,) says the historian of Wellfleet, "there are
King William and Queen Mary's coppers picked up, and pieces of silver
called cob-money. The violence of the seas moves the sands on the outer
bar, so that at times the iron caboose of the ship [that is, Bellamy's]
at low ebbs has been seen." Another tells us, that, "for many years
after this shipwreck, a man of a very singular and frightful aspect used
every spring and autumn to be seen travelling on the Cape, who was
supposed to have been one of Bellamy's crew. The presumption is that he
went to some place where money had been secreted by the pirates, to get
such a supply as his exigencies required. When he died, many pieces of
gold were found in a girdle which he constantly wore."

As I was walking on the beach here in my last visit, looking for shells
and pebbles, just after that storm which I have mentioned as moving the
sand to a great depth, not knowing but I might find some cob-money, I
did actually pick up a French crown-piece, worth about a dollar and six
cents, near high-water mark, on the still moist sand, just under the
abrupt, caving base of the bank. It was of a dark slate-color, and
looked