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THE COMING OF THE PACKETS
As news of the Treaty of Ghent spread along the New England coast in 1815, the smell of pitch and the sound of the caulking maul filled the air. The mackerel fleets started out, sloops and schooners began their coastal runs, and American brigs and barks were soon a familiar sight from Liverpool to the Straits of Malacca. Cape Cod became a prime source of the ablest masters and seamen in this greatest age of the American merchant marine. Yarmouth, despite its modest coastlines, provided many of the most colorful and respected captains on Yankee quarterdecks, including Ebenezer Sears, who commanded the first American vessel to round the Cape of Good Hope, Asa Eldredge of Red Jacket fame, and Allen H. Knowles, Asa's neighbor, who commanded the 2000 ton clipper, Chariot of Fame, for 10 years.
But for all these global sea masters, there were many more Yarmouth sons manning the coasters which provided the main transport for goods and people in the 19th century America.
In the demand for reliable means of travel and shipping from Cape Cod, it is not recorded when the first enterprising mariners organized a regular line of vessels following fixed schedules. More or less regular transport to Boston began after the revolution with Solomon Otis of Barnstable and Captain Nathaniel Hall of Dennis.
Early packet lines on the Hudson River after the War of 1812 prompted New York shipbuilders to design vessels adaptable to the trade. These included deep, beamy sloops of 60 to 70 tons burthen, up to 80 feet in length, carrying not only great spreads of main and foresails, but topsails also. Similar types were adapted to Cape Cod Bay.
One of the greatest boons to the coasting trade was the development of the centerboard. Leeboards and crude drop keels had been in use in the 18th century, but a British naval officer is given credit for inventing the pivoting centerboard in 1809. By the 1820's, they were in general use along the American coast, including Cape Cod. Centerboards had great effect on American commercial vessels for they not only allowed shallow draft for coastal waters but would sail well when light, and handled smartly in confined situations. In 1824, Captain Jesse Collins introduced the first centerboard sloop in Eastham waters, considered a marvel in its day. He used it sometimes from Nauset Harbor, but usually from the Bay side, running salt to Boston at five or six cents per bushel.
Hudson River centerboard sloops reached the peak of development in the 1830s, and one of them, from Sing Sing, N. Y., aroused great speculation among Yarmouth and Barnstable citizens in 1837, as we shall see.
It must surely have been by the 1820s that a wooden mast or pole rose above the scrub oaks on German Hill, the highest point in Yarmouth, now occupied by the standpipe above the junction of the Station Avenue ramp with Route 6. Twice weekly a young Hallett climbed the hill to run a redpainted barrel to the mast peak. This was the signal to ``South Sea" folk to saddle Old Gray or hitch up the truck-wagon and set out for the Yarmouth north shore. The packet sloop Betsey, with Captain Ansel Hallett at the wheel, would be rounding Sandy Neck and tacking for the Bass Hole landing on its regular schedule from Boston.
Henry David Thoreau observed from his stage coach window during his trip along the north shore of the Cape in October, 1849, signal poles on every eminence, flying old clothes or sails to alert south shore residents when the Boston packet arrived.
``It appeared as if this use must absorb the greater part of the old clothes of the Cape, leaving but few rags for the pedlars." Blackball Hill in Dennis and Cannon Hill in Brewster were other sites for the packet semaphores. At the latter point, a cannon was fired when the Boston vessel came in.
Swift, writing in Deyo's history of Cape Cod, relying probably on local tradition, says that the first packets were running more or less regularly between Yarmouth and Boston ``before the commencement of this (19th) century ...." If so, they must have been among the earliest on the coast.
It is known that after the War of 1812, Captain Job Crowell, Nathan Hallett, Prince Howes and Ansel Hallett were the earliest Yarmouth packet masters. The latter sailed the sloop Betsey for a number of years after 1815, until taking over another sloop, Messenger, which cost him his life in 1832. While digging beneath the vessel at low tide, to free it from a sand bar, it rolled over, crushing him to death.
Evidently sandbars also forced the center of commercial life from Yarmouth to Yarmouth Port, early in the 19th century.
In 1811 a town dock was built at Bass Hole, and two years later, the proprietors were authorized to dig out the channel. But in 1832, Central Wharf, at the end of what is now Wharf Lane in Yarmouth Port, was built where the confluence of Mill and Short Wharf creeks made for deeper water and a better harbor---when the tide was in. With the building of this wharf, as well as the smaller Simpkins Wharf on the neighboring creek, the commercial center of the Yarmouth north shore shifted from the Bass Hole area which was too shallow for larger vessels to the west end of town at Mill Creek.
Information courtesy of the Yarmouth Historical Society. Taken from Yarmouth's Proud Packets by Haynes Mahoney
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