This town, the Indian Pamet, was formally settled in 1709 by a few English purchasers from Eastham, having been occupied earlier only by irresponsible fishermen and traders. The new planters took hold with energy, waging war against blackbirds and crows, wolves and foxes, for the protection of their little wealth in corn and cattle, while none the less they dug clams, fished by line and net and watched from their lookouts for offshore whales. The Cape plumes itself not a little upon its early proficiency in whaling. In 1690, one Ichabod Paddock, whose name might so easily have been Haddock, went from Yarmouth to Nantucket “to instruct the people in the art of killing whales in boats from the shore.” And when the sea-monster, thus maltreated, withdrew from its New England haunts, the daring whalemen built ships and followed, cruising the Atlantic and Pacific, even the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. But the Revolution put a check on all our maritime enterprises. The Truro fishermen, like the rest, laid by their harpoons, and melted up their mackerel leads for bullets. From one village of twenty-three houses, twenty-eight men gave up their lives for liberty. In religion, too, Truro had the courage of her convictions, building the first Methodist meeting-house on the Cape, the second in New England. The cardinal temptation of Cape Cod is Sunday fishing, and Truro righteousness was never put more sharply to the pinch than in 1834, when a prodigious school of blackfish appeared off Great Hollow one autumnal Sabbath morning. A number of Truro fishermen, from the Grand Banks and elsewhere, were on their way home in boats from Provincetown, when the shining shoulders of hundreds of the great fish were seen moving through the waves. With fortunes in full view, a goodly number of these men shifted into boats which rowed soberly for their destination, while the rest, with eager outcry, rounded up the school, and drove the frightened creatures, with shouts and blows from the oars, like sheep upon the beach. Church-members who took part in the wild chase were brought to trial, but a lurking sympathy in the hearts of their judges saved them from actual expulsion. This befell within the period of Truro’s highest prosperity. From 1830 to 1855 the wharves were crowded with sloops and schooners, a shipyard was kept busy, and salt was made all along the shore. At the middle of the century, the town had over two thousand inhabitants, but the number has now fallen off by some three fifths. The “turtle-like sheds of the salt-works,” which Thoreau noted, have been long since broken up and sold for lumber. There is weir-fishing still, supplying fresh fish for market and bait for the fishing-fleets of Provincetown and Gloucester. Rods of the black netting may be seen spread over the poverty-grass to dry.