The surface of the country about Brewster and Orleans is rolling prairie, barren, yet thinly covered with an appearance of soil. Stone walls divide the fields, but from here down the Cape you will seldom see a stone of any size in going thirty miles. My faith in Pilgrim testimony began to diminish as I looked on all sides, and in vain, for a "spit's-depth of excellent black earth," such as they tell of. It has, perchance, been blown away, or buried out of sight in the shiftings constantly going on here. Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro grow more and more forbidding, as you approach the _Ultima Thule_, or land's end.[214] [Illustration: COHASSET NARROWS.] Mr. Thoreau, who has embodied the results of several excursions to the Cape in some admirable sketches, calls it the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. Mr. Everett had already used the same figure. To me it looks like a skinny, attenuated arm thrust within a stocking for mending--the bony elbow at Chatham, the wrist at Truro, and the half-closed fingers at Provincetown. It seems quite down at the heel about Orleans, and as if much darning would be needed to make it as good as new. It was something to conceive, and more to execute, such a tramp as Thoreau's, for no one ought to attempt it who can not rise superior to his surroundings, and shake off the gloom the weird and wide-spread desolateness of the landscape inspires. I would as lief have marched with Napoleon from Acre, by Mount Carmel, through the moving sands of Tentoura. The resemblance of the Cape to a hook appears to have struck navigators quite early. On old Dutch maps it is delineated with tolerable accuracy, and named "Staaten Hoeck," and the bay inclosed within the bend of it "Staaten Bay." Massachusetts Bay is "Noord Zee," and Cape Malabar "Vlacke Hoeck." Milford Haven appears about where Eastham is now located. On the earliest map of Champlain the extremity of the Cape is called "C. Blanc," or the White Cape.[215] Mather says of Cape Cod, he supposes it will never lose the name "till swarms of cod-fish be seen swimming on the highest hills." [Illustration: HIGHLAND LIGHT, CAPE COD.] This hook, though a sandy one, caught many a school of migratory fish, and even whales found themselves often embayed in the bight of it, on their way south, until, from being so long hunted down, they learned to keep a good offing. It also caught all the southerly drift along shore, such as stray ships from France and England. Bartholomew Gosnold and John Brereton were the first white men to land on it. De Monts, Champlain, De Poutrincourt, Smith, and finally the Forefathers, were brought up and turned back by it.