TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The main text of this handbook is in Parts 1 and 2. There were many
2-page information segments inserted throughout this text. In this
etext these fourteen inserts have been moved to the end of Part 2,
to improve readability of the main text. Part 3 consists solely of
a further set of 1- and 2-page informational inserts.
Each insert is separated by a line of # hash marks.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
Illustrations without captions have descriptive text added by the
transcriber and placed in (round brackets.)
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,
when a predominant preference was found in the original book.
The Table of Contents in the Frontmatter has been augmented by the
transcriber to include fourteen entries in Part 2 for “A Glacial
Base”, and the other informational inserts.
The following minor changes have been made to the original text:
Frontmatter: ‘along the the Cape’ replaced by ‘along the Cape’.
Pg 54: ‘and others fishes’ replaced by ‘and other fishes’.
Pg 93: ‘chower is made’ replaced by ‘chowder is made’.
Pg 112: ‘Everett 66-67 dunin’ replaced by ‘Everett 66-67 dunlin’.
Cape Cod
Official National Park Handbook
[Illustration: =Front cover=: _Nauset Light hovers over an eroding
cliff facing the Atlantic Ocean in Eastham_.]
Handbook 148
Cape Cod
Its Natural and Cultural History
By Robert Finch
A Guide to Cape Cod
National Seashore
Massachusetts
Produced by the
Division of Publications
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
Washington, D.C.
_Using This Handbook_
The Cape Cod peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean off
Massachusetts is one of America’s prime coastal recreational areas.
Cape Cod National Seashore, managed by the National Park Service,
extends for 40 miles along the Cape’s outer arm between Chatham
and Provincetown. In Part 1 of this handbook, author and longtime
resident Robert Finch introduces the reader to the Cape’s rich
cultural and natural history and to the National Seashore. In the
three chapters of Part 2, Finch more closely examines the land, the
sea, and the transformations that have taken place in recent years.
Pictorial features on various Cape aspects supplement these chapters.
Part 3 presents concise travel guide and reference materials,
including a full-color map.
National Park Handbooks are published to support the National
Park Service’s management programs and to promote understanding
and enjoyment of the more than 360 National Park System sites.
Each handbook is intended to be informative reading and a useful
guide before, during, and after a park visit. The handbooks are
sold at parks and can be purchased by mail from the Superintendent
of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC
20402-9325.
=Part 1= =A Fragile Coastal Retreat= =4=
A Cape for All Seasons 7
=Part 2= =A Great Arm in the Sea= =20=
A Sliver of Sand 23
The Bountiful Sea 45
The Cape’s Transformation 69
A Glacial Base 26
The Restless Shore 28
Wampanoag Indians 32
Pilgrims First Landing 34
The Cape Cod House 38
Whaling’s Heyday 48
Cape Codders and the Sea 50
Fisheries 54
Saltworks 56
A Coastline Littered With Shipwrecks 60
Lighthouses and Lifesaving 62
Two Henrys: Thoreau and Beston 72
The Cranberry Bog 74
Marconi’s Wireless Station 78
=Part 3= =Guide and Adviser= =84=
Visiting Cape Cod 86
Map of the National Seashore 88
The National Seashore 90
Water Activities 92
Whale-Watching 94
Recreation Ashore 96
Birdwatching 98
Orleans, Brewster, and Chatham 100
Eastham and Wellfleet 102
Truro and Provincetown 104
Nearby Attractions 106
Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket 107
Safety, Other Management Concerns 108
Armchair Explorations 109
Index 110
[Illustration: =Preceding pages=: _The sun sets over Provincetown
and the towering Pilgrim Monument. Such tranquil scenes can be
misleading, for the Cape is a place of shifting sands and struggling
grasses._]
Part 1
A Fragile Coastal Retreat
[Illustration: (Grasses on a sand dune.)]
[Illustration: _Summer, fall, winter, spring, the interaction of the
sea and the land is clearly evident on Cape Cod’s Outer Beach._]
A Cape for All Seasons
Majestically eroded, the great glacial bluffs of Cape Cod’s outer
beach rise from the open Atlantic, separating the ocean from Cape
Cod Bay. Its many-colored sands and clays flow grain by grain, or
in sudden shelving slabs, to replenish the shore below. The beach,
broad and gently sloping in summer, short and steep in winter,
arcs northward for more than 20 miles, giving the walker a curved
prospect two or three miles ahead at most. And always, coming onto
the shore and reforming it, with measured cadences in calm weather,
with awesome fury during northeast gales, is the sea. Here, as Henry
Beston put it, “the ocean encounters the last defiant bulwark of two
worlds.” There is no other landscape like it anywhere.
Cape Cod holds a special place in America’s landscape, history, and
collective imagination. As the world’s largest glacial peninsula, it
juts farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than any other part of the
United States. It was one of the earliest landfalls of the European
explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its purported identity as
the “Wonderstrand” of the Viking sagas remains apocryphal, but it
was—as every Cape Codder will be quick to tell you—indisputably the
_first_ landing place of the _Mayflower_ Pilgrims in 1620, and it
became one of the oldest settled areas in the country.
Cape Codders early on took to the sea with a will, and they have
never relinquished it. Over the centuries there developed on this
thin peninsula a unique maritime way of life that has produced
some of the most familiar objects and images in American culture.
They include that durable architectural form, the Cape Cod house;
indigenous nautical designs such as the Cape Cod catboat; tools like
the quahog bullrake; and such functional folk art as carved bird
decoys. Cape Cod bogs produced the first commercial cranberries,
that traditional part of our Thanksgiving celebrations. The Cape’s
villages, low hills, and sandy shores are still dotted with gray
shingled windmills, looking like ungainly landbound ships, whose
great sheeted arms once ground corn and pumped seawater for the
making of salt; tall lighthouses that stand sentry on bold eroding
sea cliffs and at the entrances to low, protected harbors; stately
sea captains’ houses with roofs crowned with “widows walks” and yard
gates framed by arched whale jaws; and, from local wharves and piers,
fleets of colorful boats manned by fishermen who continue to go out
to harvest the sea as they have for centuries.
[Illustration: _Fishermen’s floats, weathered-shingled boathouses,
and catboats—Cape Cod’s coves reflect its seafaring traditions._]
Perhaps the most enduring image of all, however, is that of the
legendary “Cape Codder” himself. He appears in many guises: as a
Portuguese “banker” fisherman trawling for cod in a small dory off
the Georges Banks; a Truro “mooncusser” salvaging the booty from
an 18th-century pirate ship wrecked on the Cape’s “backside;” a
Wampanoag Indian gathering alewives, or migratory herring, in spring
to plant with her corn; a Wellfleet whaler casting his harpoon at a
right whale in the icy Arctic seas; a Yankee clipper ship skipper
from Brewster or Dennis helping to open up the China Trade or setting
a transoceanic sailing record that still stands today; a Cape Verdean
girl picking ripe wine-colored cranberries in the long rows of a
Harwich bog; a Chatham Life Saving Serviceman pulling his surfboat
through a fierce January gale to make a daring rescue of the crew
of a vessel grounded on one of the Cape’s treacherous shoals; a
Provincetown rum-runner in his weather-beaten dragger eluding a Coast
Guard cutter in the fog; an “old salt” in sou’wester and knee boots
spinning yarns in Barnstable or Rock Harbor.
These and other versions of the protean Cape Codder have been
celebrated and recorded in story and song since the founding of this
country and have become a part of our history and folklore. In fact,
few if any rural areas of comparable size have been written, painted,
and sung about so richly over the years as the Cape landscape and its
inhabitants.
[Illustration: (Boathouse and yacht.)]
[Illustration: =Pages 10-11=: _Because the Outer Cape is such a
narrow strip of land with the Atlantic on one side and Cape Cod Bay
on the other, sunrises and sunsets can be spectacular_. _Here the sun
rises over Eastham’s Nauset Marsh, which was a harbor when Champlain
explored the area in 1606._]
[Illustration: (Sea shells.)]
Still, the dominant image of Cape Cod for most Americans today is
probably that of one of the Nation’s most popular summer playgrounds.
For two centuries countless visitors and vacationers have escaped the
burdens and the routines of daily life for a day, a week, or a season
of liberation, exploration, relaxation, and recreation along the
Cape’s unsurpassed beaches, ponds, marshes, bays, pine barrens,
inlets, and dunes. Originally a summer resort for Bostonians and
other New Englanders, the Cape now receives visitors from everywhere,
at all seasons of the year. One of the favorite summer games for
Cape children is to see how many different state license plates they
can spot. Not infrequently they can get them all, including Alaska
and Hawaii—as well as the Canadian provinces, Mexico, and several
European countries. Where Cape Cod once produced seamen who sailed
around the globe to bring home wealth and exotic treasures, the Cape
has in turn become host to much of the world, providing the setting
for countless beach parties, clambakes, family outings, sailing and
fishing trips, summer romances, and increasingly, an appreciation and
enjoyment of its rich environment, history, and natural resources.
[Illustration: _Gulls seem to be everywhere, but the variety of birds
makes Cape Cod a birdwatcher’s paradise throughout the year. Along
shorelines, tides rhythmically polish shells and cobbles._]
What constitutes the enduring allure of a place like Cape Cod? What
makes more people than ever cross the Cape Cod Canal bridges at all
seasons in search of something they believe lies in promise for
them here despite ever-increasing traffic jams, crowded beaches,
the continuing proliferation of honky-tonk tourist traps, and the
ongoing fragmentation of woodlands and waterfronts by commercial and
residential development?
Over the centuries the universal and nearly perfect image of Cape Cod
as a flexed human arm has provided an ambivalent symbol for what its
settlers and visitors have hoped to find here. For the fearful yet
hopeful Pilgrim passengers on the _Mayflower_ it both beckoned and
threatened, offering religious liberty and land for settlement, yet
at the same time presenting, in William Bradford’s words, “a wild and
savage hue,” a “hideous and desolate wilderness” that many of them
would not survive.
To their maritime descendants the Cape offered seemingly endless
abundance from the sea and a springboard to personal fortune; yet at
the same time it proved to be a treacherous barrier to sea traffic,
a graveyard for hundreds of ships that fell victim to the Cape’s
treacherous rips and shoals, or to fierce northeast storms and gales.
It was not by chance, or merely to escape the wind, that most old
Cape houses are built well back from the shore. As Rowena Myers, an
88-year-old lifetime resident of Orleans once explained to me, “The
old people didn’t like to look at the sea once they were ashore. It
held too much pain for them.”
[Illustration: _Winds and tides constantly move the sands, tearing
down dunes and creating new ones._]
Today Cape Cod beckons as never before to a Nation increasingly
starved, in Henry Beston’s words, “for lack of elemental things, for
fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for
the dear earth itself underfoot.” Seventy-five million of us live
within a day’s drive of Barnstable County. During the past 30 years
the Cape’s permanent population has risen from 70,000 to 190,000, a
figure that nearly triples during the peak summer season.
Some come to walk the spacious curved length of the Great Beach of
Cape Cod, which Thoreau claimed was a place where “a man may stand
and put all America behind him” (though at many public beaches in
July and August it may seem as if one has most of America in front
of him!). Others seek quieter places like the soft pine barrens
of the interior woodlands, or one of the Cape’s hundreds of clear
kettle-hole ponds, or the dune country of the Province Lands with
its eccentric and colorful community of dune shacks—an ever-shifting
landscape of mirages and stark, unexpected beauty.
Still others find, along the Cape’s many well-preserved village
streets, in its old farmhouses and meandering stone walls of glacial
boulders, its lighthouses, fishing shacks, and aging fleets of
sea-beaten draggers and lobster boats, a deep sense of that earnest,
abiding, communal history that flourished here for so long and which
we seek to borrow to help anchor our more modern, shifting lives.
Many are attracted to the energetic and often outrageous bohemian
diversity of a place like Provincetown, or to the Cape’s many art
galleries, theaters, concerts, and museums. Some may hope for a
glimpse of the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport or a movie star on
the bench in front of a local general store. Others look forward to
a Cape Cod lobster and clam dinner (which may, in fact, have come
from the waters off Maine or Alaska) at a waterfront restaurant, or
the seemingly endless array of gift shops, night spots, and tourist
diversions (including increasingly elaborate miniature golf courses
with waterfalls and “historic reproductions”)—much of which have
little or no indigenous connection with Cape Cod and can be had
elsewhere, but which somehow seem to mean more when experienced here.
One element that seems to embrace and permeate all of the Cape’s
attractions is natural change. Change, of course, takes place in any
environment, but here on the Cape it seems peculiarly pervasive,
visible, and dramatic, particularly along the ocean shore. I like
to point out to people who want to retrace Thoreau’s famous walk
along the Outer Beach that they are likely to get pretty wet if they
try it, since Thoreau’s original path now lies several hundred feet
offshore!
[Illustration: _In stark contrast with the sandy shorelines, the
upper Herring River in Wellfleet is rich in vegetation._]
We are subject to great periodic sea changes on this peninsula. Tides
rise and fall up to nine feet twice a day, sweeping out in places in
Cape Cod Bay to reveal tidal flats over a mile in extent. Waves and
currents continuously undermine and cut into the great glacial cliffs
of the Outer Cape, removing an average of three feet a year from
our eastern boundary. Autumn and winter storms rearrange the ocean
beaches, undermining the foundations of lighthouses, beach parking
lots, and shorefront cottages, strewing the beaches at times with
the carcasses of thousands of sea creatures, from whelks to whales.
Tides and winds build and unbuild ridges and bowls of sand dunes,
which in turn march across the land, threatening to bury marshes,
forests, ponds, roads, and, in the past, whole villages and harbors.
Major storms, like that of the Great Blizzard of February 6-7, 1978,
change the very outlines of Cape Cod, cutting barrier beaches in two,
creating new islands, flattening entire dune systems, creating new
inlets, and plugging up old ones. The Cape is a river of sand into
which we can never step twice.
For whatever reasons we come, the continuing attraction of the Cape
to tourists and new residents (known as “washashores”) has proven
a mixed blessing, providing a valuable source of income to the
local populace but also bringing an increase in development and
commercialization that threatens the very things we seek here: clean
air, unpolluted waters and beaches, the harvest of the sea, unspoiled
vistas, a sense of rooted historical continuity, the free interplay
of natural forces and wild inhabitants, and the opportunity for
discovery and self-discovery in a landscape that has had a perennial
allure for the human spirit for over three and a half centuries.
[Illustration: (Fishing boat unloading its catch.)]
It was with the intent of preserving this experience for the public
at large, and not for just a privileged few, that the idea for the
National Seashore was born more than 30 years ago. The formation of
the National Seashore was unique among the creation of the Nation’s
public parks. Prior to its establishment in 1961, national parks,
forests, seashores, and monuments had been created from land already
owned by federal or state governments, or from land or funds donated
by private individuals. No federal monies had ever been spent to
create such places.
[Illustration: _Today Nauset Light alerts mariners off Eastham’s
treacherous Atlantic coast. Since the days of the earliest Indian
inhabitants, Cape Codders have plied the bay and ocean for food and
related marine products. Commercial fishing boats still work out of
Provincetown, Chatham, and Wellfleet within the National Seashore._]
On August 7, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy signed the
legislation establishing Cape Cod National Seashore, he declared: “I
... hope that this will be one of a whole series of great seashore
parks which will be for the inspiration and enjoyment of people all
over the United States.” Since then, others indeed have been created
and Cape Cod National Seashore has become one of the most popular of
the Nation’s public parks, with more than five million visits each
year. The diligent and dedicated participation of the Seashore’s
Advisory Commission, composed of 10 state, county, and town
representatives, helped park officials devise the first comprehensive
master plan for the National Seashore. Nonetheless, the “balancing
act” of preservation, recreation, and local rights has not always
been an easy or a smooth one. Debates continue over recreational
demands versus conservation, controversial uses such as beach buggy
access, and development within the park. But there are relatively few
who do not recognize not only the economic importance of the Seashore
but the critical role it has played in realizing former Senator
Leverett Saltonstall’s dream of maintaining Cape Cod “so that other
Americans, in dire need of the natural grandeur of the clean, open
spaces, will find an outlet from their crowded, grimy, urban lives.”
What you will find here is a different experience from what is
offered in our national parks and most of the other national
seashores. There is stunning scenic beauty and wildlife in abundance,
to be sure, and the chance to explore and enjoy them on foot,
horseback, or bicycle, in a canoe or a sailboat, on a guided walk, at
an interpretive talk, or, if you like, simply lying on a beach before
the rolling waves.
But there is also, by design and intent, the ongoing presence of
man, in the hundreds of historic houses, lighthouses, Coast Guard
stations, and summer cottages that remain within the Seashore, and
in the continuing traditional uses of its lands and waters, such as
commercial fishing, lobstering and shellfishing, hunting and berry
picking.
[Illustration: _On a cloudy day, the Cape’s most obvious icon, the
codfish, keeps track of the wind. With a change in the weather,
Nauset Marsh glows in autumn light._]
The boundaries between Seashore lands, private property, and
community facilities are not always obvious. The Provincetown airport
and the Nauset Regional High School in Eastham, for instance, both
lie within Seashore boundaries. Visitors are asked to observe
the “Private Property—Please Respect Owner’s Rights” signs they
encounter along many of the Seashore roads and trails. A number of
the more popular beaches require local town parking stickers. Cape
Cod National Seashore, in other words, is not so much a protected
pristine preserve as an ongoing experiment in cooperation between
the Federal Government and local communities and their residents who
continue to live, work, and play alongside, and often within, the
park itself.
Whether you choose to join the summer crowds, or seek a solitary walk
along the winter beach, we hope this handbook will acquaint you with
enough knowledge of Cape Cod’s rich historic and natural heritage
so that your visit here, whether brief or extended, will be more
rewarding.
[Illustration: (Pond with marshy shoreline.)]