Part 2

A Great Arm in the Sea

[Illustration: =Pages 20-21=: _This satellite view clearly shows the

flexed arm shape of the Cape._]

[Illustration: _Overwashes of sand become readily apparent from the

air over North Beach off Chatham._]

A Sliver of Sand

From the air the great curled arm of Cape Cod looks like a mere film

of sand, a whimsical momentary shape floating on the vast ocean

around it. Its flimsy fabric appears torn and rent by hundreds of

holes, large and small, and dozens of slits at the edges, where the

water shows through. So sheer and vulnerable does it appear that it

seems as if the slightest push might sink it beneath the sea.

This somewhat fanciful impression nonetheless contains several grains

of geologic truth, for water, in its various guises, permeates the

Cape’s past, present, and future. Created by the frozen water of vast

glaciers, shaped today by the water of tides, waves, currents, and

storm surges, this prominent hook of land is destined to succumb at

last to the steadily rising waters of the sea—all in the merest flick

of geologic time.

Some 75,000 years ago, when the Earth’s climate entered a cooling

period, the most recent of the vast continental ice sheets, known as

the Laurentide, began to form across eastern Canada. As it spread and

thickened, much of the oceans’ waters became trapped in its mass,

lowering sea levels by several hundred feet. The visible bulk of Cape

Cod is primarily the work of the Wisconsin Stage Glacier, a towering

wall of ice 10,000 feet thick that moved south over New England some

25,000 years ago. Grinding forward in rounded fronts, or lobes, the

ice sheared off the tops of mountains, gouged huge valleys through

granite hills, and plowed up tons upon tons of rocks, material, and

debris from what had been the floor of the sea.

Advancing, hesitating, and advancing again, the glacier moved as far

south as Long Island, Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket.

Then, as the climate warmed, the front edges of the glacier began to

melt; the ice sheet retreated north of the present outline of Cape

Cod, dropping rocks and large chunks of ice as it went. Then, as

cooler weather returned, it paused, and, as the flow of ice exceeded

the rate of melting, the glacial lobes once more advanced. This time

they pushed enormous amounts of drift material across the face of the

Upper and Lower Cape, creating the Elizabeth Islands in Buzzards Bay

and the rocky, morainal hills on the western and northern sides of

the Upper Cape.

[Illustration: _When the glacier melted, it left behind huge rocks,

known as erratics, scattered on the landscape._]

As the glacier began its final withdrawal about 18,000 years ago,

water from the melting ice carried and sorted finer material, forming

the gently sloping southern and interlobate outwash plains of the

Upper and Lower Cape (see pages 26-27). Braided meltwater streams

covered the ice chunks that the retreating glacier had dropped in

thick, insulating layers of outwash material. Eventually, perhaps

centuries later, the buried ice melted and the glacial debris

above it sank, creating the hundreds of kettle holes that are

characteristic of so much of the Cape’s topography.

As the great ice sheets melted, the sea level began to rise,

forcing the Cape’s fresh groundwater upward. When the freshwater

level intersected with these kettle holes, the Cape’s numerous

kettle ponds, so clear and deep, came into being. In some places

these meltwater deposits and kettle holes form a highly irregular

landscape of hills and hollows, such as the “kame and kettle” fields

of Eastham, which can be seen on the bike trail from the Salt Pond

Visitor Center to Coast Guard Beach.

Farther north a prominent series of east-west valleys cross the high

plains of Wellfleet and Truro, separated by the so-called “hogback”

hills of Truro. Most of these valleys only partially cross the Lower

Cape. An exception is the Pamet River Valley, which traverses the

entire forearm of the Cape, separated from the ocean at its eastern

end only by a fragile line of dunes that is sometimes broken through

by major storms.

For many years geologists believed these valleys were carved out

by glacial meltwater streams, but a more recent theory suggests a

different origin, based on a phenomenon known as “spring sapping.”

Spring sapping occurs when water emerges at the surface of a plain to

form a spring, or seep, which then erodes back up the plain toward

its head. There is evidence that during the final period of glacial

retreat a large freshwater glacial lake existed to the east of

Cape Cod. The surface of this lake may have been as much as 80 feet

above present sea level, providing a powerful head of water that may

have leaked through the porous outwash material of the Lower Cape,

producing springs that created the valleys we see today. However they

were formed, most of these valley beds are dry today, or else they

carry only the small, sluggish streams that constitute Cape Cod’s

“rivers.”

[Illustration: _Kettle ponds formed over time as underground

freshwater filled glacial depressions. Today the life in these ponds

can be quickly affected by humans._]

After the glacier’s final withdrawal, Cape Cod was only a rough

sketch of its present streamlined form. Its moraines, high

tablelands, valleys, and kame fields stood high and dry amid the

surrounding coastal plain that stretched a hundred miles to the south

and east, as far as the present-day Georges Banks.

The sea, however, continued to rise and advance, gradually filling

the Gulf of Maine and covering the continental shelf. It probably

reached the edge of the glacial Cape some 5,000-6,000 years ago. Now

the rough-hewn shapes left by the ice began to undergo a process

of planing, smoothing, elaboration, and elongation under the more

subtle hands of the sea. Currents, tides, and storms began to chew

away at the outer shores of the Lower Cape, creating in time what is

surely the most impressive feature of the Seashore, and perhaps the

quintessential Cape Cod landscape: the great marine scarp, or sea

cliff, of the Outer Beach.

Stretching some 15 miles from Coast Guard Beach in Eastham to Head

of the Meadow Beach in North Truro, this curved headland presents a

nearly unbroken, undulating bulwark of bold, eroding bluffs, composed

of clay and sand and ranging in height from 30 to more than 170 feet

above the beach. From South Wellfleet to North Truro the smooth

rim of the sea cliff is marked by a half-dozen pronounced dips or

“hollows,” which are the eroded cross-sections of relict valleys.

These hollows were later to play an important part in the human

history of this beach.

To the casual observer the cliff face appears uniform, lying at a

general “angle of repose” of some 27 degrees to the horizon. But look

closely and you will see that, as the Colorado River has done through

the Grand Canyon, the sea has cut open the geologic book of the

Cape’s history, exposing thousands of years of history. Alternating

layers of till—rock debris deposited by the ice—meltwater-deposited

sand and gravel, and clayey silt tell of the glacial advance and

withdrawal, of inundation and ebb by the sea. Large outcrops of blue

clay, such as the 25-foot thick “Clay Pounds” just north of Highland

Light, are the result of glacial lake sediments deposited during the

last deglaciation.

[Illustration: _Low tide bares a wide expanse of sand patterns and

tidepools at Coast Guard Beach._]

The ocean also invaded parts of the land, creating estuaries and

embayments at the mouths of these glacial valleys, such as those at

Pamet Harbor and Blackfish Creek. Several of the Cape’s “salt ponds,”

such as the one in Eastham below the visitor center, were originally

freshwater kettle ponds that have been breached by the rising sea.

As Cape Cod was being smoothed, slimmed, and invaded by the rising

sea, it was also being lengthened. Like a sculptor working in clay,

the ocean currents took much of the eroded cliff material and,

carrying it both north and south, created the elaborate forms of the

barrier beaches, barrier islands, and sand hooks that give the Outer

Cape its characteristic filigreed coastline. Monomoy Island, North

Beach, Nauset Beach, Coast Guard Beach, and Jeremy Point are some of

the more prominent of these post-glacial landforms, enclosing such

important estuaries as Pleasant Bay, Nauset Harbor, and Wellfleet

Harbor. Among the more unusual formations are the tombolos of outer

Wellfleet Harbor: the series of short sand beaches that connect Bound

Brook, Griffin, Great Beach Hill, and Great Islands.

Of all these sea-spawned parts of Cape Cod, however, the most

impressive and extensive is undoubtedly the Provincetown Hook. These

3,000 acres of dunes at the northern tip of the Cape form a broad

recurved spit of sand that encloses Provincetown Harbor, one of the

finest deepwater harbors on the East Coast and the initial port for

the _Mayflower_ Pilgrims in 1620. Some oceanographers believe that

the hook began to form as much as 6,000 years ago and has built up in

a series of roughly parallel ridges, or dune lines, widening out into

the ocean.

In the protected bays and inlets behind these elongating fingers of

barrier beaches and islands, salt marshes—one of the Cape’s most

characteristic and important ecosystems—began to form 4,000 to 6,000

years ago. Composed of a few species of salt-tolerant grasses,

primarily the stalky cord grass (_Spartina alterniflora_) and

the finer salt hay (_Spartina patens_), these green salt meadows

of the sea built slowly on the accumulating sediment deposited in

protected areas of water by the tides and land runoff. Gradually,

as the sea rose relative to the land, the marshes raised and spread

themselves on a platform of their own decay, forming thick beds of

peat underneath them. As the climate continued to warm, the Cape’s

woodlands evolved from boreal forests to the mixed pine-oak woodlands

we see today.

[Illustration: _Pitch pine is the most common tree on Cape Cod and

the only species of native pine that grows in the National Seashore.

It survives on well drained glacial sediments and stable sand dunes

and is very fire resistant. In this stand on Great Island, the

undergrowth is primarily bearberry._]

As the Cape’s post-glacial environment grew more diverse and complex,

so did the culture of the people living on it. The first Native

Americans on Cape Cod are now thought to have arrived at least 9,000

years ago. By the late Archaic Period, starting about 5,000 years

ago, local Indian groups had developed a seasonal pattern of movement

based on multiple resources. During the warmer months they settled

on the shores of bays, marshes, and fish runs, trapping birds and

collecting herring and shellfish. In winter they retreated inland to

the more protected forested shores of ponds and other wetlands.

By the beginning of the Woodland Period, about 2,500 years ago,

Indian settlements had grown even more numerous, larger, and more

sedentary. About 800 years ago agriculture and a variety of new

materials and tools had been introduced. One of the most important of

these “tools” was fire; with it the Cape’s Native Americans changed

the face of the land.

Many early accounts attest to the extent and scale of the Cape’s

original woodlands. Even at Provincetown, which must have always been

the most barren area of the Outer Cape, the Pilgrim leader William

Bradford observed “The whole countrie, full of woods and thickets,

wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, some ash,

walnut, the wood for the most part open and without underwood, fit to

go or ride in.”

Archeologists now believe that the Cape Cod Indians may have

practiced a form of low-level woodland management, burning

underbrush, or wooded ridges, to provide browse for game and to

make hunting easier. Such burns may have promoted the Cape’s

characteristic pine barrens, tracts of open woodlands composed

primarily of pitch pine, a tree adapted to periodic fires.

Some glacial lands, now vanished, still existed in historical times.

There are many early references, for example, to Ile Nauset, or

Nauset Isle, a point of land that lay off Nauset Beach, perpendicular

to the coastline. It may have formed part of Cape Mallebarre, the

place of “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” that turned back the

_Mayflower_ from its intended destination of Virginia. Nauset Isle

had sunk beneath the waves by the 18th century, but another piece

of early glacial real estate survived much longer. In the late 19th

century, Billingsgate Island, off Jeremy Point in Wellfleet, was a

flourishing 60-acre fishing community with livestock, a schoolhouse,

and a lighthouse. By 1915, however, the island had been abandoned,

and by 1942 it had vanished, the victim of gradual erosion by

currents, storms, and rising sea levels. Today, at low tide, one can

view the remains of this Wellfleetian Atlantis from the southern

bluffs of Great Beach Hill: an extensive spread of granite boulders

brought over on ships as riprap in a futile attempt to stem the tides.

[Illustration: (Capt. Myles Standish.)]

[Illustration: _In Capt. Myles Standish the Pilgrims had both a

military and temporal leader. He helped found the Plymouth Colony,

led a group that bought the colony from London investors, and served

as assistant governor and treasurer for 5 years. Metacomet, or King

Philip, shown in an engraving by Paul Revere, was killed leading the

Wampanoags in an unsuccessful war concerning land disputes with the

English settlers in 1676._]

To get some idea of the scope of erosion on the Outer Beach, consider

this: in 1990 an ancient prehistoric site was uncovered at Coast

Guard Beach; archeologists have estimated that at the time of its

occupation, nearly 9,000 years ago, it was five miles inland. More

recent evidence of erosion can often be observed on the Seashore’s

ocean side. At Nauset Light Beach, a circular brick foundation from

one of the former “Three Sisters” lighthouses (replaced in 1923 with

the present single light) is frequently uncovered in winter at the

base of the cliffs, having survived a 50-foot slide to the beach.

Farther north, at the Marconi Site in South Wellfleet, Guglielmo

Marconi constructed his original transmitting towers in 1901-1902,

set back 165 feet from the edge of the cliff. Today only two of the

foundations remain; the other two have fallen into the sea.

Few things remain in place on the edge of the cliffs or on the dunes.

They either move or disappear. Cape Cod Light, first built in 1796,

has been replaced twice; the current tower sits some 600 feet back

from the site of the original one, though only a little more than

100 feet from the present cliff edge. The present Eastham Coast

Guard Station, built in 1936, is a successor to the first one, which

succumbed to beach erosion. When the Seashore was established in

1961, more than 80 cottages existed on its barrier beaches. Today, as

a result of subsequent storms, less than one quarter of them remain.

Logs and other objects, including the remains of old shipwrecks, are

frequently uncovered by eroding dunes and beaches. During a dramatic

storm, while he was staying in the Outermost House in the 1920s,

Henry Beston described how the blackened skeleton of an ancient ship

that had been buried in a dune for more than a century “floated and

lifted itself free ... thus stirring from its grave and yielding its

bones again to the fury of the gale.”

[Illustration: _Fall and winter storms often develop quickly and tear

away at the shorelines, removing sands from one place and depositing

them elsewhere._]

One survivor of this coastal erosion is the Old Harbor Life Saving

Station. Now a maritime museum at Race Point Beach in Provincetown,

it began life in 1897 twenty miles to the south on Chatham’s North

Beach. In 1977, in the face of imminent destruction, the station was

cut in half and floated on two barges to its present site.

During the summer, the beaches of the Outer Cape present a generally

peaceful and benign aspect. A wide, gently sloping shelf of sand lies

between the base of the sea cliffs and a rhythmic, moderate surf.

The summer shoreline’s peaceful countenance encourages the illusion

that all this change and rearrangement of shoreline lies in the

settled past. There is little indication to the summer visitor of the

ferocity, violence, and transformation that visit this coast in the

“off-season.” But if one returns in late autumn, when the prevailing

winds shift to the north and the east, when the first northeasters

of the season begin to chew away at the wide summer beach, replacing

it with a short, steep winter berm, one begins to have a sense that

this is still a land in the making, that, as Henry Beston observed,

“Creation is here and now.”

In winter the ocean storms claw into the base of these cliffs,

undermining them. Along some stretches erosion is gradual, with

little rivulets of sand running down the cliff face into the sea. At

other places, especially where there are large deposits of clay, the

process can be dramatic. Whole slabs of the marine scarp may shelve

off at once, and a single stretch of cliff may lose 30 or 40 feet in

one storm. In still other areas the beach appears to be accreting,

with wide terraces of sand covered with beach grass building out

from the cliff base. But overall the Outer Beach continues to erode,

losing an average of three feet a year.

On the barrier beaches the erosion process is somewhat different,

though the overall effect is also retreat. Barrier beach dune lines

are dynamic systems. That is, they retreat and maintain themselves by

moving with, rather than resisting, the ocean’s power. Normally the

foreslopes of the dunes flatten out during a severe storm, presenting

a less steep face to the waves, which helps to dissipate their force.

Meanwhile wind and occasional storm surges that break through the

line carry sand into the estuary or marsh behind the dunes. These

deposits are gradually colonized by beach grass and other beach

plants, which begin the process of building up another dune line as

the foredunes continue to erode. Evidence of this gradual retreat can

be observed by the occasional emergence in front of the present dune

lines of peat ledges, the remains of a salt marsh or freshwater bog

that once lay behind a former line of dunes. In a healthy system and

under normal conditions a barrier beach “rolls over on itself” in a

smooth progression landward.

On occasion, however, even this process is overwhelmed by an unusual

manifestation of the sea’s power. One such manifestation was the

Great Blizzard of February 6-7, 1978, called “The Storm of the

Century.” Carrying 15-foot tides and hurricane-force winds, this

storm rearranged many parts of the Cape’s shoreline. Monomoy Island,

for example, was severed in two, and remains so today. But nowhere

were the effects more dramatic and visible than at Eastham’s Coast

Guard Beach. Storm surges breached the dune line, flattening 90

percent of the dunes themselves, carrying off most of the beach

cottages, including Henry Beston’s Outermost House, and totally

destroying the Seashore’s bathhouse and large parking lot.

Provincetown has always been the Cape community that has had to

contend most with change. During the 19th century the moving dunes

of the Province Lands threatened to bury its houses and silt up its

vital harbor. Subsequent erosion control and beach grass plantings

have so far kept the dunes at bay, but a more implacable force may

now be threatening the town.

Over the past few decades oceanographers have observed an

acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise, possibly the result of

global warming. The sea may now be rising as much as one foot every

century, which on low shorelines translates into a loss of 100 feet

inland. Nowhere on Cape Cod does thick settlement lie so close to

the shore as along the low, narrow streets of Provincetown. If

present rises in the level of the sea continue, or, as seems likely,

increase, the ocean may well claim this ancient fishing community

before the dunes do.

Meanwhile the bulk of the Provincetown Hook continues to expand

outward into the sea. The dangerous Peaked Hill Bars represent,

in current oceanographic theory, the next ridge of Province Lands

dunes in the making, rising gradually from the sea. But regardless

of such gains, or the pains taken by humans to stem the loss of

land from the sea, the Cape is inevitably losing more than it is

replacing. Oceanographers estimate that for every five acres of

shoreline lost to erosion, only two are replaced with new land in the

form of barrier beaches or sand hooks. There is little doubt that

the Cape’s ultimate fate is to return to the sea that spawned and

shaped it. At current rates of sea-level rise, Cape Cod has at best

only another five to six thousand years before the Puritan preacher

Cotton Mather’s prediction comes true, and “shoals of codfish be seen

swimming on its highest hills.”

[Illustration: Salt Marsh

_Salt hay and cord grass_

_Sea stars_

_Lobster_

_Hermit crab_

_Moon snail_

_Fiddler crab_

_Anemone_

_Moon jelly_]

[Illustration:

_Sea-lavender and honey bee_

_Bay scallop_

_Eelgrass_

_Rock crabs_

_Northern diamondback terrapin_

_Glasswort, or salicornia_

_Sea robin_

_Sea lettuce and mussels_]

[Illustration: _Schools of silversides, about 3 inches long, dart

through shallow waters feeding on plankton. They in turn are fed upon

by other marine life and birds such as gulls and terns._]

The Bountiful Sea

The first English settlers who came to the Cape from Plymouth in 1639

were farmers, not fishermen. It took several generations for them

to give themselves fully to the life of the sea, though they early

saw the potential in it. In fact, even in their farming they quickly

took advantage of what the sea had to offer. Alewives were gathered

from local streams in spring as a seasonal source of food, as well

as fertilizer for their cornfields, a practice taught to them by the

Wampanoag Indians. Eelgrass from the flats also provided fertilizer,

mulch, insulation for house foundations, and even stuffing for

mattresses. Lobsters were so abundant that they were often blown

ashore in deep windrows. They were more valued as fertilizer than

food in colonial times, and in the 18th century a petition was filed

with the General Court on behalf of indentured servants that they

“not be fed lobsters more than twice a week”!

Even more valued by these early Cape Cod farmers were the salt

marshes, or salt meadows. In a place of little natural grassland,

marshes were prized for grazing. During the spring and summer cows

were pastured on the marshes, with boys sent along to keep them from

falling into the tidal creeks or potholes, called “pannes.” In fall

the salt hay was scythed, stacked in ricks on raised wooden platforms

called “staddles,” and hauled to the barns by oxen or horses wearing

special wide wooden shoes to keep them from sinking into the peat.

The Cape’s numerous bays, inlets, salt ponds, and estuaries were also

early recognized as marine cornucopias. Foot-long oysters, scallops,

crabs, eels, flounder, diamondback terrapins, striped bass, mackerel,

and other fish were taken for local use, and clam shells provided the

lime for plastering colonial walls.

Still, despite the many uses these early settlers made of the marine

riches around them, they did not truly become men of the sea until

they were forced to by the land’s limitations and by their own

mismanagement of it. The Cape’s once-abundant woodlands were cut and

burned for farm and pasture land and consumed for a seemingly endless

array of local uses and industries: heating homes; boiling seawater

for salt; building boats, gristmills, houses, and barns; firing tar

kilns; and trying out whale blubber, to name just a few.

[Illustration: _The Atlantic cod typically weighs 10 to 25 pounds but

ranges up to 200 pounds. Its bountiful numbers sparked Massachusetts’

first major maritime industry in the 1600s. A bottom dweller, the cod

soon attracted Cape fishermen to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and

to Georges Bank off Cape Cod._]

The thin glacial soil, exhausted by repeated cropping and left

unprotected by deforestation, soon blew away. In Provincetown,

unregulated cutting and grazing in the Province Lands let loose the

dunes, which threatened to bury the town and fill up the harbor. By

1800 dune ridges were advancing at a rate of 90 feet a year. In 1847

Massachusetts geologist Edward Hitchcock, visiting the Lower Cape,

felt as if he were “in the depths of an Arabian or Libyan desert.”

Though the Cape’s soil was never very rich, the waters around it

teemed with abundance, and in the sea Cape Codders found their

true destiny. Thrust some 30 miles out into the Atlantic, the Cape

partakes of two distinct marine environments. Cape Cod Bay is part of

the larger Gulf of Maine ecosystem, a cold-water habitat influenced

by the south-flowing Labrador Current. The waters of Nantucket Sound,

averaging some ten degrees warmer, are influenced primarily by the

northward-flowing Gulf Stream.

Such a range of temperature in its surrounding waters, combined with

numerous estuaries of varying salinity, has produced one of the

richest diversities of marine habitats on the East Coast. A National

Park Service report states that the difference in flora and fauna

“between Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay is greater than that between

Cape Cod Bay and the Bay of Fundy, or between Buzzards Bay and the

coast of Virginia.” Warm-water species such as whelks, bay scallops,

diamondback terrapins, blue crabs, striped bass and tuna inhabit the

same waters as do more northerly species such as blue mussels, Jonah

crabs, winter flounder, halibut, and, of course, cod.

Of all the creatures nourished by the sea, none has been more

important to the history of Cape Cod than the Atlantic cod, _Gadus

morhua_. In 1602, the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold was so

impressed by the schools of codfish surrounding his vessel, the

_Concord_, that he named this peninsula after them, a name so apt

that, in the words of Truro historian Shebnah Rich, “blow high or

low, cold or hot, thick or thin, fish or no fish, it has hung on like

a lamper-eel from that day to this.”

[Illustration: _A few Pilgrims left Plymouth and returned to the

Cape and settled in the Eastham area. So, too, did this windmill. It

was built in Plymouth in the 1600s and was moved to Eastham in 1793.

The mill was used in producing flour. Some mills were used to pump

seawater as a part of saltworks._]

The cod has always been what Captain John Smith described in 1616 as

“the maine staple” of the New England fishing industry. More than a

century before the _Mayflower_ landed, fleets of small ships from

Holland, Portugal, and the Basque region of Spain had braved the

North Atlantic annually to fish the rich spawning grounds of the

Grand Banks of Newfoundland, salting their fish ashore and returning

with their catch to European ports. It is more than likely that the

first European visitors to Provincetown Harbor—originally called

Cape Cod Harbor—were Portuguese fishermen who came ashore to cure,

or “make,” cod on the long sandy stretches there. Some permanent

European settlements may even have existed there in the 1500s.

If the Plymouth settlers were unskilled as fishermen, they were smart

enough to sell the rights to fish to others, and in 1670 a tax on

the Provincetown fisheries was established as a means of funding

public schools in Plymouth. As Thoreau put it, schools of fish were

used to provide schools for children. As early as 1730, however,

Cape fishing captains were making voyages to the Grand Banks in a

“triangle trade:” taking salted cod to the West Indies, exchanging

fish for molasses and rum, and bringing them back to the mainland

where they were sold to finance new and larger ships for more fishing

trips. But during the 18th century most fishing remained inshore, or

close to shore, and part-time. Cape Codders remained half-farmers,

half-fishermen, and most took only enough for themselves and local

markets.

The British embargo on shipping during the American Revolution was

disastrous for the Cape’s nascent fishing industry, but after the war

it began to come into its own. Shorter and more profitable runs were

made in smaller boats, and lightly salted “fresh” fish was brought

directly back for sale in Boston. Fish flakes—low wooden slatted

platforms on which split cod was salted and sun-dried—became the

common method of curing fish. Because of its capacious harbor, “where

a thousand sail may safely anchor,” and its extensive sandy beaches

providing ideal sites for fish flakes, Provincetown soon became a

magnet for the Cape’s burgeoning fish exports. From a mere ten houses

in 1755, it boasted a thousand residents in 1802, and by 1840 the

Cape-tip community had become the preeminent fishing port on Cape

Cod, harboring more than 100 cod trawlers. When Thoreau visited its

narrow streets in 1849, he counted over 200 mackerel schooners alone.

[Illustration: _The whaler_ Charles W. Morgan _can be toured today at

Mystic Seaport in Connecticut_.]

One of the major events in the growth of the Cape’s fishing industry

was the opening up of the Georges Banks in 1821. Much closer than

Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, but just as fertile, this vast glacial

deposit, the work of the same ice sheets that formed Cape Cod, had

long been shunned because of its dangerous shoals and currents. But

the rising price of cod and halibut tempted more and more fishing

captains to its waters. By the mid-1800s a distinctive “banker”

version of the Provincetown schooner had evolved, sleeker and faster

than the old tub-hulled vessels, giving greater maneuverability on

the shoals and greater speed in getting the fish to market first for

the best prices. The schooners also began carrying dories aboard.

These small, double-ended, highly seaworthy boats were launched from

the mother ship with two-man crews, who set out hundreds of yards of

hooked lines on floats, hauled in their catch by hand, and waited to

be picked up at the end of the day. Deep-sea dory fishing, though it

greatly increased the yield of each voyage, also increased the risks

for the crews, especially if, as frequently happened, these small

rowboats became separated from the schooners in fog or squalls.

After the Civil War the industrial revolution hit the fishing market.

Greater concentrations of capital, larger boats, more expensive gear

and faster transportation for landed fish were required. Most Cape

towns did not possess the resources, the anchorage, or the facilities

to compete. They turned instead to local handlining, trap, and weir

fishing, or, as in Wellfleet’s case, began to develop local shellfish

industries. But Provincetown, reinvigorated by the arrival of the

railroad in 1873 and by an influx of Portuguese fishermen from the

Azores in the late 1800s, remained a prominent New England fishing

port until the end of the century, when the increasing demands of

capital investment and labor forced the town to yield to the ports

of Boston and Gloucester.

Today Provincetown, Chatham, and several of the other Cape towns

still support small but tenacious fleets of local draggers, trawlers,

and lobster boats. Declining stocks, smaller quotas, oil spills,

competition from foreign “factory ships,” and ever-more-expensive

gear have made it even harder for the small fisherman to stay in

business. But the independence, challenge, the hope of a “big haul,”

and the unexplainable lure of the sea continue to attract local

residents to this ancient profession, and it is likely they will

continue to do so as long as there are fish to catch.

[Illustration: _Colorful boats line up in Provincetown harbor ready

for another day of commercial fishing._]

Though whaling was never as important to Cape Cod as were its

fisheries, it nonetheless formed an significant chapter in the Cape’s

maritime history. In the early colonial days drift whales came ashore

frequently enough that they formed a portion of some Congregational

ministers’ salaries. Live whales were common in Cape Cod Bay and

Nantucket Sound, and a modest inshore whaling industry developed

in the 17th century. In fact, in 1694 a Yarmouth captain, Ichabod

Paddock, was invited to Nantucket to teach the Quaker residents the

trade. He apparently did such a good job that Nantucketers soon

became the preeminent New England whalers.

Try yards—areas where whale blubber was boiled down, or “tried

out,” to obtain the oil—were established early in the 18th century

on Barnstable’s Sandy Neck, and in 1715 that town boasted some 200

inshore whalers. But such intensive exploitation soon diminished the

nearby stocks, and by 1750 the inshore whaling industry was dying out.

As in fishing, so in whaling, Provincetown with its unrivaled

harbor became the Cape’s most important port. At its peak, in 1876,

seventeen deep-sea whaling vessels sailed out of Provincetown.

The last two Cape whaling vessels made their final voyages from

Provincetown in 1920-21. They were the schooner _Cameo_ and the bark

_Charles W Morgan_. The _Morgan_ is preserved at Mystic Seaport in

Connecticut.

One species of cetacean has had a peculiar attachment to the Cape

shores over the centuries. The pilot whale, or blackfish, is a

medium-sized toothed whale, 15-22 feet in length. It tends to travel

in tight groups, and large numbers of pilot whales frequently strand

themselves in the tidal creeks and on the shallow flats of Cape Cod

Bay, particularly in the labyrinthine channels around Wellfleet

Harbor. Scientists are still trying to fathom the causes of these

mass strandings, but to the early Cape Codders they were obviously a

gift from God, providing both meat and high-grade whale oil from the

rounded “melon” in the front of the whale’s head.

[Illustration: _A humpback whale displays its tail stock and flukes

off the Provincetown coast. Other species of whales are also commonly

seen from spring through fall, including finback, minke, and right

whales. These marine mammals, once hunted for their blubber and

baleen, now support a thriving whale-watching industry._]

Before long lookouts were posted to spot pods of pilot whales coming

inshore. Fleets of small boats would then be launched, and their

crew members would circle the whales and beat their oars and blow

horns to “help” the panicked herd ashore. In 1855 Thoreau witnessed

hundreds of blackfish driven ashore at Great Hollow in Truro, and

in 1880 a school of more than 1,300 stranded in South Wellfleet at

Blackfish Creek, giving it its present name. Strandings of pilot

whales continued to be a source of local income for Cape towns into

the 1930s, when, for reasons not clear, they largely disappeared. But

since the mid-1970s strandings have become common again; in November

1982, sixty-five pilot whales came ashore at Wellfleet’s Lieutenant

Island.

In the eyes of many, Cape Codders attained their greatest seafaring

eminence as shipmasters in the merchant marine. As captains during

the early days of the Republic, they were, as Cape historian Henry

Kittredge noted, “the first ambassadors of a young nation.” Later, in

command of the great clipper ships of the mid-19th-century, they set

a number of transoceanic sailing records that still stand today. They

also made considerable fortunes for their owners, and for themselves.

This monetary bounty was translated into the hundreds of substantial

“captain’s houses” that still stand along the streets of their home

towns from Sandwich to Provincetown. Brewster alone is said to have

counted more than 50 sea captains residing there at one time.

But perhaps even more important than the fortunes and exotic

souvenirs these ship captains brought home from foreign ports was the

broad perspective gained by their experience. It was said that many a

Cape Codder had been to China who had never gone to Boston by land.

Wives and children often sailed with the shipmasters, and several

of Cape Cod’s small villages boasted a cosmopolitan culture unusual

among mid-19th-century New England towns. Many of the retired ship

captains became selectmen in their towns, and, as Kittredge put it,

“Narrow-mindedness found barren soil in a district where two houses

out of every three belonged to men who knew half the seaports of the

world and had lived ashore for months at a time in foreign countries.”

But the sea that brought such bounty and prosperity to Cape Codders

during the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was not

always kind. There was a dark side to the Cape’s relationship to the

ocean, a side reflected in the numerous slate and limestone markers

in the Cape’s small burying grounds that bear the inscription “Lost

at Sea.”

[Illustration: _Over the years the sea has taken the life of many a

Cape Cod fisherman. This stone, in the Burying Ground of the First

Congregational Parish of Truro, honors Mrs. Rebecca Snow, who died

Nov. 4, 1832, and her husband, Capt. Reuben Snow, who was lost at sea

in January 1825. The inscription at the bottom reads: “Tho’ in the

dust, or in the sea, their mortal bodies rest, their spirits dwell in

paradise.”_]

The 30-mile stretch of land between the Monomoy Shoals on the south

and Race Point on the north is one of several East Coast stretches

known as “Graveyards of the Atlantic.” The Cape’s sandy outer shore

does not look as menacing as, say, the rocky coastline of Maine or

Nova Scotia. Its threats take more subtle shapes, in the form of

submerged sandbars and treacherous rips, that can easily run a ship

aground, and where in winter gales waves will pound a vessel to

pieces as effectively as if it were on solid rock.

The first recorded shipwreck on Cape Cod was the _Sparrowhawk_, an

English vessel that struck a sandbar off Orleans in 1626. Since then

an estimated 3,000 vessels have been lost in the waters off the Cape,

most on the stretch of open Atlantic from Chatham to Provincetown.

One of the most famous of the early wrecks was the pirate ship

_Whydah_, a 300-ton galley commanded by “Black Sam” Bellamy, which

broke up on the bars off Eastham (now South Wellfleet) on May 8,

1717. More than 145 lives were lost in the wreck, and of the nine

survivors, seven were tried for piracy and hanged on Boston Common.

Cape Codders early on recognized that those who went “down to the

sea in ships” did not always come back. The most deadly areas were

the shoals and rips off Monomoy—places known as “Cape Mallebarre”

and “Tucker’s Terror”—and the infamous Peaked Hill Bars off the

Atlantic, or back side, of Provincetown. Not all losses occurred

close to shore, however. Once fishing vessels began making trips to

the Georges and Grand Banks, entire fleets were sometimes caught in

furious fall northeasters, winter gales, and hurricanes. Perhaps

the worst single storm, in terms of its effects on local Cape

communities, was the disastrous October Gale of 1841. Dozens of ships

and more than 100 men were lost on Georges Banks. Truro alone lost 57

men. When Thoreau passed through Truro a decade after the storm, the

community was still in mourning: “‘Who lives in that house?’ I

inquired. ‘Three widows,’ was the reply.”

The first organized attempt to aid shipwrecked sailors was made in

1794, when the Massachusetts Humane Society began to build a series

of Humane Houses, or Charity Huts, along the Outer Beach. Located

at the “hollows” in the sea cliff for ease of access, these Humane

Houses were at first no more than crude huts, irregularly stocked

with straw, matches, and a few other items of survival that might see

a shipwrecked sailor through the night. Later they were equipped with

small boats and rope lines with mortars that volunteer crews might

use to try to reach sailors stranded offshore.

Cape Cod, or Highland, Light, the first lighthouse on the Cape, was

erected in 1796 atop the clay cliffs in North Truro. In the next 70

years others followed: the twin lights of Chatham in 1808; Race Point

in 1816; Monomoy in 1823; Long Point in 1826; the original “Three

Sisters of Nauset” in 1838; and Wood End in 1872. The establishment

of these lights significantly reduced the number of wrecks off the

back shore. But lighthouses and beacons were of little help during

intense fogs or furious northeast storms when anchors dragged and

sailing ships caught rounding the Cape could not manage to stay

offshore. More often than not ships became trapped between the outer

and inner bars, and Cape residents had to stand helplessly on the

shore as men froze in the rigging or were washed overboard into icy

seas only a hundred yards from land.

A major step in aiding these wreck victims was taken in 1872, when

Congress established the U.S. Life Saving Service, the culmination

of a series of federal measures that had begun in 1847 with an

appropriation to subsidize the Massachusetts Humane Society. Nine

stations were initially built, and eventually four others joined

them. In 1915 the U.S. Life Saving Service was merged with the

Revenue Cutter Service to form the U.S. Coast Guard.

Ironically, the sea disasters provided yet one more way of making

a living for Cape Codders. Compassionate and selfless as they were

in their efforts to save lives and aid victims of wrecks wherever

possible, they were also pragmatic. Salvaging, or wrecking, as it

was called, provided windfalls for the local populace. This practice

gave rise to the legend of the nefarious “mooncussers,” men who

deliberately lured ships to their doom with lighted lanterns on the

beach on dark, moonless nights.

There is no evidence that “mooncussing” was ever engaged in by Cape

Codders, but they were both philosophic and industrious about what

the sea threw up on their shores, whether drift whales or freighters

filled with useful cargo. During the 19th century wrecking became a

true business. Salvaging crews were organized and hired by owners of

wrecked ships to refloat or unload the vessels. Some local farmers

spent as much time on the beaches as they did in their fields. E.

Hayes Small of North Truro was one such man. On one occasion, using

heavy block and tackle, cradles and eight horses, he hoisted 15,000

board feet of lumber off the beach to the top of the 150-foot bluffs

north of Highland Light.

In 1914, however, a long-envisioned project finally became a reality

and forever changed the history of wrecks, wrecking, and lifesaving

on Cape Cod. A canal across the Cape, eliminating the entire

arduous and dangerous outside passage for ships sailing between

Boston and New York, had been dreamed of by Pilgrim leader Myles

Standish, proposed as early as 1676, and approved in principle by

George Washington. However, despite numerous government studies and

the formation of at least four private canal companies, nothing

substantial was accomplished until 1906, when New York financier

Augustus P. Belmont took control of the Boston, New York, and Cape

Cod Canal Company. Construction began on June 19, 1909, and the

first vessels sailed through the newly completed Canal on July 29,

1914. The longest sea-level canal in the world, it was widened to

500 feet in 1935, and the present Sagamore and Bourne bridges were

constructed. Today some 30,000 vessels annually sail through its

protected passage.

With the canal’s completion, the number of shipwrecks off the back

side of the Cape declined precipitously, and so did the need for the

13 manned Life Saving stations. In 1915 they were incorporated into

the newly-formed U.S. Coast Guard. Today the Outer Cape has only two

Coast Guard stations, one at Chatham Light, the other in Provincetown

Harbor.

[Illustration: Birds of the Shore

_Red-breasted merganser_

_American oystercatcher_

_Canvasback pair_

_Sanderlings_

_Lesser and greater yellowlegs_

_Ruddy turnstone_

_Ring-billed gull_

_Osprey_]

[Illustration:

_Dunlin_

_Common terns_

_Great blue heron_

_Willet_

_Snowy egret_

_Spotted sandpiper_

_Green-backed heron_

_Common eider family_]

[Illustration: _Workers flood and then corral floating ripe

cranberries in the annual fall harvest._]

The Cape’s Transformation

The Cape Cod that Thoreau visited nearly a century and a half ago was

a rural, semi-isolated peninsula with a distinct maritime culture.

Villages were small; most food and materials were obtained locally;

travel by land over sand roads was slow and difficult; and, although

many a local shipmaster had visited Singapore and São Paulo, most

native Cape Codders spent their lives within a few miles of their

birthplace, except when they went to sea to fish. Language was local,

not only in its flat Cape accent, but in a host of names and phrases

attached to local plants, animals, and weather.

Off-Cape visitors were rare and often regarded with suspicion.

Thoreau and his traveling companion, William Ellery Channing, were

initially mistaken for bank robbers. Though a steamboat ran regularly

from Boston to Provincetown, travel elsewhere on the peninsula was

still difficult. Aside from a few hardy, curious souls like Thoreau,

the only regular summer visitors to the Cape in the mid-19th century

were those attending the Methodist camp-meetings, such as the one

described by him at Millennium Grove in Eastham. “At present,” he

said of Cape Cod, “it is wholly unknown to the fashionable world.”

Yet Thoreau was perceptive enough to realize that “The time must come

when this coast will be a place of resort for those New Englanders

who really wish to visit the seaside”—though even he could not have

imagined how complete that transformation would be.

After the Civil War, the Cape entered a period of economic decline

that lasted for more than half a century. With the decline of the

merchant marine, whaling, and fishing fleets, and the opening up of

the rich western prairies, many of the Cape’s younger people left

to seek their fortune elsewhere. Hundreds of acres of farmland were

abandoned. The Cape’s population, which reached a high of 35,990 in

1860, reached a low of 26,670 in 1920. Wellfleet lost 65 percent of

its population, and Truro nearly 75 percent.

[Illustration: _In 1851 trains ran in the summer between Boston and

Sandwich. The fare was $1.50, one way._]

Ironically, it was the railroad—which initially contributed to

the decline in the packet boat and merchant marine trade—that

subsequently helped revive the Cape’s economy. The Cape Cod Branch

Railroad first arrived at Sandwich in 1848. Rails were gradually

extended down-Cape, finally reaching Provincetown in 1873. The

completed railroad linked Cape towns to the rest of New England and

made inland resources such as coal and lumber widely available. More

importantly, for the first time the Cape itself became accessible to

the region’s urban population.

Oddly enough, the first railroad advertisements enticed Cape Codders

to Boston, rather than the reverse. But it was not long before

the “fashionable world” began to discover the charms of Cape Cod.

“Summer folk,” including President Grover Cleveland, began building

substantial homes with imported lumber along the shores of Buzzards

Bay, Nantucket Sound, and Pleasant Bay.

Bird shooting became a popular sport on the Cape, and several gunning

clubs were established for vacationing sportsmen from Boston and New

York. These clubs, combined with the commercial hunting of waterfowl

and shorebirds for the food market and millinery trade, took a

tremendous toll on the Cape’s bird populations from the Civil War

until the passage of the Federal Migratory Bird Treaties of 1916.

According to one report, 8,000 golden plovers and Eskimo curlews

were shot on the Cape in one day! (The former species is now a rare

migrant, the latter presumed extinct.) At the same time, much of the

most valuable shorebird habitat was being destroyed. Hundreds of

acres of salt marshes were dredged to expand harbors or filled in for

development, agriculture, and mosquito control.

A different kind of transformation began in Provincetown in 1899,

when Charles Hawthorne opened his Cape Cod School of Art, officially

initiating the emergence of the Cape-tip as a major art colony. By

1916 there were five art schools operating in Provincetown. That

year also saw the formation of the Provincetown Players, one of the

most important small theaters in the history of American drama. Its

founders—which included George Cram “Jig” Cook, playwright Susan

Glaspell, and author Mary Heaton Vorse—produced original plays in a

shack on a harbor wharf, plays that included the early works of a

then-unknown dramatist, Eugene O’Neill.

[Illustration: _Walter Smith, 1849-1932, retired in 1930 as at least

the seventh in a long line of town criers that lasted into the late

1980s in Provincetown. Traditionally they gave out news of village

events, antiques sales, church suppers, and the like. For a fee, they

also advertised products for local merchants._]

Since then the towns of the Outer Cape have been seasonal and

year-round homes to a host of artistic and literary figures. Edward

Hopper, Edwin Dickinson, Karl Knaths, Ross Moffett, Henry Hensche,

Hans Hoffman, Ben Shahn, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, Robert

Motherwell, Alice Stallknecht, and Arnold Geissbuhler are a few of

the influential painters and sculptors who have worked and lived on

the Outer Cape. Literary figures have included John Reed, William

Daniel Steele, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Edna St. Vincent

Millay, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Provincetown’s “Poet of the

Dunes” Harry Kemp, Norman Mailer, Howard Nemerov, Alan Dugan, Stanley

Kunitz, Marge Piercy, and Annie Dillard.

A particularly rich vein of the Cape’s creative activity has been

the literary treatment of the landscape itself. Thoreau’s _Cape Cod_

(1864) was the first recognized classic of this genre. Others have

included _The Outermost House_ by Henry Beston, _The House on Nauset

Marsh_ by Dr. Wyman Richardson, _The Great Beach_ by Brewster author

John Hay, and the poetry of Provincetown’s Pulitzer-Prize winner Mary

Oliver.

After World War I the first paved roads were constructed down-Cape.

With the arrival of the automobile, the second wave of the Cape’s

transformation began. The weekender appeared. Cottage colonies began

to spring up in the towns and on the beaches. Golf courses were

built, including the Highland Links in Truro and the Nauset Links in

Eastham. The Nauset Links fairways today are a cedar forest through

which the visitor can walk on the Seashore’s Nauset Marsh Trail.

The Cape’s summer population began to mushroom, and Provincetown

in particular took on a distinctively Bohemian ambience during the

1920s and 1930s. At the same time, the descendants of the Portuguese

immigrants came to dominate Provincetown’s fishing fleet. Even

today nearly a third of its permanent population claims Portuguese

descent and continues to give a distinctive Old World flavor to this

community’s cuisine, culture, and local festivals.

[Illustration: _As the number of summer visitors increased, inns and

cottages such as these in Wellfleet were built to take in lodgers.

In 1911, Provincetown’s Commercial Street, right, had restaurants,

lodgings, ice cream shops, and other facilities for tourists arriving

by car as well as by boat._]

Having lived with change throughout their history, Cape Codders

adjusted to these outside influences with philosophy and pragmatism.

As Cape historian Henry Kittredge observed in 1930: “If whales

no longer visit their shores, rich city folk do, and with easy

adaptability Cape men and women take the goods the gods provide

them.” Some local residents began to rent out rooms in their old

Cape houses, while others added on a front porch for a restaurant,

set up a gas station or a beach plum jelly stand in the front yard,

or an antiques store in the barn. Some took advantage of less legal

commerce of the era; during Prohibition a number of trawler captains

turned to the more lucrative sea-trade of rum-running.

At least one native industry survived, in fact flourished, during

these years of decline and transformation. Cranberries had been

commercially raised on the Cape’s bogs since the early 1800s, but

the coming of the railroad opened off-Cape markets for the crop. The

cranberry, as much as the cod, became the symbol of Cape Cod. In

recent years, because of the success of modern marketing, many small

bogs that were abandoned over the last half century have been put

back into cultivation. One of these old bogs, established by James

Howe in the 1880s on North Pamet Road in Truro, has been partially

restored by the National Park Service.

The third and unquestionably the most sweeping transformation of

the Cape’s culture and landscape has occurred since World War II.

With the building of the Mid-Cape Highway and the expansion of

the post-war economy, the first waves of modern “washashores,” or

permanent immigrants, began to arrive over the Bourne and Sagamore

bridges. From 1940 to 1990 the Cape’s year-round population increased

from about 30,000 to more than 175,000, with a summertime population

that swells to 500,000 or more. Each year from 1970 to 1990 an

average of 5,000 acres (roughly the size of Provincetown) was

developed for residential and commercial uses.

[Illustration: (Commercial Street in Provincetown.)]

Though the Cape has been technically an island since 1914, it

continues to be increasingly a part of the mainland. The old,

indigenous, rural maritime culture of the Cape is irretrievably gone,

though small fishing fleets continue to go out of local harbors and

inlets. Cape Codders now live in a cosmopolitan contemporary culture,

sharing more with their urban counterparts than with the sea captains

in whose 200-year-old houses they may dwell or spend the night.

With this staggering growth and its resultant pressures on the Cape’s

resources and natural habitats, there has been an increasing movement

to protect the Cape’s fragile landscape and its wildlife. The most

dramatic and sweeping manifestation of this was the Congressional

authorization of the Cape Cod National Seashore itself in 1961, but

a number of homegrown environmental research, conservation, and

educational organizations have also been established. These groups

include the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, the Wellfleet

Bay Audubon Sanctuary, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in

Brewster, the Association for the Preservation of Cape Cod, and the

Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts.

In part because of the work of these and other groups, general

environmental awareness has also grown. The Cape’s salt marshes are

no longer regarded as wasteland to be dredged for marinas or filled

for development but as one of the richest and most productive marine

habitats in the world. Local kettle pond shores, once built up

with little regard for environmental impact, are now recognized as

important buffers protecting water quality and as important habitat

for certain flowering plants, some of which are found in only a

handful of sites worldwide.

No longer are local whales driven ashore or hunted with harpoons.

Instead, today’s Cape Codders ply a lucrative trade running

whale-watching trips out of Provincetown and other ports, and a Cape

Cod Stranding Network has been established to aid stranded whales and

other marine animals.

Shorebirds, too, have ceased to be slaughtered by the thousands on

our beaches and in our marshes. Instead, areas such as the Monomoy

Wildlife Refuge and the National Seashore provide protected feeding

and resting stations for thousands of migrating shorebirds and

waterfowl. Each summer sections of beaches and dunes within the

Seashore and elsewhere are roped off and patrolled to insure the

survival of such local nesting species as terns and piping plovers,

and park talks and walks stress to visitors the importance and

fragility of these breeding areas.

Besides changes in human attitudes and practice, natural changes

in wildlife populations continue to take place as well. As ocean

waters warm, cold-water species such as cod and halibut have moved

farther north, while warmer-water species such as striped bass and

bluefish seem to be increasing. Sizable numbers of wintering harbor

seals have appeared in the Cape’s estuaries and offshore beaches in

the past 20 years, and during the winter of 1989-90, for the first

time ever, some rare gray seals gave birth to several pups on Monomoy

Island. Willets and oystercatchers, after a long absence, are nesting

on Cape beaches once again, and ospreys, responding to artificial

nesting platforms, have returned to Cape bays and ponds after their

disappearance during the 1960s from DDT poisoning. Other recent

self-arrivals on the Cape’s wildlife scene include opossums, house

finches, and even coyotes.

What do all these changes and transformations teach us? It may be,

most importantly, that we still confront what the First Comers

faced: the land itself, sea-born and sea-shaped. When we learn its

history and observe the age-old forces that continue to work today,

the lesson seems to be that any human occupation of the Earth is,

at best, tentative and transitory, and particularly so here. The

waves, beaches, dunes, and trees of the Cape continue to dance, and

we have begun to learn to dance with them—to understand and adapt to

the land’s rhythms, tempos, and limits—so that we and those who come

after us may continue to enjoy all that it has to offer. For it is

we, residents and visitors alike, who are today’s Cape Codders.

[Illustration: Wildflowers

_White water lily_

_Pink ladyslipper_

_Dewberry_

_Purple aster_

_Seaside goldenrod_

_Beach plum_

_St. Johnswort_

_Sheep laurel_]

[Illustration:

_Bittersweet nightshade_

_Prickly pear cactus_

_Creeping bellflower_

_Star-flower_

_Beach heather, or poverty grass_

_Beach-pea_

_Canada mayflower_

_Cypress spurge_]

#############################################

A Glacial Base

[Illustration: (Glaciation map of North America. Moraine deposits

on Cape Cod and the Islands. Glacial, post-glacial and present

topography.)]

The Wisconsin Stage Glacier reached into southern New England 25,000

years ago and melted away more than 17,000 years ago, leaving

behind moraine and outwash deposits that became the base of Cape

Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands (see

illustrations at right). But this was only the latest in a series

of Pleistocene glaciers that covered Cape Cod during the past 1.5

million years. Even the deposits of these earlier glaciers may rest

on a much older and more stable land form, a wide, seaward-sloping

surface called a coastal plain or, if submerged, a continental

shelf. The plain and shelf are underlain by sediments. The shelf was

exposed during the ice ages by a concomitant drop in sea level of

some 400-500 feet, but today it lies drowned under rising waters.

Even more deeply buried, some 500-800 feet beneath the surface,

lies the ancient granite bedrock that is so characteristic of most

other New England areas. There is evidence that the post-glacial

landscape looked very much like arctic tundra. Deep in the bottom of

Truro’s Great Pond, twigs of arctic willow have been retrieved with

11,000-year-old scale insects still attached to the bark. Caribou,

arctic fox, and perhaps musk ox, roamed lichen-covered plains where

white-tailed deer and red fox live today. Gradually a boreal forest

of spruce and fir took root, much like the forests that now cover

northern Canada.

Outwash Plains and Kettles

_As the Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod Bay, and, perhaps, the South Channel

glacial lobes waned, they left behind moraines (above right).

Meltwater streams carried sand and gravel that then formed outwash

plains beyond the ice (above and below). Sometimes these materials

buried large blocks of ice. In time, the ice blocks melted, leaving

steep-sided depressions called kettles that became freshwater ponds

if they were deep enough to intersect the water table. Some of

these ponds became connected to the sea and turned into salt ponds,

such as the one near the Seashore visitor center in Eastham. Over

the years peat has filled in many of the ponds._

#############################################

The Restless Shore

[Illustration: (Beach erosion. Destroyed beach houses. Parabolic

sand dunes.)]

Within a person’s lifetime, the Cape’s shape changes dramatically.

The waters of the ocean and bay and the wind constantly erode

material here and deposit it there. Major storms can create islands,

sandbars, and dunes and revamp other land forms. A storm in 1931

weakened playwright Eugene O’Neill’s home—the old Peaked Hill Bars

Coast Guard Station—and sent it into the ocean in 1932 (below).

Summer winds generally come from the west or southwest. In the

winter, the most severe winds come from the northwest or northeast.

The Outer Cape as a whole is moving westward and diminishing as

these forces tear at the landscape and as ocean currents move sand

northward and southward from about the Marconi Station Site. For

every 5 acres of sand eroded, about 2 acres are deposited up or

down the coast, thereby elongating (see map at right) the hook at

Provincetown and North Beach and Monomoy Point off Chatham. On the

bay side, sands have extended Jeremy Point southward to a point

almost directly west of Marconi Beach. An 1889 U.S. Coast and

Geodetic Survey report says that the entire Outer Beach from 1848 to

1888 lost 323,233,030 cubic yards of earth and sand, enough to cover

the 55-acre U.S. Capitol grounds to a depth of 375 feet. Similar

changes are taking place today. Some residents have seen North Beach,

the southern extension of Nauset Beach, lengthen itself from just

south of Orleans to Chatham and then break in 2 pieces in a fierce

northeaster in 1987. The breach, which has grown to more than a mile

in width, has opened Chatham’s shoreline to the full force of ocean

storms, increasing erosion and claiming more than a dozen houses

(inset below). But the breach has also increased tidal flushing of

Pleasant Bay, reinvigorating the marine community. In November 1991,

a 4-day gale breached the dune line at the head of the Pamet River,

carrying sand and saltwater 500 feet into the river.

_Parabolic sand dunes occur on the narrow stretch of

land east of Pilgrim Lake in the Province Lands of Truro. Prevailing

northwest winds blow obliquely to the shoreline and create belts of

these unusual dunes with the sands of former beaches_.

#############################################

Wampanoag Indians

[Illustration: (Wampanoag village. Native Americans broiling fish.

Signing a treaty of friendship.)]

The first human beings to live here did not arrive by sea. In all

likelihood they came on foot from the south, southwest, and east,

perhaps following caribou or other game up the river valleys across

the then wide coastal plain. These people, known as Paleoindians,

arrived at least 9,000 years ago. Little is known about them, but

they appear to have been a nomadic people, hunting and gathering

in small groups. The earliest period represented by a variety

of archeological sites is 3,000 to 6,000 BP (Before Present).

An archeological site uncovered recently by the ocean at Coast

Guard Beach suggests more permanent settlements. This site has

been carbon-dated to more than 2,000 BP, and contains post holes

indicative of shelter construction. These early Native Americans

created chipped stone tools, fished in kettle ponds, and likely

wintered in the Cape’s coniferous woodlands. By the early 1600s

American Indians used or inhabited all the lands now encompassed by

Cape Cod National Seashore. These Wampanoags lived in 6 villages

along the creeks and bays from Chatham to Wellfleet, relying on both

the land and sea for food. When French explorer Samuel de Champlain

visited Cape Cod in 1605 and 1606, he noted that villagers in

what became Eastham and Chatham were raising corn, beans, squash,

and tobacco. They tilled their fields with wooden spades after

burning off the vegetation. They used crabs as fertilizer but ate

clams, quahogs, oysters, and other shellfish. Champlain noted that

the Monomoy band at Stage Harbor in Chatham stored corn in grass

sacks buried 5 to 6 feet in the sand. He thought they were better

fishermen and farmers than hunters. The Wampanoags lived in domed

shelters (below), which consisted of a frame of saplings bent into

semicircles. These semicircles were linked by circles of saplings

running parallel to the ground. The Indians covered the frames with

grass, reeds, and bark and left a large hole in the roofs so smoke

could escape from fires in a stone-lined pit in the center. The

dwellings were not clustered but separated by cultivated fields.

_Native Americans broil fish in this Theodore de

Bry 1590 engraving (below) of a John White watercolor. Samuel de

Champlain’s 1606 map (below right) of Chatham’s Stage Harbor area,

which he called Port Fortune, shows Wampanoags attacking the French

upon learning that they intended to settle there. The French had

stayed in the harbor for 2 weeks drying out their ship and repairing

its rudder._

_Henry Botkin’s early 20th-century painting depicts

the Wampanoags and Pilgrims signing a treaty of friendship._

#############################################

Pilgrims First Landing

[Illustration: (Map showing path of the Mayflower and its shallop.

The Mayflower. The Pilgrims come ashore.)]

The _Mayflower_ Pilgrims settled in Plymouth—but only after rejecting

Cape Cod as unsuitable. On November 9, 1620, these emigrants from

England sighted the Cape, the first land they had seen in the 2

months since they left Holland. Though they had intended to continue

south and settle in the Hudson River area, they decided, because

of treacherous waters off the Cape, to stay. They sailed around

the northern end of the Cape, set anchor off what became known as

Provincetown, and drew up the “Mayflower Compact,” an agreement by

which the group of 102, a bare majority of whom were Pilgrims, would

govern themselves. During the next month 3 different small groups

made “discoveries” of the area. They found a freshwater spring in the

Truro area, encountered a few Indians, and discovered several baskets

of Indian corn buried on a hill near the Pamet River. On December

6 a group of 19 men led by Myles Standish left the _Mayflower_ in

a shallop, or small boat, camped for the night in Eastham, and

crossed Cape Cod Bay to the mainland. They decided this would be a

good place to settle and returned to the ship. On December 16, the

_Mayflower_ dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, and the story of a new

English settlement in the New World began. A few passengers and their

offspring later settled in the Cape’s Eastham area.

_The_ Mayflower, _a 90-foot square-rigger, left

England on August 15, 1620, with a smaller vessel called the_

Speedwell. _Both vessels carried English exiles from Holland and

England, but the leaky_ Speedwell _caused two aborted departures. An

overcrowded_ Mayflower _finally left the docks on September 6, making

the arduous Atlantic crossing in a sluggish 65 days_.

_The_ Mayflower _arrived at Plymouth from Provincetown

on December 16, 1620, after failing to cross December 15 because of

bad weather. The Pilgrims came ashore on December 18. A few of them

and their offspring later settled in the Cape’s Eastham area. Graves

of_ Mayflower _passengers Constance Hopkins Snow, Giles Hopkins, and

Joseph Rogers are in Eastham’s Old Cove Burying Ground_.

#############################################

The Cape Cod House

[Illustration: (The Cape Cod house. Chimney. The half house

version. Post-and-beam construction.)]

If anything distinguishes Cape Cod nationally, it’s a house style.

Essentially the Cape Cod House is a modest story-and-a-half frame

structure that hugs the ground and has a steep roof that sheds the

rain and snow and provides protection from buffeting winds. Usually

the wooden shingles on the sides are left unpainted, and thus the

sides—and the roof—take on a natural grayish to dark brown patina

depending on the effects of the sun and wind-driven sands and salt.

Sometimes the front, shingle or clapboard, may be painted, and if so

most likely white. Many of the oldest Capes were built in stages. A

half house might become a three-quarter and later on a full house,

depending on the needs or wealth of the family. A full Cape, such

as the park’s Atwood-Higgins House (right and cutaway below), is

deceiving: it has much more room than you might expect from its

external appearance. Inside the front door is a small hallway or

entryway. To the left and the right are small parlors. In the center

of the back is a large keeping room, or kitchen, that later was

divided into 2 rooms, where most of the daily household activity

took place. At both ends of the kitchen are a buttery, or pantry,

and a bedroom, or a borning room. At the center of the house is an

intricately-designed brick chimney serving fireplaces in the parlors,

kitchen, and front hall.

The chimney divides the upstairs into 2 bedrooms, probably for

children. The eastern part (right) of the Atwood-Higgins House was

built in Wellfleet about 1730 by Thomas Higgins; the western side was

built about the same time but attached later. The house remained in

the Higgins family until 1805, when Thomas Atwood became the owner.

The Higgins family later regained ownership.

_The half house version of the Cape Cod House has 2

windows to the left or right of the front door. The three-quarter

house has a third on the other side of the door, and the full Cape

has 2 on each side._

_The post-and-beam construction method used in the

Atwood-Higgins House was commonly used on Cape Cod until the early

1800s. Posts and beams were put together by mortising a hole in one

and inserting a tenon from the other._

#############################################

Whaling’s Heyday

[Illustration: (A sperm whale overturns a whaleboat. Early harpoons.

The Penniman house. Scrimshaw objects. Whaling-trip logs.)]

Wellfleet and Provincetown were Cape Cod’s premier whaling ports in

the late 1700s and early 1800s. Some whaling ships sailed out of

other Cape towns, but these 2 ports were crowded and bustling with

ships and crews and related tradesmen and merchants. Both places

eventually gave way to Nantucket and New Bedford, but many Cape

captains continued to pursue the leviathan in distant seas. Settlers

had been intrigued by whales since Native Americans taught them how

to use beached whales for food and oil not long after the _Mayflower_

anchored in Cape Cod Bay. They soon erected towers on beaches to

look out for whales, which they would pursue in small boats along

the coasts. As whale oil grew in importance as a lighting fluid and

as whale bone and baleen were used for more household and personal

products, sloops and small schooners gave way to larger schooners

and square-riggers, such as barks, and even full-rigged ships. And

the ships extended their hunting grounds first to the South Atlantic

and then to the Pacific and Arctic oceans as their quarry changed

from right whales to sperm whales and bowheads. Whaling’s peak years

were between 1825 and 1860. The decline is traced to the discovery

of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859, the loss of many ships in the

Civil War, and a surge in other fisheries. Edward Penniman of Eastham

went to sea at age 11 in 1842 as a cook and at age 21 as a harpooner

aboard the New Bedford whaleship _Isabella_. By 1860 he was captain

of the bark _Minerva_. When he retired in 1883, he had made 6 voyages

as a whaling captain.

_In this painting, a sperm whale overturns a whaleboat

crew that has harpooned it._

_Harpoon styles improved over the years. Early

harpoons were double-flued (left). Later refinements included the

toggle head, invented in 1848, which was less likely to come loose

from the whale._

_While whaling crews were on long sea voyages, many of

the men whiled away the time making scrimshaw objects, including such

intricate pieces as this sewing box._

_When Augusta Penniman accompanied her husband on

voyages, she kept detailed whaling-trip logs in which she used

symbols to indicate kills and misses. In 1868 the Pennimans built

a French Second Empire mansard-roofed house (above) with a cupola

overlooking the ocean and bay in Eastham. The Penniman House, now a

part of the National Seashore, sports a pair of whale jaws at the

entrance to its walk._

#############################################

Cape Codders and the Sea

[Illustration: (Waterfront pass. Sailing card. Brewster sea captains.

A Yankee clipper. Captain Asa Eldridge. An octant.)]

Coastal packet boats, the first commercial vessels on Cape Cod,

flourished in the first half of the 19th century carrying mail,

passengers, salt, and other cargo to Boston and New York. These

boats were built in local yards from local lumber and captained by

local men. The rivalry and pride among the various Cape towns for

the fastest and most seaworthy packets stood the Cape men in good

stead when the new Republic began to engage in international trade.

Cape Codders, in fact, were among the first to sail the American flag

into many foreign ports and uncharted seas. Captain John Kendrick

of Harwich sailed from Boston in 1787 in the _Columbia_, the first

American ship to circumnavigate the globe. A Brewster captain,

Elijah Cobb, was captured by a French frigate during the French

Revolution and made a successful appeal to Robespierre for release.

After the War of 1812, many Cape Codders captained the first of the

transatlantic Liverpool packets. But their true glory awaited them on

the decks of the clipper ships, those majestic sailing vessels of the

1840s and ’50s. With their sleek hulls and tapered sterns, towering

masts and double courses of sails, their speed and maneuverability in

sailing into the wind, the “Yankee clippers” were generally regarded

as the finest wooden ships ever made. They counted scores of Cape

Codders among their captains, many of whom set transoceanic sailing

records that still stand today. To cite only one, and not the most

modest example, the following gravestone for Freeman Hatch, 1820-89,

can be found in an Eastham cemetery: “He became famous making the

astonishing passage in the clipper ship _Northern Light_ from San

Francisco in 76 days 6 hours—an achievement won by no mortal before

or since.”

_This waterfront pass was issued to lighthouse keeper

C. E. Turner of Wellfleet._

_This sailing card is for a clipper ship named after

its owner, Osborn Howes, a Dennis native who with his brother-in-law

ran an international shipping fleet out of Boston in the 1800s. He

managed or owned 43 vessels in his 87 years._

_Decked out in top hats about 1855, Brewster sea

captains Charles Crosby (left) and James Edwin Crosby flank an

unidentified English captain._

_Asa Eldridge (right) of Yarmouth served as captain of

the clipper ship_ Red Jacket _(above) when it set a record crossing

from New York to Liverpool of 13 days, 1 hour. Eldridge was lost in

the North Atlantic in February 1856 with the steamer_ Pacific.

_Sailors in the 19th century used octants to determine

their latitude by measuring the sun’s angle above the horizon at

noon. Tables converted that figure for the day, month, and year into

distance north or south of the equator._

#############################################

Fisheries

[Illustration: (Fish drying on a wharf in Provincetown. Fisherman

with quahog rake. Small boat raising a trap. Loading quahogs into a

wagon in shallow water. Collecting quahogs with a net.)]

As the name implies, Cape Cod and fishing are nearly synonymous.

The Wampanoag Indians were primarily farmers, but they also dug

clams, gathered oysters and scallops, caught crabs, and fished for

herring and other fishes, mostly in freshwater or where it mixed

with saltwater. They used bone hooks, spears, nets made of plant

fibers, and wooden-staked weirs. The first European settlers on the

Cape also were farmers, but they soon learned how bountiful the sea

was and quickly refined and developed various kinds of fisheries.

“I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their

whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing,” Henry David

Thoreau observed in the mid-1800s. How they fished, where they

fished, and what they fished for have changed greatly over the years

as some species were over-fished and as technological changes were

introduced. The Atlantic cod was the first fish to spark a major

industry. In 1878, 63 vessels sailed out of Provincetown in search

of cod and returned with more than 7.5 million pounds. Wellfleet led

the Cape in fishing for mackerel; in 1879, 30 schooners followed

the schools north May to November from North Carolina to Maine. The

ships returned to Cape ports from long voyages with their catches

salted and dried for market. After brief trips, the fish were

dried on the docks in Provincetown and other ports (below left and

continuing counterclockwise). Hard-shelled clams—called quahogs and

pronounced as ko-hogs by Cape Codders—were and are harvested in deep

water with wooden-handled rakes up to 56 feet in length. Sometimes

nets were stretched between poles to form weirs; high tides would

bring the fish in; and at low tide men would go out—sometimes with

wagons and horses—to remove their catches. Early on fishermen used

small boats or dories to fish with lines, then with nets and wooden

traps, in nearby waters; trawling schooners carried dories to the

fishing grounds of the banks for cod, haddock, and groundfish. At

first lobsters were so plentiful they were used as bait and then as

food for servants; today they are not plentiful and are among the

highest-priced seafood in America. Fishermen in small boats still go

out to pull up lobster traps.

#############################################

Saltworks

[Illustration: (Moveable covers for the salt troughs. A salt works

with numerous windmills.)]

The growth in Cape Cod’s fishing industry early in the 19th century

spawned other sea-related industries. One of the most important was

the development of the saltworks. Salt was needed especially to

preserve the cod and mackerel and other fish caught at such distant

places as the Grand Banks. In colonial times, salt was obtained by

boiling seawater in enormous iron pots that were set up near the

beach, a technique that hastened the demise of the Cape’s forests.

But as early as 1776, Captain John Sears of Dennis had experimented

with making salt through evaporation of seawater in long shallow

troughs. With a bushel of salt worth a dollar at the turn of the

century, saltmaking became profitable and Cape Codders continued

to improve their methods. They incorporated movable roofs on rails

(right) to cover the troughs on cloudy or rainy days, windmills to

pump seawater through hollow wooden pipes into the troughs, and an

intricate system of reservoirs, falls, vats, and boiling rooms. The

water went through three stages: evaporation, precipitation of lime,

and crystallization of salt. Epsom salts came from boiling “bitter

water,” the liquid remaining after the salt was crystallized. During

the 1830s saltworks were a major industry in almost every Cape

town, covering dozens of acres of beaches (background engraving).

At their peak on Cape Cod, there were 442 saltworks producing more

than 500,000 bushels of salt a year. By 1840, however, the opening

up of large salt mines in the West, among other factors, signaled

the beginning of the industry’s swift decline. Still, in the 1850s,

Henry David Thoreau saw “saltworks scattered all along the shore,

with their long rows of vats resting on piles driven into the marsh,

their low, turtle-like roofs, and their ... windmills ... novel and

interesting objects to an inlander.”

#############################################

A Coastline Littered With Shipwrecks

[Illustration: (Locations of Cape shipwrecks. The schooner

“Messenger” grounded in Wellfleet. The fishing boat “Ulysses” in

rough seas.)]

About 3,000 ships and small fishing boats have wrecked in heavy

fog or storms along the Cape’s coastline. Periodic northeasters

and occasional hurricanes pound the coast and drive ships upon

sandbars—more than 1,000 of them between 1843 and 1903 alone. One

of the first recorded wrecks occurred December 17, 1626, when the

Virginia-bound _Sparrowhawk_ ran aground off Orleans. A gale then

forced the ship over the sandbar and grounded it in the harbor. The

ship was repaired, but another storm caused so much damage it was

abandoned. In 1863 a storm removed sand from the wreck, and the

remains were taken later to the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth. The

_Sparrowhawk’s_ passengers survived their ordeal, but many have not

been so fortunate. More than 145 lives were lost when the pirate

ship _Whydah_ sank off Wellfleet in 1717. The most lost in any wreck

were all 175 passengers and crew who went down off Truro with the

steamship _Portland_ in a huge gale November 27, 1898. Such storms

have turned many fishermen’s wives into widows. Of the women living

in Barnstable County in 1839, nearly 1,000 had lost husbands at sea.

In one of the worst disasters, only 2 of Truro’s 9 fishing fleet

crews survived a gale on October 3, 1841; 57 fishermen were drowned,

and 9 of them were 11 to 14 years old. The storm left 19 Truro widows

with 39 children. Dennis lost 20 men and Yarmouth lost 10. Some

military ships and large liners also have gone down in Cape waters.

On December 17, 1927, the Coast Guard cutter _Paulding_ collided with

a Navy submarine as it surfaced off Wood End at Provincetown’s tip.

Divers found that 6 of the 40 submariners initially survived, but

they perished as a gale hampered rescue efforts. In 1956 the Italian

passenger liner _Andrea Doria_ sank 50 miles south of Nantucket after

colliding in fog with the Swedish ship _Stockholm_; 52 were killed;

1,662 were rescued. Overall, losses have been reduced since 1914,

when the Cape Cod Canal linked Cape Cod Bay with Buzzards Bay and

allowed ships to avoid treacherous shoals. Today 30,000 ships and

boats use the canal annually.

_This map shows the locations of Cape shipwrecks

between 1802 and 1967. The schooner_ Messenger _(top) of Boston

lost its masts in a storm off Long Island in 1894; weeks later the

hull washed ashore in Wellfleet. Sailing out of Salem, the_ Ulysses

_(right) was grounded with 2 other ships off the Cape on February 22,

1803. After struggling ashore, 87 men froze to death_.

#############################################

Lighthouses and Lifesaving

[Illustration: (Crew at the Chatham station. Hauling the boat by

horse to the water. Logo of U.S. Life Saving Service. View of a

station.)]

A major step in aiding shipwreck victims was taken in 1872 when

Congress established the U.S. Life Saving Service, a predecessor to

today’s Coast Guard. Nine stations were initially built at Monomoy,

Chatham, Orleans, Nauset, Cahoon Hollow, Pamet River, Peaked Hill

Bars, Highland, and Race Point. Eventually others joined them at

Monomoy Point, Old Harbor, High Head, and Wood End. All were manned

almost entirely by local men. From 1872 to 1915, station crews

patrolled the beaches day and night in rain, fog, and blizzard,

meeting at halfway stations to exchange tokens and return to their

stations. If a wreck or a ship in trouble was sighted, a red Coston

flare was ignited to alert the ship that it had been seen. Then the

station crew brought the 18-foot surfboat op a cart drawn by horse or

by hand to the site. If the surf proved too rough to launch the boat,

the crew attempted to shoot a life line from a small cannon to the

stricken vessel, from which a “breeches buoy” could be suspended and

the victims taken off one by one. In these pictures, a Life Saving

Service crew poses at one of the Chatham stations and in a drill

another crew gets ready to haul its surfboat by horse to the water.

In the 43 years of its existence, the Cape’s Life Saving Service

performed hundreds of sea rescues, some of truly heroic proportions.

Despite their motto—“You have to go, but you don’t have to come

back”—there was very little loss of life among the crews, a tribute

to their skill and training. After the Cape Cod Canal was built in

1914, the number of shipwrecks declined greatly. In 1915 the Life

Saving stations were made a part of the newly-created U.S. Coast

Guard. Today the Coast Guard staffs stations only at Provincetown,

Chatham, Sandwich, and Woods Hole; the old Nauset station (shown in

color) is now a part of the National Seashore. The recent advent

of ship radar, radio beacons, LORAN, and other sophisticated

navigational equipment has even further reduced the risks of offshore

travel. Despite all these improvements, the sandbars and storms of

the Outer Cape have not claimed their last victims.

#############################################

Two Henrys: Thoreau and Beston

[Illustration: _Henry David Thoreau_ _Henry Beston_]

Cape Cod has attracted a number of authors who have written countless

stories and books about the place. Two books that have become

classics were written by Henry David Thoreau and by Henry Beston.

Thoreau’s _Cape Cod_ was published posthumously in 1865 and tells of

visits totaling 3 weeks that he made to the Cape in 1849, 1850, and

1855. He walked to Provincetown from Eastham absorbing its geologic

and natural history and observing the solitary life of its people,

especially the lighthouse keepers and shipwreck scavengers, known as

“wreckers.” Thoreau may have been the first in print to liken the

Cape to a “bared and bended arm of Massachusetts.” He was especially

fascinated with the beach from Nauset Harbor to Race Point and with

the bluff abruptly rising to its west. “This sandbank—the backbone

of the Cape—rose directly from the beach to the height of a hundred

feet or more above the ocean. It was with singular emotions that we

first stood upon it and discovered what a place we had chosen to walk

on ... a perfect desert of shining sand....” In his day more of the

Cape was barren than today, but efforts to plant grasses were already

underway. Henry Beston spent more time on the Cape than Thoreau,

and he stayed mostly in one place. His book, _The Outermost House_,

tells of a year, in 1927-28, he spent among the elements at a 2-room,

10-windowed cottage in the dunes on Nauset Beach opposite Fort Hill

in Eastham (background photo). As Thoreau had done at Walden Pond,

Beston chronicled nature’s seasonal sights, sounds, and smells on

this narrow spit of sand, a place of “outermost” exposure. “Listen

to the surf, really lend it your ears,” Beston wrote, “and you will

hear in it a world of sounds: hollow boomings and heavy roarings,

great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp

rifle-shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of

stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk

of people in the sea.” Beston’s cottage became a National Literary

Landmark in 1964, but in 1978 it was washed away in a storm. No doubt

he would have assented to what the elements had done.

#############################################

The Cranberry Bog

[Illustration: (The cranberry plant. Cranberry pickers. Mechanical

picker.)]

Cranberries are among the true natives of Cape Cod. The plant,

_Vaccinium macrocarpon_, is a low evergreen shrub of the heath family

that grows in bogs. Legend has it that the plant originally was

named craneberry because its small, bell-shaped, pink flowers look

like the neck and head of a crane, or heron, that stalks marshes and

bogs. The deep red, nearly round, acidic berry is almost a half-inch

in diameter. Indians called cranberries sassamanesh. They used this

fruit as food and medicine; they mixed ripe berries with dried

venison to make pemmican and placed roasted unripe berries on wounds.

They also taught Pilgrims to use wild cranberries in their foods, and

the colonists shipped 10 barrels of them to Charles II, but he found

them too tart. Cranberries remained popular on the Cape, however,

and by 1773 anyone caught picking more than a quart in Provincetown

before September 20 would be fined a dollar—and would have to

surrender the berries. Sailing ships served cranberries to their

crews to prevent or cure scurvy. In 1813 Henry Hall of North Dennis

made a discovery that led to commercial production: the berries

became invigorated when sand drifted on the plants.

Soon other Cape Codders were purposely sanding their bogs, and

production was rising. By 1855 Cape Cod was a major Massachusetts

producer with 2,408 acres in cranberries. Today about 1,250 acres

are in production, 10 percent of the state’s total. Besides needing

bogs with good peat bottoms, growers must have a water supply for

sprinklers or enough water to flood their bogs through a series of

ditches. Between November and March, and occasionally at other times,

bogs are flooded to prevent frost from killing the vines. Ice up to

8 inches thick is allowed to form and the water below it is drained

off. To sand the bogs, the ice is covered every 3 to 5 years with up

to an inch of sand, which sinks to the bottom when the ice melts. In

April the meltwater is drained off. Harvesting starts in September

and continues through October. In this old postcard (below), pickers

armed with wooden-toothed scoops move across a bog harvesting the

berries. Today the process has been mechanized. More than 100

cranberry varieties have been developed, but the Early Black and

Howes are direct descendants of the wild ones growing on the Cape.

Processors now produce sauces, juices, and relishes that have become

as closely associated with Thanksgiving as the Pilgrims and turkeys.

#############################################

Marconi’s Wireless Station

[Illustration: (Guglielmo Marconi with his wireless telegraphy

equipment. Early radio communications equipment. Large circular

antenna using 20 wooden masts. Plate commemorating the first wireless

message.)]

In these days of instant worldwide communications via satellites,

it is difficult to imagine the excitement that came with the

advent of wireless telegraphy and radio. In the 1890s, the idea

of transmitting long-distance messages via electromagnetic waves

captured the imagination of Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian. In

1899 Marconi succeeded in sending a radio message across the English

Channel, and, he went to work on developing a transatlantic system.

Two communications cables already had been laid on the bottom of the

ocean between France and Cape Cod. Marconi, too, selected a site

for a station on the Cape, high on a cliff overlooking the ocean in

South Wellfleet. He built others at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and at

Poldhu in Great Britain. At first the antennas at South Wellfleet and

Poldhu consisted of huge rings of masts, but these were destroyed by

gales before any messages could be transmitted. They were replaced

at each place by 4 towers 210 feet high. In December 1901, at an

experimental site in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Marconi received the

first transatlantic signal, 3 dots for the letter “S,” from Britain.

In December 1902 his Glace Bay station received a complete message

from Poldhu. On the night of January 18, 1903, he transmitted from

South Wellfleet this message, in Morse code, from President Theodore

Roosevelt to King Edward VII: “In taking advantage of the wonderful

triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved

in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of

the American people most cordial greetings and good wishes to you

and to all the people of the British Empire.” The king replied in

a similar vein, making this the first 2-way wireless communication

between Europe and America. Soon newspapers and others were

transmitting messages across the Atlantic, and the wireless became

the common way of communicating with ships. For 15 years telegraphers

sent out messages on the South Wellfleet spark-gap transmitter. But

in 1917 the Navy closed the station. It was dismantled in 1920 and

scrapped. Its successor, WCC in Chatham, operated until 1993.

_Guglielmo Marconi displays his wireless telegraphy

equipment in England in 1896. The Leyden jar capacitor and boxlike

transformer (below) represent an application of Marconi’s invention

in World War I for national defense, maritime safety, and commercial

communications._

_At South Wellfleet Marconi first built a circular

antenna consisting of 20 ship masts 200 feet high about 165 feet back

from the edge of the ridge overlooking the Atlantic. The masts were

blown down in a storm November 25, 1901._

_This ironstone plate commemorates the first wireless

message, received from President Theodore Roosevelt by King Edward

VII on January 19, 1903, and shows the 4 towers that replaced the 20

masts._

#############################################