Cape Cod _ its natural and cultural history _ a guide to Cape Cod National Seashore_ Massachusetts United States. National Park Service. Division of Publications and Robert Finch 7

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Title: Cape Cod
its natural and cultural history : a guide to Cape Cod National
Seashore, Massachusetts

Author: Robert Finch

Creator: United States. National Park Service. Division of Publications

Release date: May 30, 2023 [eBook #70885]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: National Park Service, 1993

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/70885

Credits: Steve Mattern, John Campbell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPE COD ***

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
The main text of this handbook is in Parts 1 and 2. There were many 2-page information
segments inserted throughout this text. In this etext these fourteen inserts have been
moved to the end of Part 2, to improve readability of the main text. Part 3 consists solely
of a further set of 1- and 2-page informational inserts.
Each insert is separated by a thick black horizontal line.
Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant
preference was found in the original book.
The Table of Contents in the Frontmatter has been augmented by the transcriber to
include fourteen entries in Part 2 for “A Glacial Base”, and the other informational inserts.
The following minor changes have been made to the original text:
Frontmatter: ‘along the the Cape’ replaced by ‘along the Cape’.
Pg 54: ‘and others fishes’ replaced by ‘and other fishes’.
Pg 93: ‘chower is made’ replaced by ‘chowder is made’.
Pg 112: ‘Everett 66-67 dunin’ replaced by ‘Everett 66-67 dunlin’.

Cape Cod
Official National Park Handbook

Front cover: Nauset Light hovers over an eroding cliff facing the Atlantic Ocean in Eastham.

Handbook 148

Cape Cod
Its Natural and Cultural History

By Robert Finch

A Guide to Cape Cod
National Seashore
Massachusetts

Produced by the
Division of Publications
National Park Service

U.S. Department of the Interior
Washington, D.C.

Using This Handbook
The Cape Cod peninsula extending into the Atlantic Ocean off
Massachusetts is one of America’s prime coastal recreational areas. Cape
Cod National Seashore, managed by the National Park Service, extends for
40 miles along the Cape’s outer arm between Chatham and Provincetown.
In Part 1 of this handbook, author and longtime resident Robert Finch
introduces the reader to the Cape’s rich cultural and natural history and to
the National Seashore. In the three chapters of Part 2, Finch more closely
examines the land, the sea, and the transformations that have taken place in
recent years. Pictorial features on various Cape aspects supplement these
chapters. Part 3 presents concise travel guide and reference materials,
including a full-color map.
National Park Handbooks are published to support the National Park
Service’s management programs and to promote understanding and
enjoyment of the more than 360 National Park System sites. Each handbook
is intended to be informative reading and a useful guide before, during, and
after a park visit. The handbooks are sold at parks and can be purchased by
mail from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office, Washington, DC 20402-9325.

Part 1 A Fragile Coastal Retreat 4
A Cape for All Seasons 7

Part 2 A Great Arm in the Sea 20
A Sliver of Sand 23
The Bountiful Sea 45
The Cape’s Transformation 69
A Glacial Base 26
The Restless Shore 28
Wampanoag Indians 32
Pilgrims First Landing 34
The Cape Cod House 38
Whaling’s Heyday 48
Cape Codders and the Sea 50
Fisheries 54
Saltworks 56
A Coastline Littered With
60
Shipwrecks
Lighthouses and Lifesaving 62
Two Henrys: Thoreau and Beston 72
The Cranberry Bog 74
Marconi’s Wireless Station 78

Part 3 Guide and Adviser 84
Visiting Cape Cod 86
Map of the National Seashore 88
The National Seashore 90
Water Activities 92
Whale-Watching 94

Recreation Ashore 96
Birdwatching 98
Orleans, Brewster, and Chatham 100
Eastham and Wellfleet 102
Truro and Provincetown 104
Nearby Attractions 106
Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket 107
Safety, Other Management Concerns 108
Armchair Explorations 109

Index 110

Preceding pages: The sun sets over Provincetown and the towering Pilgrim Monument. Such
tranquil scenes can be misleading, for the Cape is a place of shifting sands and struggling grasses.

Part 1

A Fragile Coastal Retreat

Summer, fall, winter, spring, the interaction of the sea and the land is clearly evident on Cape Cod’s
Outer Beach.

A Cape for All Seasons
Majestically eroded, the great glacial bluffs of Cape Cod’s outer beach rise
from the open Atlantic, separating the ocean from Cape Cod Bay. Its many-
colored sands and clays flow grain by grain, or in sudden shelving slabs, to
replenish the shore below. The beach, broad and gently sloping in summer,
short and steep in winter, arcs northward for more than 20 miles, giving the
walker a curved prospect two or three miles ahead at most. And always,
coming onto the shore and reforming it, with measured cadences in calm
weather, with awesome fury during northeast gales, is the sea. Here, as
Henry Beston put it, “the ocean encounters the last defiant bulwark of two
worlds.” There is no other landscape like it anywhere.
Cape Cod holds a special place in America’s landscape, history, and
collective imagination. As the world’s largest glacial peninsula, it juts
farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than any other part of the United States.
It was one of the earliest landfalls of the European explorers in the 16th and
17th centuries. Its purported identity as the “Wonderstrand” of the Viking
sagas remains apocryphal, but it was—as every Cape Codder will be quick
to tell you—indisputably the first landing place of the Mayflower Pilgrims
in 1620, and it became one of the oldest settled areas in the country.
Cape Codders early on took to the sea with a will, and they have never
relinquished it. Over the centuries there developed on this thin peninsula a
unique maritime way of life that has produced some of the most familiar
objects and images in American culture. They include that durable
architectural form, the Cape Cod house; indigenous nautical designs such as
the Cape Cod catboat; tools like the quahog bullrake; and such functional
folk art as carved bird decoys. Cape Cod bogs produced the first
commercial cranberries, that traditional part of our Thanksgiving
celebrations. The Cape’s villages, low hills, and sandy shores are still dotted
with gray shingled windmills, looking like ungainly landbound ships,
whose great sheeted arms once ground corn and pumped seawater for the
making of salt; tall lighthouses that stand sentry on bold eroding sea cliffs

and at the entrances to low, protected harbors; stately sea captains’ houses
with roofs crowned with “widows walks” and yard gates framed by arched
whale jaws; and, from local wharves and piers, fleets of colorful boats
manned by fishermen who continue to go out to harvest the sea as they have
for centuries.
Perhaps the most enduring image of all,
however, is that of the legendary “Cape Codder”
himself. He appears in many guises: as a
Portuguese “banker” fisherman trawling for cod in
a small dory off the Georges Banks; a Truro
“mooncusser” salvaging the booty from an 18th-
century pirate ship wrecked on the Cape’s
“backside;” a Wampanoag Indian gathering
alewives, or migratory herring, in spring to plant
with her corn; a Wellfleet whaler casting his
harpoon at a right whale in the icy Arctic seas; a
Yankee clipper ship skipper from Brewster or
Dennis helping to open up the China Trade or
setting a transoceanic sailing record that still
stands today; a Cape Verdean girl picking ripe
Fishermen’s floats, weathered-
shingled boathouses, and wine-colored cranberries in the long rows of a
catboats—Cape Cod’s coves Harwich bog; a Chatham Life Saving Serviceman
reflect its seafaring traditions. pulling his surfboat through a fierce January gale
to make a daring rescue of the crew of a vessel
grounded on one of the Cape’s treacherous shoals;
a Provincetown rum-runner in his weather-beaten dragger eluding a Coast
Guard cutter in the fog; an “old salt” in sou’wester and knee boots spinning
yarns in Barnstable or Rock Harbor.
These and other versions of the protean Cape Codder have been
celebrated and recorded in story and song since the founding of this country
and have become a part of our history and folklore. In fact, few if any rural
areas of comparable size have been written, painted, and sung about so
richly over the years as the Cape landscape and its inhabitants.

Pages 10-11: Because the Outer Cape is such a narrow strip of land with the Atlantic on one side and
Cape Cod Bay on the other, sunrises and sunsets can be spectacular. Here the sun rises over
Eastham’s Nauset Marsh, which was a harbor when Champlain explored the area in 1606.

Still, the dominant image of Cape Cod for most Americans today is
probably that of one of the Nation’s most popular summer playgrounds. For
two centuries countless visitors and vacationers have escaped the burdens
and the routines of daily life for a day, a week, or a season of liberation,
exploration, relaxation, and recreation along the Cape’s unsurpassed
beaches, ponds, marshes, bays, pine barrens, inlets, and dunes. Originally a
summer resort for Bostonians and other New Englanders, the Cape now
receives visitors from everywhere, at all seasons of the year. One of the
favorite summer games for Cape children is to see how many different state
license plates they can spot. Not infrequently they can get them all,
including Alaska and Hawaii—as well as the Canadian provinces, Mexico,
and several European countries. Where Cape Cod once produced seamen
who sailed around the globe to bring home wealth and exotic treasures, the
Cape has in turn become host to much of the world, providing the setting
for countless beach parties, clambakes, family outings, sailing and fishing
trips, summer romances, and increasingly, an appreciation and enjoyment of
its rich environment, history, and natural resources.
What constitutes the enduring allure of a place like Cape Cod? What
makes more people than ever cross the Cape Cod Canal bridges at all
seasons in search of something they believe lies in promise for them here
despite ever-increasing traffic jams, crowded beaches, the continuing
proliferation of honky-tonk tourist traps, and the ongoing fragmentation of
woodlands and waterfronts by commercial and residential development?
Over the centuries the universal and nearly perfect image of Cape Cod as
a flexed human arm has provided an ambivalent symbol for what its settlers
and visitors have hoped to find here. For the fearful yet hopeful Pilgrim
passengers on the Mayflower it both beckoned and threatened, offering
religious liberty and land for settlement, yet at the same time presenting, in
William Bradford’s words, “a wild and savage hue,” a “hideous and
desolate wilderness” that many of them would not survive.
To their maritime descendants the Cape offered seemingly endless
abundance from the sea and a springboard to personal fortune; yet at the
same time it proved to be a treacherous barrier to sea traffic, a graveyard for
hundreds of ships that fell victim to the Cape’s treacherous rips and shoals,
or to fierce northeast storms and gales. It was not by chance, or merely to
escape the wind, that most old Cape houses are built well back from the

shore. As Rowena Myers, an 88-year-old lifetime
resident of Orleans once explained to me, “The
old people didn’t like to look at the sea once they
were ashore. It held too much pain for them.”
Today Cape Cod
beckons as never before
to a Nation increasingly
starved, in Henry
Beston’s words, “for
lack of elemental things,
for fire before the hands,
for water welling from
the earth, for air, for the
dear earth itself
underfoot.” Seventy-five Gulls seem to be everywhere, but
million of us live within the variety of birds makes Cape
Cod a birdwatcher’s paradise
a day’s drive of throughout the year. Along
Barnstable County. shorelines, tides rhythmically
polish shells and cobbles.
Winds and tides constantly move
During the past 30 years
the sands, tearing down dunes the Cape’s permanent
and creating new ones. population has risen
from 70,000 to 190,000, a figure that nearly triples
during the peak summer season.
Some come to walk the spacious curved length of the Great Beach of
Cape Cod, which Thoreau claimed was a place where “a man may stand
and put all America behind him” (though at many public beaches in July
and August it may seem as if one has most of America in front of him!).
Others seek quieter places like the soft pine barrens of the interior
woodlands, or one of the Cape’s hundreds of clear kettle-hole ponds, or the
dune country of the Province Lands with its eccentric and colorful
community of dune shacks—an ever-shifting landscape of mirages and
stark, unexpected beauty.
Still others find, along the Cape’s many well-preserved village streets, in
its old farmhouses and meandering stone walls of glacial boulders, its
lighthouses, fishing shacks, and aging fleets of sea-beaten draggers and
lobster boats, a deep sense of that earnest, abiding, communal history that

flourished here for so long and which we seek to borrow to help anchor our
more modern, shifting lives.
Many are attracted to the energetic and often outrageous bohemian
diversity of a place like Provincetown, or to the Cape’s many art galleries,
theaters, concerts, and museums. Some may hope for a glimpse of the
Kennedy compound in Hyannisport or a movie star on the bench in front of
a local general store. Others look forward to a Cape Cod lobster and clam
dinner (which may, in fact, have come from the waters off Maine or Alaska)
at a waterfront restaurant, or the seemingly endless array of gift shops, night
spots, and tourist diversions (including increasingly elaborate miniature golf
courses with waterfalls and “historic reproductions”)—much of which have
little or no indigenous connection with Cape Cod and can be had elsewhere,
but which somehow seem to mean more when experienced here.
One element that seems to embrace and permeate all of the Cape’s
attractions is natural change. Change, of course, takes place in any
environment, but here on the Cape it seems peculiarly pervasive, visible,
and dramatic, particularly along the ocean shore. I like to point out to
people who want to retrace Thoreau’s famous walk along the Outer Beach
that they are likely to get pretty wet if they try it, since Thoreau’s original
path now lies several hundred feet offshore!
We are subject to great periodic sea changes on this peninsula. Tides rise
and fall up to nine feet twice a day, sweeping out in places in Cape Cod Bay
to reveal tidal flats over a mile in extent. Waves and currents continuously
undermine and cut into the great glacial cliffs of the Outer Cape, removing
an average of three feet a year from our eastern boundary. Autumn and
winter storms rearrange the ocean beaches, undermining the foundations of
lighthouses, beach parking lots, and shorefront cottages, strewing the
beaches at times with the carcasses of thousands of sea creatures, from
whelks to whales. Tides and winds build and unbuild ridges and bowls of
sand dunes, which in turn march across the land, threatening to bury
marshes, forests, ponds, roads, and, in the past, whole villages and harbors.
Major storms, like that of the Great Blizzard of February 6-7, 1978, change
the very outlines of Cape Cod, cutting barrier beaches in two, creating new
islands, flattening entire dune systems, creating new inlets, and plugging up
old ones. The Cape is a river of sand into which we can never step twice.

For whatever reasons we come, the continuing
attraction of the Cape to tourists and new residents
(known as “washashores”) has proven a mixed
blessing, providing a valuable source of income to
the local populace but also bringing an increase in
development and commercialization that threatens
the very things we seek here: clean air, unpolluted
waters and beaches, the harvest of the sea,
unspoiled vistas, a sense of rooted historical
continuity, the free interplay of natural forces and
wild inhabitants, and the opportunity for discovery
and self-discovery in a landscape that has had a
perennial allure for the human spirit for over three
and a half centuries.
In stark contrast with the sandy
shorelines, the upper Herring
River in Wellfleet is rich in
vegetation.

It was with the intent of preserving this experience for the public at large,
and not for just a privileged few, that the idea for the National Seashore was
born more than 30 years ago. The formation of the National Seashore was
unique among the creation of the Nation’s public parks. Prior to its
establishment in 1961, national parks, forests, seashores, and monuments
had been created from land already owned by federal or state governments,
or from land or funds donated by private individuals. No federal monies had
ever been spent to create such places.
On August 7, 1961, when President John F.
Kennedy signed the legislation establishing Cape
Cod National Seashore, he declared: “I ... hope
that this will be one of a whole series of great
seashore parks which will be for the inspiration
and enjoyment of people all over the United
States.” Since then, others indeed have been
created and Cape Cod National Seashore has
become one of the most popular of the Nation’s
public parks, with more than five million visits
each year. The diligent and dedicated participation
of the Seashore’s Advisory Commission,
composed of 10 state, county, and town
representatives, helped park officials devise the
first comprehensive master plan for the National Today Nauset Light alerts
Seashore. Nonetheless, the “balancing act” of mariners off Eastham’s
preservation, recreation, and local rights has not treacherous Atlantic coast. Since
the days of the earliest Indian
always been an easy or a smooth one. Debates inhabitants, Cape Codders have
continue over recreational demands versus plied the bay and ocean for food
conservation, controversial uses such as beach and related marine products.
Commercial fishing boats still
buggy access, and development within the park. work out of Provincetown,
But there are relatively few who do not recognize Chatham, and Wellfleet within
not only the economic importance of the Seashore the National Seashore.
but the critical role it has played in realizing
former Senator Leverett Saltonstall’s dream of
maintaining Cape Cod “so that other Americans, in dire need of the natural
grandeur of the clean, open spaces, will find an outlet from their crowded,
grimy, urban lives.”

What you will find here is a different experience from what is offered in
our national parks and most of the other national seashores. There is
stunning scenic beauty and wildlife in abundance, to be sure, and the
chance to explore and enjoy them on foot, horseback, or bicycle, in a canoe
or a sailboat, on a guided walk, at an interpretive talk, or, if you like, simply
lying on a beach before the rolling waves.
But there is also, by design and intent, the ongoing presence of man, in
the hundreds of historic houses, lighthouses, Coast Guard stations, and
summer cottages that remain within the Seashore, and in the continuing
traditional uses of its lands and waters, such as commercial fishing,
lobstering and shellfishing, hunting and berry picking.
The boundaries between Seashore lands, private
property, and community facilities are not always
obvious. The Provincetown airport and the Nauset
Regional High School in Eastham, for instance,
both lie within Seashore boundaries. Visitors are
asked to observe the “Private Property—Please
Respect Owner’s Rights” signs they encounter
along many of the Seashore roads and trails. A
number of the more popular beaches require local
town parking stickers. Cape Cod National
Seashore, in other words, is not so much a
protected pristine preserve as an ongoing
experiment in cooperation between the Federal
Government and local communities and their
residents who continue to live, work, and play
On a cloudy day, the Cape’s
most obvious icon, the codfish, alongside, and often within, the park itself.
keeps track of the wind. With a
Whether you choose to join the summer
change in the weather, Nauset
crowds, or seek a solitary walk along the winter
Marsh glows in autumn light.
beach, we hope this handbook will acquaint you
with enough knowledge of Cape Cod’s rich
historic and natural heritage so that your visit here, whether brief or
extended, will be more rewarding.

Part 2

A Great Arm in the Sea

Pages 20-21: This satellite view clearly shows the flexed arm shape of the Cape.

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.
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
When the glacier melted, it left began to rise, forcing the Cape’s fresh
behind huge rocks, known as groundwater upward. When the freshwater level
erratics, scattered on the
landscape. 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.”
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 Kettle ponds formed over time as
underground freshwater filled
storms began to chew away at the outer shores of glacial depressions. Today the
the Lower Cape, creating in time what is surely life in these ponds can be quickly
the most impressive feature of the Seashore, and affected by humans.
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.
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
Low tide bares a wide expanse of Cape its characteristic filigreed coastline.
sand patterns and tidepools at Monomoy Island, North Beach, Nauset Beach,
Coast Guard 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.
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, Pitch pine is the most common
tracts of open woodlands composed primarily of tree on Cape Cod and the only
species of native pine that grows
pitch pine, a tree adapted to periodic fires. in the National Seashore. It
survives on well drained glacial
Some glacial lands, now vanished, still existed sediments and stable sand dunes
in historical times. There are many early and is very fire resistant. In this
references, for example, to Ile Nauset, or Nauset stand on Great Island, the
undergrowth is primarily
Isle, a point of land that lay off Nauset Beach, bearberry.
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.
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.”
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
In Capt. Myles Standish the summer shoreline’s Fall and winter storms often
Pilgrims had both a military and peaceful countenance develop quickly and tear away at
the shorelines, removing sands
temporal leader. He helped encourages the illusion from one place and depositing
found the Plymouth Colony, led
a group that bought the colony that all this change and
them elsewhere.
from London investors, and rearrangement of
served as assistant governor and shoreline lies in the
treasurer for 5 years.
Metacomet, or King Philip, settled past. There is little indication to the
shown in an engraving by Paul summer visitor of the ferocity, violence, and
Revere, was killed leading the
Wampanoags in an unsuccessful
transformation that visit this coast in the “off-
war concerning land disputes season.” But if one returns in late autumn, when
with the English settlers in 1676. 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.”

Salt Marsh
Salt hay and cord grass Moon snail
Sea stars Fiddler crab
Lobster Anemone
Hermit crab Moon jelly

Sea-lavender and honey bee Northern diamondback terrapin
Bay scallop Glasswort, or salicornia
Eelgrass Sea robin
Rock crabs Sea lettuce and mussels

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.
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
The Atlantic cod typically weighs
10 to 25 pounds but ranges up to waters, combined with numerous estuaries of
200 pounds. Its bountiful varying salinity, has produced one of the richest
numbers sparked Massachusetts’
first major maritime industry in diversities of marine habitats on the East Coast. A
the 1600s. A bottom dweller, the National Park Service report states that the
cod soon attracted Cape difference in flora and fauna “between Cape Cod
fishermen to the Grand Banks off
Newfoundland and to Georges Bay and Buzzards Bay is greater than that
Bank off Cape Cod. 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.”
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 A few Pilgrims left Plymouth and
have existed there in the 1500s. returned to the Cape and settled
in the Eastham area. So, too, did
If the Plymouth settlers were unskilled as this windmill. It was built in
fishermen, they were smart enough to sell the Plymouth in the 1600s and was
moved to Eastham in 1793. The
rights to fish to others, and in 1670 a tax on the mill was used in producing flour.
Provincetown fisheries was established as a means Some mills were used to pump
of funding public schools in Plymouth. As seawater as a part of saltworks.
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.
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
The whaler Charles W. Morgan
can be toured today at Mystic
began carrying dories aboard. These small,
Seaport in Connecticut. 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.
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 Colorful boats line up in
bark Charles W Morgan. The Morgan is preserved Provincetown harbor ready for
another day of commercial
at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. fishing.

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.
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
A humpback whale displays its of substantial “captain’s houses” that still stand
tail stock and flukes off the along the streets of their home towns from
Provincetown coast. Other Sandwich to Provincetown. Brewster alone is said
species of whales are also
commonly seen from spring to have counted more than 50 sea captains
through fall, including finback, residing there at one time.
minke, and right whales. These
marine mammals, once hunted But perhaps even more important than the
for their blubber and baleen,
fortunes and exotic souvenirs these ship captains
now support a thriving whale-
watching industry. 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.”
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 Over the years the sea has taken
the life of many a Cape Cod
estimated 3,000 vessels have been lost in the fisherman. This stone, in the
waters off the Cape, most on the stretch of open Burying Ground of the First
Atlantic from Chatham to Provincetown. One of Congregational Parish of Truro,
honors Mrs. Rebecca Snow, who
the most famous of the early wrecks was the pirate died Nov. 4, 1832, and her
ship Whydah, a 300-ton galley commanded by husband, Capt. Reuben Snow,
who was lost at sea in January
“Black Sam” Bellamy, which broke up on the bars 1825. The inscription at the
off Eastham (now South Wellfleet) on May 8, bottom reads: “Tho’ in the dust,
1717. More than 145 lives were lost in the wreck, or in the sea, their mortal bodies
rest, their spirits dwell in
and of the nine survivors, seven were tried for paradise.”
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.

Birds of the Shore
Red-breasted merganser Lesser and greater yellowlegs
American oystercatcher Ruddy turnstone
Canvasback pair Ring-billed gull
Sanderlings Osprey

Dunlin Snowy egret
Common terns Spotted sandpiper
Great blue heron Green-backed heron
Willet Common eider family

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.
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
In 1851 trains ran in the summer
reverse. But it was not long before the
between Boston and Sandwich. “fashionable world” began to discover the charms
The fare was $1.50, one way. 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.
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.
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
Walter Smith, 1849-1932, retired
others added on a front in 1930 as at least the seventh in
porch for a restaurant, a long line of town criers that
As the number of summer set up a gas station or a lasted into the late 1980s in
Provincetown. Traditionally they
visitors increased, inns and beach plum jelly stand in gave out news of village events,
cottages such as these in the front yard, or an antiques sales, church suppers,
Wellfleet were built to take in and the like. For a fee, they also
lodgers. In 1911, Provincetown’s antiques store in the advertised products for local
Commercial Street, right, had barn. Some took merchants.
restaurants, lodgings, ice cream advantage of less legal
shops, and other facilities for
tourists arriving by car as well commerce of the era;
as by boat. 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.

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.

Wildflowers
White water lily Seaside goldenrod
Pink ladyslipper Beach plum
Dewberry St. Johnswort
Purple aster Sheep laurel

Bittersweet nightshade Beach heather, or poverty grass
Prickly pear cactus Beach-pea
Creeping bellflower Canada mayflower
Star-flower Cypress spurge

A Glacial Base

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Part 3

Guide and Adviser

Visiting Cape Cod

Though Cape Cod has been known as Massachusetts’ major summer resort
for many years, it is now attracting a number of travelers at all times of the
year. Today more than 5 million people visit the Cape annually.
Those wishing to avoid crowds may prefer to walk its windswept beaches
and tour its historic sites between September and June, the off-season.
That’s tip Number 1 in this handbook’s Guide and Adviser section, which
focuses on that part of Cape Cod containing the National Seashore. This is
the area, known as the Lower or Outer Cape, between Chatham and
Provincetown. Some information also is provided to help you travel
throughout the rest of Cape Cod and neighboring offshore islands. The first

few pages deal with general travel tips and activities information. Then, 2-
page spreads take closer looks at towns within or near the 27,000-acre
National Seashore. They are followed by travel tips about nearby Cape Cod
attractions and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Seasons
The summer beach season in July and August attracts the most vacationers,
especially families with children. But enough tourist facilities are open in
the fall, winter, and spring to take care of lodging and food needs.
In July and August daytime temperatures usually rise into the 80s°F.
From September through November, temperatures gradually decline from
the 70s to the 50s, or lower. Fall’s cool, brisk days make the Cape a favorite
destination for some New Englanders on the Columbus Day and
Thanksgiving holidays.
Winters are generally cold and windy, with temperatures averaging in the
30s during the day and in the 20s at night. The Atlantic Ocean and Cape
Cod Bay help to moderate the winter temperatures, so the Cape’s snowfall
is considerably less than the mainland’s.
As in all parts of New England, spring is short, arriving at the earliest in
April and often not until June. Like the fall, however, spring can be one of
the most pleasant times on Cape Cod because of the relative solitude.

Transportation
Major highways leading to Cape Cod are I-495 and Mass. 3 from the
Boston area and I-195 from Providence, R.I., and Fall River, Mass. On the
Cape itself U.S. 6 is the primary road to and through the National Seashore.
Those wishing to travel through the Mid-Cape, or Upper Cape, towns and
villages may use Mass. 6A on the north side or Mass. 28 on the south. In the
summer, traffic moves slowly on most roads and highways.
Buses Major bus lines serve Hyannis on the Cape from Boston,
Providence, Fall River, and New Bedford. Additional routes run from
Hyannis to Chatham and Provincetown.

Air Service Flights operate from Boston, Providence, and New York City
to Hyannis and between Boston and Provincetown. Private and charter
planes may use airstrips in Hyannis, Chatham, and Provincetown.
Ferries A passengers-only ferry runs in summer between Boston and
Provincetown. Passenger and vehicle ferries operate from Woods Hole and
Hyannis to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in the summer. Ferry services
to the islands are limited in other seasons. For further information: Woods
Hole, Martha’s Vineyard & Nantucket Steamship Authority, P.O. Box 284,
Dept. CG, Woods Hole, MA 02543-0284, telephone 508-540-2022; or Hy-
line Cruises, Ocean Street Dock, Pier #1, Hyannis, MA 02601-4715,
telephone 508-778-2600.

Cape Cod National Seashore

Local Geographical Terms
Outer Cape generally refers to the area from Chatham through
Provincetown.
Lower Cape includes the same area as Outer Cape but could encompass
Brewster, Harwich, and perhaps Dennis.
Upper Cape, not shown on this map, refers to Bourne, Falmouth,
Sandwich, and Mashpee.

The National Seashore

The National Park Service operates two major visitor centers in Cape
Cod National Seashore.
The Salt Pond Visitor Center on U.S. 6 in Eastham has an information
desk, exhibits on the natural and human history of the Cape, audiovisual
shows, a bookstore, and special programs. A foot trail from the center goes
by Nauset Marsh; the bike path leads to the beach. The Buttonbush Trail,
with special features for the blind, is located next to the visitor center
parking lot. Ask about other facilities and services accessible to those with
disabilities.

The Province Lands Visitor Center in Provincetown is smaller than the
one at Salt Pond, but it offers similar services. Exhibits and guided walks
focus on the life of the dunes.
Both visitor centers are open daily from spring until late fall, and the
staffs at both centers offer guided walks, talks, and evening programs on the
Cape’s natural and human history. The many subjects include life of the
marshes, seashore ecology, geology, archeology, birdlife, Indians, early
settlers, and architecture. These services are provided daily in the summer
and on a reduced basis in the spring and from Labor Day through Columbus
Day. Ask for schedules at the visitor centers.
The Race Point Ranger Station in Provincetown provides year-round
informational services. Informational services also are available in the
winter at the Salt Pond Visitor Center and at park headquarters in South
Wellfleet.

Environmental Education
The National Seashore is host to 2 environmental education centers that
accommodate educational groups on an advanced booking basis during the
school year. For further information, write to the National Seashore.

Camping
There are no campgrounds operated by the National Park Service, but a
number of private commercial campgrounds are located within the
boundaries of the National Seashore. Otherwise camping on park lands is
prohibited. The Roland C. Nickerson State Park, on Mass. 6A in nearby
Brewster, offers camping on a first-come, first-served basis from mid-April
to mid-October; there are no trailer hookups. The park address is Main
Street, Brewster, MA 02631-0003, and the telephone number is 508-896-
3491. For information about private campgrounds, write or telephone the
Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce (see below).
The National Seashore is a place of discovery, a place to find bird tracks,
horseshoe crabs, shells, polished stones, and life along trails.

Travel Services

Restaurants, hotels, motels, gifts shops, stores, gasoline stations, and other
facilities are located in nearby towns and villages. Lodging reservations are
essential in July and August. For information and to make reservations,
write: Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce, Routes 6 and 132, Hyannis, MA
02601-0016; or telephone: 508-362-3225.

Further Information
For specific inquiries about the Seashore prior to or after a visit, write:
Superintendent, Cape Cod National Seashore, 99 Marconi Site Road,
Wellfleet, MA 02667; or telephone 508-349-3785. Call the Salt Pond
Visitor Center at 508-255-3421, or the Province Lands Visitor Center
(closed in winter) at 508-487-1256.

Water Activities

Coast Guard Beach
Surf casting at Race Point, Provincetown
Mussels Quohogs Softshell clam

The Cape’s recreational activities are mostly water-related, naturally.
Its many beaches, harbors, and inlets offer endless opportunities
whether you want to swim, surf, sail, fish, water-ski, use a motorboat,
or just sunbathe.

Swimming
Within the National Seashore, lifeguard services, restrooms, changing areas,
and related facilities are located at these beaches operated by the National

Park Service from Eastham to Provincetown: Coast Guard, Nauset Light,
Marconi, Head of the Meadow, Race Point, and Herring Cove (see map on
pages 88-89). Several towns also have public beaches; all of them charge
parking fees in the summer.
The water usually is quite cold—temperatures may be in the high 50s°F
even in the summer—and the surf can be rough at times, so be especially
careful. Some parents with young children prefer beaches on Cape Cod Bay
to those on the Atlantic coast because the water is warmer and usually
calmer and because the beaches slope more gradually into the water. See rip
current warning, page 108.

Motorboating
The many inlets and harbors along the coastlines make the Cape appealing
to motorboaters. Most town harbors have boat launching ramps, boat
rentals, and other facilities. Marine supply stores are located in most Cape
towns.
Some harbors, such as Provincetown, Wellfleet, Orleans, Chatham,
Harwich Port, and Woods Hole, have docks, moorings, and other marine
facilities for those visiting the Cape by powerboat. Write to the Chamber of
Commerce or inquire locally for specific information.

Sailing, Surfing, and Windsurfing
Sailboats and sailboards are a familiar sight in Cape Cod waters from
Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound to the Atlantic itself and Cape Cod
Bay. In the National Seashore area, bays and harbors in Chatham, Orleans,
Wellfleet, and Provincetown are excellent for those using small sailboats
and sailboards. The Atlantic coast from Orleans to Provincetown is usually
good for surfboarding. Special areas are designated for their use at beaches
run by the National Park Service. If in doubt, inquire locally.

Fishing
Saltwater fishing is one of the most popular recreational activities on the
Cape. Surf-fishermen line up on the more accessible beaches to cast their

lines into the Atlantic for striped bass, bluefish, and flounder, while others
seek secluded spots to try their luck.
Charter fishing boats work out of Chatham, Orleans, Wellfleet, and
Provincetown. Besides the fish cited above, you might catch halibut,
haddock, and mackerel.
No license is required for saltwater sport fishing, but there are size and
number limits and a state license is necessary for fishing in the many
freshwater ponds. Commercial fishing is not permitted within the National
Seashore. Inquire at town offices or fishing supply stores about regulations
and for other information.

Shellfishing
Because so many clams and other shellfish have been harvested for so
many years, the supplies are dwindling and towns regulate their gathering
and areas and times when shellfishing is allowed. You must obtain a town
shellfish permit.
While on the Cape, you will hear about “mussels,” “steamers,”
“quahogs,” and “little necks.” What are the differences?
Mussels, which are dark blue oblongs about 2½ inches long, are found in
groups attached to rocks or pilings.
Quahogs are grayish hardshell clams that are commonly used in
chowders. Small quahogs, known as little necks or cherrystones, are served
raw. Quahogs are dug with a wide-toothed rake, or scratcher, primarily
along the Cape Cod Bay shoreline at low tide and in the shallows of Nauset
Bay and Pleasant Bay. From their boats, commercial shellfishermen use a
heavy, long-handled rake that looks like a wire basket on the end of two
long poles.
Softshells are whitish, oblong clams that are steamed or fried. They are
dug with a small fine-toothed rake, or clam hoe, at low tide on sand flats
facing the Atlantic, Nantucket Sound, and Cape Cod Bay. You can spot their
locations by tiny holes in the sand. Sometimes they squirt water at you as
you step near their holes.

Other common shellfish are bay or sea scallops. Scallop shells come in a
variety of colors and have ribs or elevated ridges running from the top to
the outer edges. Bay scallops usually are found in eelgrass beds.
A tip to out-of-staters: Cape Cod clam chowder is made with a milk base.
Manhattan clam chowder is made with a tomato base. Do not expect the
latter on the Cape. Don’t even ask for it!

Whale Watching

Humans trace their ancestry to animals that left the sea and moved onto
land. Whales trace their ancestry to a group of mammals that left the land
60 million years ago and returned to the sea. In relatively more recent times,
Cape Cod, Nantucket, and New Bedford were East Coast centers for the
harvesting of whales. Today, the Cape is a major center for the watching of
whales. Commercial sightseeing boats conduct whale-watching tours of 3 to
8 hours from piers in Provincetown, Barnstable, and Plymouth from April
to November. In the spring whales can be seen off the Cape migrating from
the south, and in the fall they can be seen migrating from the north. Whales
commonly seen off the Cape include the humpback, minke, and finback.
Right whales are sometimes seen in the fall and spring. Whales may often
be seen from land at Province Lands Visitor Center and from Race Point

Beach. But you will see the whales up closer from a boat—and they will get
a chance to watch you.

Minke whale
Spouts rarely seen; sleek, like finback, but much smaller; body gray above,
light underside; white band on flippers; narrow, pointed head; 15 to 35 feet
long; seen in spring and fall.

Right whale
V-shaped double spout; white callosities on head; short, rounded flippers;
body black above and below, with white patches by chin and navel; no
dorsal fin; shows black tail flukes when diving; 35 to 56 feet long; seen
most often in spring.

Humpback whale
Mushroom-shaped spout; long, white flippers; barnacles on snout; body
black above, splotches of white on belly; very acrobatic, jumping, spinning,
slapping tail; shows white patches on flukes when diving; 30 to 56 feet
long; seen in spring and early summer.

Finback whale
Tall, slender spout; flat, wedge-shaped head; dark gray above white belly;
left side dark gray, right side including lower jaw white like belly; gray
stripes behind eyes forming V’s on back; prominent dorsal fin; rarely shows
tail when diving; 40 to 85 feet long; seen in spring, summer, and fall.

Recreation Ashore

Biking in the Province Lands
Red Maple Swamp Trail

Recreational opportunities abound on land as well as on or in the
water. The National Seashore offers a number of short trails, a major
biking trail, bridle paths, and birds, birds, birds.

Biking
The 26-mile Cape Cod Rail Trail follows an old railroad bed from Dennis to
South Wellfleet. This trail connects the National Seashore with Nickerson
State Park’s camping facilities in Brewster.

Three bike trails are located within the National Seashore. The Nauset
Trail, 1.6 miles long, starts at the Salt Pond Visitor Center and runs to
Coast Guard Beach.
The Head of the Meadow Trail is 2 miles long and runs between High
Head Road and Head of the Meadow Beach parking area in Truro. The trail
commemorates the Pilgrims’ first discovery of fresh drinking water in 1620.
The most difficult of the 3 trails is a 5¼-mile loop through the dunes of
the Province Lands area. A 1-mile spur from the loop leads to Herring Cove
Beach on Cape Cod Bay. A half-mile spur leads to Race Point Beach.
Bikers may also take a roundtrip along the Cape Cod Canal.
Bicycles may be rented in Orleans, Eastham, and Provincetown.
Safety Tips Check your brakes, gears, and steering before starting out,
especially if you are using an unfamiliar bicycle. Wear a helmet.
All trails are two-way, so keep to the right.
Be alert for hikers and watch out for sand on the trails.
Use front and rear brakes together, or you may be thrown over the
handlebars.
Do not speed.

Hiking
Walking the self-guiding trails located throughout the National Seashore is
an excellent way to get away from the hurly-burly pace of the tourist areas
and to get a sense of the Cape’s natural and human history. Most of the
trails are not arduous.
The Nauset Marsh Trail in Eastham is a 1-mile loop that starts at Salt
Pond, a glacial kettle pond that is fed twice daily by the ocean. From the
trail you can get a close look at the life of Nauset Marsh, which was a bay
when Champlain explored the area in 1605.
The Beech Forest Trail on Race Point Road near the Province Lands
Visitor Center consists of 2 loops totaling 1 mile and tells the story of dune

ponds and the elimination of early forests of beech, oak, pine, and cedar on
the Lower Cape.
The Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail of 1.2 miles starts at the
Marconi Station Site in Wellfleet, descends inland through a landscape in
which the trees gradually grow taller as the effects of the sea lessen. The
trail ends at a white cedar swamp in a glacial kettle, and returns to the
parking area on the Old Wireless Road.
For information on other trails, see pages 100-105. While hiking on the
Cape, be on the watch for ticks (see Lyme disease precautions on page 108).

Horseback Riding
Because of the fragility of the plants and soil, horseback riding is restricted
to three bridle paths located in the Provincetown area and on designated dirt
roads. Horses are not permitted on nature trails.
The Sunset Trail starts near Race Point Road and leads through dunes to
the ocean. The West Trail starts at the same point but passes through shady
pitch pine and black oak forests and by freshwater ponds and cranberry
bogs. The Herring Cove Trail traverses a narrow barrier beach along Cape
Cod Bay.
Allow 2 hours for a round trip on each of the bridle paths. Ask for more
information about these trails at the visitor centers.

Birdwatching

Black duck
Clapper rail Belted kingfisher

Cape Cod is one of the best places for birdwatching on the East Coast.
Besides the terns, gulls, and ducks common to most seashores, the Cape is a
seasonal home to a great number of marsh and lowland dwellers and a
stopover for numerous migratory species traveling the Atlantic Flyway.
More than 360 species have been recorded.
Some of the best places on the Lower Cape for birdwatching include Fort
Hill, Coast Guard Beach, and Nauset Marsh in Eastham, the heathlands
near Marconi Station, the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wellfleet Bay

Wildlife Sanctuary in South Wellfleet, the Pleasant Bay area and the
Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge in Chatham, and, of course, all the
beaches in between.
With the right weather conditions, the Beech Forest in Provincetown is
good for seeing spring migrants. Also in the spring, migrating hawks may
be seen from many vantage points, and autumn falcon flights on Cape Cod
can be spectacular. Watch for seabirds from Race Point Beach any time of
the year but particularly after northeast winds.
Ask at the National Seashore visitor centers about checklists and other
birding publications.

Piping Plover, a Threatened Species
All birds are protected within the National Seashore, but the piping plover
is getting special protection. This small, sand-colored bird once was
commonly seen along the Atlantic Coast, but its numbers dwindled greatly
because of habitat loss. In 1918 the piping plover came under the
protection of the Migratory Bird Treaty. Its numbers rose until the 1940s,
when increases in beach recreation and development again threatened the
bird. In 1986 the piping plover was listed by the Federal Government as a
threatened species.
The National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are
jointly making efforts to protect piping plover nesting areas on the outer
beaches. As a result, the piping plover’s U.S. Atlantic coast population now
totals nearly 1,000 pairs.
To help protect this threatened species, respect all areas fenced or posted,
stay away from the birds and their nests, keep pets leashed on beaches
where they are allowed, and do not bury any garbage on beaches, because
it attracts predators.

Orleans, Brewster, and Chatham

Chatham fishing wharf Brewster house
Jonathan Young Windmill

On the Outer Cape in the summer, the towns of Orleans, Brewster, and
Chatham provide a full range of food, lodging, and other services and
facilities for vacationers. Some facilities remain open year round.
The National Seashore’s authorized boundaries encompass parts of
Orleans and Chatham, primarily on the relatively remote Nauset Beach
sandspit.

Orleans
The town is named for Louis-Philippe de Bourbon, Duke of Orleans, who
later was the King of France; he supposedly visited this area while exiled
during the French Revolution. In the War of 1812 residents claimed to have
driven off attacking British ships.
Major industries in the late 1800s were commercial fishing, shipbuilding,
and saltmaking. Today, Orleans offers a variety of restaurants, lodging
facilities, shops, and travel-related services with ready access to the
National Seashore.
The Nauset (Orleans) Beach is within the National Seashore but is
town-owned and operated; fees are charged in spring and summer. A surfing
area is provided.
Boating opportunities abound with 20 town landings providing access
to Cape Cod Bay and to Pleasant Bay, which in turn leads to the Atlantic
and Nantucket Sound. Several boatyards offer boat and equipment rentals.
Other places of interest: Orleans Historical Society, French Cable
Station Museum, Jonathan Young Windmill.

Brewster
The town of Brewster is on the sheltered Cape Cod Bay side of the upper
arm where the trees grow taller and the grass thicker than they do between
Eastham and Provincetown. Old ship captains’ houses and giant elms line
Mass. 6A, which meanders through town. Numerous antiques shops,
restaurants, and other travel facilities also line the highway.
The Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, a nonprofit organization
on Mass. 6A, preserves in conjunction with a town-owned reserve an
ancient herring run between Cape Cod Bay and freshwater ponds. The
museum, open year round, offers ecology exhibits, nature trails, films,
lectures, and, in the spring, opportunities to watch alewives run on Stony
Brook. For further information, write: P.O. Box 1710, Brewster, MA 02631-
0016; telephone 508-896-3867.

At Stony Brook Mill, on Stony Brook Road off Mass. 6A, you can see
corn ground at a water-powered gristmill and tour a miller’s museum.
The Brewster Historical Society Museum, on Mass. 6A in East
Brewster, exhibits local history.
Roland C. Nickerson State Park, on the eastern edge of Brewster, is an
excellent place to camp if you plan to spend much time in the National
Seashore. The park has 1,955 acres with more than 400 campsites available
on a first-come, first-served basis. Recreational activities include freshwater
swimming, boating, bicycling, and hiking. For bicyclists the Cape Cod Rail
Trail links the state park with the National Seashore 8 miles away. For
further information, write: Roland C. Nickerson State Park, Main Street,
Brewster, MA 02631-0003; telephone 518-896-3491.
For more information about the town, call the Brewster Board of Trade:
508-896-5713.

Chatham
Chatham sits at the Cape’s elbow, facing both the Atlantic and Nantucket
Sound. As a result, the morning fog seems to stay a little longer in Chatham
than elsewhere on the Cape.
Commercial fishing boats still work out of Chatham harbors, but the
main activity in the summer is tending to vacationers’ needs. Main Street,
Mass. 28, is a beehive of shops, motels, and restaurants. The Fourth of July
parade and Friday evening summer band concerts are longtime Chatham
traditions.
An overlook near the Coast Guard lighthouse on Main Street provides
excellent views of the Atlantic and of the massive swath cut through the
Nauset (North) Beach spit in a storm in 1987.
Just south of the lighthouse, on Morris Island, is the Monomoy National
Wildlife Refuge, a difficult place to access but a great place for
birdwatching. Guided natural history tours on the island are available
through the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History and the Wellfleet Bay
Audubon Sanctuary.

Chatham has a few small public beaches and a large one, Harding Beach
on Nantucket Sound. Remember, the waters of Nantucket Sound are usually
calmer and about 5 degrees warmer than those of the Atlantic.
Diligent history buffs can locate a marker at Stage Harbor
commemorating Samuel de Champlain’s visit in 1606.
Other places of interest: Old Atwood House, built in 1752, on Stage
Harbor Road; Chatham Railroad Museum; Old Gristmill; fishing boats
unloading at Chatham Fish Pier.

Eastham and Wellfleet

Penniman House Old Schoolhouse Museum
Wellfleet church door Trail to Great Island

The character of the Cape’s landscape changes the farther out you go
from the mainland. At Eastham and Wellfleet the land becomes
noticeably flatter, the vegetation sparser, and the sand more evident.
You’ve reached the Outer Cape—and the National Seashore.
Eastham is home to the National Seashore’s Salt Pond Visitor Center,
and Wellfleet is home to its headquarters. A stop at the visitor center
east of U.S. 6 is an excellent way to discover—through films, exhibits,
publications, interpretive programs, and guided walks—the Outer

Cape’s many natural and historical features and recreational
opportunities (see pages 90-91).

Eastham
When the Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod, a small group led by Myles
Standish encountered some Indians on Eastham’s bay side. After the
Pilgrims had settled in at Plymouth, some of them decided to move back to
the Cape, and in 1644 a group founded Nauset, which has been known as
Eastham since 1651. One of the Nauset founders, Thomas Prence, governed
the whole of Plymouth Colony from Eastham for a few years.
Symbolic of these Plymouth-Eastham ties is the gristmill at Windmill
Park on the west side of U.S. 6, about 2½ miles past the Orleans border.
The mill was built in the 1600s in Plymouth and was reconstructed in
Eastham in 1793. The mill is open during the summer and on weekends in
the spring and fall (see page 47).
The Penniman House on Fort Hill Road is symbolic of another Eastham
era: the heyday of sailing ships and whaling. Edward Penniman was 11
years old in 1842 when he left Fort Hill and went to sea. By the time he was
29 he was captain of his own whaler and soon was sailing to ports around
the world. He returned to Eastham in 1868 to build this ornate house
complete with mansard roof, kerosene chandelier, and cupola (see page 49).
The Nauset Marsh Trail is a loop that starts and ends at the National
Seashore’s Salt Pond Visitor Center and goes past its namesake, a former
glacial kettle pond that has been inundated by seawater, a salt marsh rich in
wildlife, and an abandoned farmstead.
Fort Hill Trail takes a loop through the late-18th century farmstead of
Rev. Samuel Treat. You can start at either of 2 parking lots on Fort Hill
Road south of the visitor center. It winds past stone walls to Skiff Hill and
Fort Hill on the edge of Nauset Marsh and then past the Penniman House.
The Red Maple Swamp Trail is a spur loop off the Fort Hill Trail.
Other places of interest: whaling, lifesaving items, and other artifacts at
the Historical Society’s Old Schoolhouse Museum opposite Salt Pond
Visitor Center; Doane Rock, a glacial erratic; Coast Guard Beach and

Nauset Light Beach; Three Sisters Lighthouses; local historical objects at
Swift-Daley House on U.S. 6.

Wellfleet
The town of Wellfleet—which was a part of Eastham and called
Billingsgate until 1763—is an old whaling port and still a major fishing and
shellfish center on Cape Cod Bay. Some say Wellfleet got its name from
being a “whale fleet” base, while others say the name came from the
Wallfleet oyster beds area of England.
The center of Wellfleet is small but has several restaurants, shops, art
galleries, and other facilities for vacationers. The town boasts of its First
Congregational Church clock that strikes ship’s time.
The Massachusetts Audubon Society runs the 700-acre Wellfleet Bay
Wildlife Sanctuary west of U.S. 6 in South Wellfleet. Trails go through
beach, marsh, and pine forest. It’s a good place for birdwatching.
Past the sanctuary, to the east of U.S. 6, is the National Seashore
headquarters. Informational services are provided here when the Province
Lands Visitor Center is closed in the winter.
The Marconi Station Site, located past the headquarters on a bluff
facing the Atlantic, is where Guglielmo Marconi transmitted the first
transatlantic radio message, between Theodore Roosevelt and the King of
England, in January 1903 (see pages 78-79).
While you’re at the Marconi Station Site, take the 1.2-mile Atlantic
White Cedar Swamp Trail (see page 97).
On Wellfleet’s west side, another trail leads out to and across Great
Island, a glacial remnant that has become a peninsula. This former island
was once dotted with lookout towers for whales and was the location of
houses and a tavern.
Other places of interest: Atwood-Higgins House (inquire at National
Seashore visitor centers); Wellfleet Historical Society museum on Main
Street; Marconi Beach.

Truro and Provincetown

Truro rowboats Highland Light
Old Harbor Life Saving Museum, Provincetown
Blessing of the fleet, Provincetown

The narrowing of the Outer Cape and the power of nature readily
become evident in Truro and Provincetown. Here the way the wind and
the sea move sand around seems to be more noticeable than elsewhere
on the peninsula.
Even in the summer, Truro is relatively desolate for a Cape Cod
town, especially when compared with its bustling neighbor to the north,
Provincetown, with its writers, artists, actors, and tourists.

Truro
Many towns claim many associations with the Pilgrims, and Truro can
certainly claim its own. Myles Standish and a small Mayflower group
discovered a basket of corn that had been buried by Indians on what is now
known as Corn Hill, and another group found a freshwater spring near
Pilgrim Lake (see pages 34-35).
The town, originally called Pamet and then Dangerfield, took the name of
Truro in 1709 because of its similarities to an area of seaside moors and
valleys by that name in England.
Whaling ships once worked out of Pamet Harbor on Cape Cod Bay, and
until the 1860s the town was a major port with its related shipbuilding and
fishing facilities and its saltworks. Most of the men made their living at sea,
and in 1841 the town lost 57 fishermen in one storm. Today the small center
of town has a few restaurants and other facilities for travelers.
Highland Light—also known as Cape Cod Light—is the second
lighthouse constructed on the high bluff overlooking the Atlantic at Truro.
The first was built in 1797 and the present one in 1857. Today the U.S.
Coast Guard also maintains a radio beacon here to assist ships in their
navigation. Nearby is the Truro Historical Society’s Highland House
Museum.
The National Seashore has two short trails in the Pilgrim Heights area of
North Truro. Pilgrim Spring Trail takes you through the area where a
Mayflower exploratory group supposedly found a freshwater spring.
Small’s Swamp Trail loops through a farmstead that was abandoned in
1922; the Small family built their house in a glacial kettle-hole.
Other points of interest: Pamet Cranberry Bog house; a Paul Revere
bell in the 1827 Bell Church on Meetinghouse Road; Head of the Meadow
Beach.

Provincetown
The town has been a prominent port and fishing community since colonial
days when wharves lined the shores and hundreds of sailing ships filled the
harbor. Today Provincetown is still a major port, but cod, mackerel, and

hake have long since replaced whales as the major catch. And today, the
town is full of art galleries, theaters, sidewalk cafes, restaurants, and shops
that come alive in the summer when the population jumps from about 3,000
to 30,000.
Symbolic of Provincetown’s long history connected with the sea is the
town’s Blessing of the Fleet festival on the last weekend in June. In the
harbor, colorfully decorated fishing boats pass before a Roman Catholic
bishop to receive his blessing for a successful season, and paraders wander
through the narrow streets to honor Saint Peter, the patron saint of
fishermen.
Whereas the center of town is located on the Cape Cod Bay side of the
Cape, another center of interest, Race Point, is on the Atlantic side. The
National Seashore’s Province Lands Visitor Center on Race Point Road has
exhibits and films about the area’s natural and human history and is the
starting point for a bicycle trail (see page 96). The center offers a variety of
guided walks and talks and, from the observation deck, views over the
dunes of the ocean—and possibly of whales.
In the summer, the Old Harbor Life Saving Museum at Race Point
Beach presents interpretive talks and displays about the Cape’s early
lifesaving activities. The station, on the National Register of Historic
Places, was moved to Race Point from Chatham in 1978.
For swimming and sunbathing, the National Park Service manages
beaches at Race Point and Herring Cove.
Back in town, the Pilgrim Monument rises 255 feet, a prominent
reminder that the Pilgrims landed here before heading to Plymouth. Climb
to the top of this granite tower and you are rewarded with wonderful views
of the Atlantic and of Cape Cod Bay with the Manomet bluffs near
Plymouth on the horizon. The ground-level museum houses memorabilia of
the town.
The Provincetown Heritage Museum at 356 Commercial Street has a
number of maritime paintings, a half-size model of the schooner Rose
Dorothea, the fishing boat Charlotte, and other memorabilia.
Other points of interest: the Seth Nickerson House, circa 1746, at 72
Commercial Street; Provincetown Art Association and Museum; Center for

Coastal Studies; whale-watching excursions starting at the MacMillan
Wharf.

Nearby Attractions

Mayflower replica, Plymouth
Awashonks figurehead, New Bedford Whaling Museum

The historical, cultural, recreational, and scenic attractions of Cape
Cod and the nearby area are so multitudinous they cannot be listed in
this book. Here, by community, are a few sites related thematically to
the National Seashore.

Bourne
The 7-mile-long Cape Cod Canal links Massachusetts Bay with Buzzards
Bay and saves mariners 100 miles of traveling around the Cape in
hazardous waters. The Army Corps of Engineers manages the canal and the
3 bridges that cross it. The canal was first envisioned by Myles Standish in
1624, and 150 years later George Washington liked the idea so much he
ordered a survey. But nothing happened for years. New York financier
August Belmont took over the construction in 1909 after it had been
worked on for nearly 30 years. He saw it through to completion in 1914, but
he lost millions of dollars on it. The Federal Government took over the
canal in 1928, and the Army Corps deepened and widened it. Stop at the
canal visitor center on Main Street in Bourne Monday through Friday to see
a model of the canal and an audiovisual show. Canal boat tours are offered
out of Onset Bay Town Pier. Hikers and bicyclists can take a 14-mile
roundtrip along the canal.

Woods Hole
The National Marine Fisheries Service Aquarium has tanks of seals, East
Coast fish and shellfish, and exhibits about fisheries. The Marine Biological
Laboratory offers a tour in the summer of a lab and of sea life in holding
tanks. It also presents a slide show about its scientific studies.

Mashpee
The Wampanoag Indian Museum on Mass. 130 has exhibits and artifacts of
early Wampanoag life (see pages 32-33).

Plymouth
In this Massachusetts Bay town you can see Plymouth Rock, the traditional
landing spot of the Pilgrims after they left Cape Cod in 1620; go aboard a
replica of the Mayflower, tour Plimoth Plantation, a reconstruction of the
Pilgrims’ first village; and see a number of other historic sites, plus
Cranberry World Visitor Center’s exhibits on the cultivation and harvesting
of cranberries.

New Bedford
Nantucket and New Bedford were the centers of New England’s whaling
industry in the 19th century. Today New Bedford is still a key fishing port,
but whaling is an historical attraction. The New Bedford Whaling Museum
on Johnny Cake Hill features the 89-foot Lagoda, a half-scale model of a
fully rigged whaling ship; a large collection of scrimshaw; and a multitude
of whaling artifacts. Nearby is the Seaman’s Bethel, a sailors’ church with a
pulpit in the shape of a ship’s prow. The church figured in Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick.

Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket

Osprey
Main Street, Nantucket

While visiting Cape Cod, consider spending a day or two or more on
the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, summertime havens
that share much of the Cape’s cultural history and scenic ambience.
Both islands were settled in the 1600s by colonists from the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, both were major seaports linked with Cape
fisheries, and both have attracted vacationers since the steamboat days
of the 1800s. Despite these similarities, the islands are distinctive.
Martha’s Vineyard is closest—only 7 miles and 45 minutes by ferry
from Woods Hole. Nantucket is about 30 miles from the Cape and 2
hours and 20 minutes by ferry from Hyannis. And don’t feel you have
to take your car. Bicycles, mopeds, taxis, and buses are available.

Martha’s Vineyard
New England’s largest island, Martha’s Vineyard is 24 miles long and 10
miles wide. Vineyard Haven was a major port until the Cape Cod Canal re-
routed ship traffic in 1914. Today, the ferry stops at Vineyard Haven and, in
the summer, at Oak Bluffs, an old Methodist camp meeting site.
The Vineyard’s eclectic architecture includes Victorian gingerbread
houses and cottages in Oak Bluffs, sturdy white clapboard sea captains’
houses in Edgartown, a mix of styles in Vineyard Haven, fishing shanties in
Menemsha, and cedar-shingled cottages throughout the island.
Examine whaling artifacts at the Dukes County Historical Museum in
Edgartown, look for ospreys at the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary, inspect
solar- and wind-powered energy sources at the Windfarm Museum, and
visit Gay Head’s scenic cliffs overlooking the Atlantic.

Nantucket
Nantucket is the name not only of the island but of the county and of the
main town on the island, which is 14 miles long and 3½ miles wide. The
island is known for its more than 800 houses built between 1740 and 1840,

for its brick sidewalks and cobblestone streets, for its encircling 55 miles of
beautiful beaches, and for its whaling and Quaker heritage.
Nantucket’s architecture reflects the great wealth garnered by its whaling
merchants and captains. The most notable structures are the Three Bricks
and the Two Greeks, mansions built across from each other by Joseph
Starbuck and William Hadwen respectively.
Be sure to see the old whaleboat and other seafaring artifacts at the
Whaling Museum; ship captain portraits, old baskets, and other historical
objects at the Peter Foulger Museum; the elegant ballroom in the William
Hadwen House. These sites are administered by the Nantucket Historical
Association (508-228-1894). You may also visit a re-created beach station
at the Nantucket Life Saving Museum. And don’t be startled if you hear
Nantucketers refer to the mainland as America. It’s a sign of their isolation
and independence.

Information
Martha’s Vineyard Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 1698, Beach Road,
Vineyard Haven, MA 02568-1698; 508-693-0085. Nantucket Visitor
Services, 25 Federal St., Nantucket, MA 02554-3573; 508-228-0925.

Safety and Other Management Concerns

Deer tick magnified

Most of the regulations enforced within the National Seashore concern
the protection of natural and cultural resources. Others deal with
personal safety. Please obey them.
● State law requires the wearing of seatbelts by drivers and passengers in
Massachusetts.
● Do not disturb or damage any natural features, including flowers, trees,
animals, dunes, marine animal remains, or cultural features, such as historic
structures and objects. It is permissible to collect shells, but metal detectors
are not allowed.
● Keep beaches, trails, roadsides, and other areas clean. Put all litter in trash
receptacles or carry it away with you.
● Motorized vehicles, including mopeds, are not allowed on paved bicycle
trails. Over-sand vehicles must be used only on designated sand routes, and
a permit—which may be obtained at the Race Point Ranger Station—is
required. Indiscriminate off-road driving is prohibited.
● At the ocean, be alert for underwater obstacles. Keep children within
reach. Be wary of too much sun exposure. Glass containers, rafts, rubber
tubes, snorkels, and masks are not permitted on lifeguarded beaches. Public
nudity is prohibited within the National Seashore.
● Kite flying is prohibited within 500 feet of posted shorebird nesting areas.
Rip currents, often incorrectly called rip tides, occur when wave-driven
currents surge back to sea through gaps in an offshore bar, then dissipate
quickly in deeper water. To escape a rip current, swim parallel to shore
before heading in. Never swim against a rip current!
● Keep pets under physical restraint at all times. Leashes must not exceed 6
feet. Pets are not allowed in public buildings, in picnic areas, on lifeguarded
beaches, on nature trails, in posted shorebird nesting areas, and on beaches
or in water of freshwater ponds.
● At ponds gasoline-powered motorboats, glass containers, and any use of
soaps and detergents are prohibited.

● Open fires are not allowed except when authorized by a permit, which
can be obtained at visitor centers. Permits are not required for stoves using
manufactured fuels, or for charcoal grills when they are used in designated
picnic areas at Beech Forest, Pilgrim Heights, Great Island, and Doane
Rock, or on sandy or rock beaches bordering tidewater.
● Avoid walking in sand dunes so as not to affect the fragile vegetation.
Because sand collapses easily, do not climb cliffs and sandy slopes or dig
deep holes in the sand.
● Be alert for ticks. A bite may transmit various ailments. The deer tick is
known to carry Lyme disease. Inspect yourself carefully if you walk
through grass or brush.
● Upland game and migratory waterfowl may be hunted in certain National
Seashore areas in specified seasons. Federal, state, and local laws apply.
Ask for information on hunting opportunities and regulations.
Note: Rangers can provide first aid assistance. The closest health clinics
are in Provincetown, Wellfleet, and Harwich, and the nearest hospital is in
Hyannis.

Armchair Explorations

Eastern National Park & Monument Association, a nonprofit group
that supports interpretive and scientific efforts at Cape Cod National
Seashore, offers books, maps, and other Cape Cod items for sale at the
park and by mail. For a free list of Cape Cod publications, including a
special selection for children, write to the association at Salt Pond
Visitor Center, Rt. 6, Eastham, MA 02642-2113. For a list of official
handbooks about other national parks, write to the Division of
Publications, National Park Service, P.O. Box 50, Harpers Ferry, WV
25425-0050.
Here is a partial list of books and booklets about Cape Cod and related
subjects:
O’Brien, Greg, editor. A Guide to Nature on Cape Cod and the Islands.
Written in cooperation with Cape Cod Museum of Natural History. Penguin
Books, 1990.
Beston, Henry. Outermost House. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1928.
Reprint First Owl Book Edition, 1992.
Burling, Francis P. The Birth of Cape Cod National Seashore. The
Leyden Press, 1979.
Clark, Admont G. Lighthouses of Cape Code, Martha’s Vineyard and
Nantucket: Their History and Lore. Parnassus Imprints, 1992.
Coulombe, Deborah A. Seaside Naturalist: A Guide to Nature Study at
the Seashore. Prentice-Hall, 1984.
Dalton, J. W. The Life Savers of Cape Cod. Barta Press, 1902. Reprint
Parnassus Imprints, 1991.
Finch, Robert. Common Ground: A Naturalist’s Cape Cod. David R.
Godine, 1981; Outlands: Journeys to the Outer Edges of Cape Cod. David
R. Godine, 1986; The Primal Place. W. W. Norton, 1983.
Hay, John. The Great Beach. Doubleday, 1963.
Kaye, Glen. Cape Cod: the Story Behind the Scenery. KC Publications,
1980.
Kittredge, Henry C. Cape Cod: Its People and Their History. Houghton
Mifflin, 1930. Reprint Parnassus Imprints, 1987.

Martin, Kenneth. Some Very Handsome Work. Eastern National Park and
Monument Association, 1991.
Oldale, Robert. Cape Cod and the Islands: The Geologic Story. Parnassus
Imprints, 1992.
Penniman, Augusta. Penniman Journal: A Whaling Voyage. Eastern
National Park & Monument Association, 1988.
Quinn, William P. Shipwrecks Around Cape Cod. Lower Cape
Publishing, 1973.
Teal, John and Mildred. Life and Death of the Salt Marsh. 1969. Reprint
Ballantine Books, 1991.
Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod. Houghton Mifflin, 1864, and Penguin
State, 1865. Reprint Parnassus Imprints with introduction by Robert Finch,
1984. Reprint Penguin Books with introduction by Paul Theroux, 1987.
Waldron, Nan Turner. Journey to Outermost House. Butterfly & Wheel
Publishing, 1991.
Weinstein-Farson, Laurie. The Wampanoag. Chelsea House, 1989.
Willison, George F. Saints and Strangers. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945.
Reprint Parnassus Imprints, 1983.

Index
Numbers in italics refer to photographs, illustrations, or maps.

Andrea Doria, 61
Atwood-Higgins House, 38-39

Barnstable, 61, 94
Beaches, 25, 37, 40, 73, 92, 99, 101
Beech Forest, 97, 99
Belmont, August, 65, 106
Beston, Henry, 7, 14, 71, 72, 73, 109
Bicycling, 24, 96, 101, 105
Birds, 66-67, 81, 98-99, 107, 111;
shooting, 70;
watching, 98-99, 101
Blackfish Creek, 30, 58
Boating, 92, 100
Botkin, Henry, 33
Bourne, 106;
bridge, 65, 76
Bradford, William, 31
Brewster, 58, 91, 100-101
Bridges, 65, 76
Buzzards Bay, 70, 106

Cape Cod, 20-21;
Bay, 46, 53, 58;
Branch Railroad, 70;
Canal, 61, 62-63, 65, 106;
history, 69;
House, 7, 38-39;
Light, 62, 64, 104;
Museum of Natural History, 80, 100, 101;
School of Art, 70;
Stranding Network, 80
Cape Cod National Seashore:
camping, 91;
founding of, 17-18, 80;
headquarters, 103;
location, 86;
map, 88-89;
recreation, 92-99;
transportation, 87;
visitor centers, 90
Captains, ship, 50-51, 58-59
Channing, William, 69
Chatham, 28-29, 62, 64, 65, 93, 100, 101
Clams, 93
Cleveland, Grover, 70
Coast Guard, U.S., 64, 65;
Beach, 24, 25, 30, 32, 40, 92
Cobb, Elijah, 50
Columbia, 50
Commerce, 47, 52-53, 69, 75, 76
Cottages, summer, 76
Cranberries, 68, 74-75, 76

Crosby, Charles, 50
Crosby, James E., 50

de Bry, Theodore, 32
de Champlain, Samuel, 32, 101
Dennis, 61
Dunes, 4-5, 29, 30, 46

Eastham, 34, 69, 101-2;
Coast Guard Station, 36;
visitor center, 30, 90, 102.
See also Nauset Marsh
Eldridge, Asa, 51
Elizabeth Islands, 24, 26
Environmental education, 80, 90, 100
Erosion, 28-29, 36-37, 40-41

Fish, 32, 42-44, 45-47, 81;
industry, 53, 54-55, 93
Federal Migratory Bird Treaties, 1916, 70

Gale, October 1841, 59, 64
Geology, 23-30, 36-41, 46;
maps, 26-29
Georges Banks, 25, 59, 64
Glaciation, 7, 23-24, 26-27, 46.
See also Geology
Golf, 71
Gosnold, Bartholomew, 46-47

Grand Banks, 47, 59
Grass, 30-31, 42, 43, 45, 80
Gravestones, 51, 59
“Graveyards of the Atlantic”, 59.
See also Shipwrecks
Great Beach, The, 71
Great Blizzard, 1978, 15, 40
Great Island, 30, 103
Great Pond, 27
Gulf Stream, 46

Hall, Henry, 74
Harding Beach, 101
Hay, John, 71, 109
Head of the Meadow Beach, 25
Herring River, 15
Highland Light, 62, 64, 71, 104
Hiking, 96-97, 103, 104
Hitchcock, Edward, 46
Horseback riding, 97
House on Nauset Marsh, 71
Howe, James, 76
Howes, Osborn, 50

Jeremy Point, 28, 30
Jonathan Young Windmill, 101

Kendrick, John, 50
Kennedy, John F., 17
Kittredge, Henry, 58, 59

Labrador Current, 46
Laurentide ice sheet, 23, 26
Lieutenant Island, 58
Life Saving Service, U.S., 62-63, 64, 65, 105
Lighthouses, 17, 62-63, 64, 65
Lodging, 91
Lower Cape, 24, 25, 46, 86

Maps, 26-29, 33-35, 60, 87-89
Mashpee, 106
Marconi, Guglielmo, 78
Marconi Wireless Station, 28, 78-79, 97, 103
Martha’s Vineyard, 26, 107
Mayflower, 34-35, 106
Messenger, 60
Metacomet (King Philip), 36
Mid-Cape Highway, 76
Monomoy Island, 30, 40, 59, 81;
Point, 28;
National Wildlife Refuge, 80, 101
Morgan, Charles W., 52, 53
Myers, Rowena, 13-14

Nantucket, 26, 46, 107;

Sound, 53, 70
Native Americans, 31, 32-33, 45, 54
Nauset:
Beach, 30, 73, 100;
Light, 17, 62-63;
Marsh, 8, 10-11, 19, 71, 96, 103
Nearby attractions, 106-7
Nickerson, Roland C. State Park, 91, 101
North Beach, 22, 28-29, 30

Old Harbor Life Saving Museum, 105
Old Schoolhouse Museum, 102
Oliver, Mary, 71
O’Neill, Eugene, 28, 71
Orleans, 93, 100
Outer Beach, 7, 15, 25, 86
Outer Cape, 28, 37, 40
Outermost House, The, 40, 71, 72-73, 109

Paddock, Ichabod, 53
Pamet:
Harbor, 30;
River, 24, 29
Paulding, 61
Peaked Hill Bars, 41, 59;
Coast Guard Station, 28-29
Penniman, Augusta, 49, 109
Penniman, Edward, 49, 102-3
Penniman House, 49, 102

Pilgrim Monument, 2-3, 105
Pilgrims, 33, 34-35, 65, 102, 104, 106
Pine, pitch, 31
Plants, 42, 43
Pleasant Bay, 29, 70
Plymouth, 34-35, 102, 106
Ponds:
kettle, 24, 25, 27;
salt, 27, 30
Population, 31, 32-33, 45, 54, 69-71, 76, 86, 104.
Portland, 61
Prence, Thomas, 102
Province Lands, 29, 46, 96;
Visitor Center, 90, 95, 104-5
Provincetown, 2-3, 48, 54, 70-71, 77, 93, 94, 104-5;
Harbor, 30, 47, 53, 65;
Hook, 28, 30, 41;
Players, 70-71;
topography, 30, 40-41, 59

Race Point, 59, 62, 64, 95, 99, 104-5;
Ranger Station, 90
Railroad, 65, 70, 76
Red Jacket, 51
Revenue Cutter Service, 64
Rich, Shebnah, 47
Richardson, Wyman, 71
Roosevelt, Theodore, 79

Safety & health, 108
Sagamore bridge, 65, 76
Saltonstall, Leverett, 17
Salt Pond Visitor Center, 24, 90, 102
Salt marshes, 30-31, 42-43, 45, 80
Saltworks, 56-57
Sandy Neck, 53
Sears, John, 56
Shipping artifacts, 50-51
Shipwrecks, 59, 60-61, 64-65
Smith, John, 47
Smith, Walter, 71
South Wellfleet, 59
Sparrowhawk, 59, 60-61
Speedwell, 35
Stage Harbor, 32, 33
Standish, Myles, 34, 36, 65, 102, 104, 106
Stockholm, 61
Stony Brook Mill, 100-101
Storms, 15, 28-29, 40, 59, 64

Thoreau, Henry David, 54, 57, 58, 69, 71, 72, 109
Tides, 15
Topography, 24-31, 36-41, 59, 76, 80-81, 101, 102
Town crier, 71
Trails, 96, 97, 103, 104

Transportation, 87
Truro, 24, 61, 64, 69, 76, 104
Turner, C. E., 50

Ulysses, 60-61
Upper Cape, 24, 88

Wampanoag Indians, 32-33, 45, 54, 106
Washington, George, 65
Water sports, 92
Weather, 86-87
Wellfleet, 30, 54, 69, 93, 103;
topography, 24, 101;
whaling, 48, 58
Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, 103
Whales, 48, 58, 80, 94-95
Whaling, 48-49, 53, 58, 104
Whydah, 59, 61
Wildflowers, 82-83
Windmills, 47, 56-57, 101, 102
Wireless telegraphy, 28, 78-79, 97, 103
Woodlands, 31, 46

Yarmouth, 61

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Finch, Robert, 1943-

Cape Cod: its natural and cultural history: a
Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore.
Massachusetts / by Robert Finch; produced by the
Division of Publications, National Park Service,
U.S. Department of the Interior.
p. cm.—(Official National Park handbook,
Cape Cod National Seashore; handbook 148)
Includes index.
1. Cape Cod National Seashore (Mass.)—
Guidebooks. I. United States. National Park
Service. Division of Publications. II. Title. III.
Series: Handbook (United States. National Park
Service. Division of Publications); 148. Sharp-tailed sparrow

F72.C3F55 1993 917.44920443-dc20 92-40414
CIP Supt. of Docs, no.: 129.9/5: 148
ISBN 0-912627-56-5
⚝ GPO: 1997—417-646/40503
Printed on recycled paper
Reprint 1997

National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior

The National Park Service expresses its appreciation to all those persons
who made the preparation and production of this handbook possible. The
Service especially thanks Eastern National Park and Monument Association
and The Friends of Cape Cod National Seashore for their financial support
of this publication. All photos and artwork not credited below come from
the files of Cape Cod National Seashore. Some materials are restricted
against commercial reproduction. The book was designed by Richard
Sheaff.
John Arsenault 95 whale watchers
Frank Balthis, 106 Mayflower
Tony Bonanno 62-63 Nauset C. G. Station, 104 rowboats
Tom Cawley, 43 sea-lavender and terrapin, 66-67 snowy egret, ruddy
turnstone, and willet, 82-83 nightshade, heather, beach plum, cactus,
dewberry, St. Johnswort, bellflower, mayflower, aster, laurel, star-flower,
and cypress spurge
Concord Free Public Library 73 Thoreau
Donald Demers 38-39 Atwood-Higgins art, mortise
R. R. Donnelley GeoSystems 87 map, 88-89
Steve Dunwell back cover, 17, 19, 22, 68, 90 girl, 93 fisherman, 107
Nantucket
Roger Everett 66-67 dunlin, spotted sandpiper, merganser, yellowlegs,
canvasback, eider, green-backed heron, sanderlings
Jeff Gnass 47, 102 schoolhouse, 105 station
Laurel Guadazno 82 goldenrod

Vincent Guadazno 59
William Hartley 16, 42-43 salt hay, snail, sea stars, scallop, lobster,
anemone, eelgrass, sea robin, hermit, jelly, rock crabs, sea lettuce, 44, 66
osprey and oystercatcher, 82 water lily
Steven Heaslip, Cape Cod Times 28 inset
Historical Society of Old Yarmouth 51 Eldridge
William Johnson 6, 30, 53, 84-85, 86 umbrella, 92 lifeguard, 96 bikers, 101
windmill, 102 Penniman, 103 Great Island, 104 lighthouse, 109
Library of Congress, 32 Debry, 33 Champlain map, 36 both
Brad Luther, Coastal News Publications 60 map
Ralph Mackenzie 2-3, 9, 13, 18, 67 common terns and great blue heron, 87
artist, 100, 101 house, 105 blessing
Mariners Museum, Newport News 51 Red Jacket
Linda Minnich 58
David Muench 10-11, 12, 15,91 swamp
Mystic Seaport 46, 52
New Bedford Whaling Museum 48 whale, 106 figurehead
Dorothy Michele Novick 33 domed shelters, 75 cranberry art, 87 leaf, 90
crab, 93 shellfish, 94-95 whales, 98-99, 107 hawk, 108 tick, 111
Laurence Parent 97 swamp trail
Peabody Museum of Salem 50 Howes, 60-61 Ulysses
Pilgrim Society 33 treaty, 35 Mayflower
Mae Scanlan 8, 103 door
Richard Sheaff Collection 34 Pilgrims landing, 86 postcard and driver, 92
swimmer, 93 lure, 96 bike art
Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities 63
Chatham crew, 71, 76, 77
Spaceshots, Inc. 20-21 Landsat Cape Cod image

Tom Till front cover
Connie Toops 66 ring-billed gull
Robert Tope 26-27 waning glacier
Glenn Van Nimwegen 4-5, 14, 31, 37, 90 tracks

As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the
Interior has responsibility for most of our nationally owned public lands and
natural resources. This includes fostering sound use of our land and water
resources; protecting our fish, wildlife, and biological diversity; preserving
the environmental and cultural values of our national parks and historical
places; and providing for the enjoyment of life through outdoor recreation.
The Department assesses our energy and mineral resources and works to
ensure that their development is in the best interest of all our people by
encouraging stewardship and citizen participation in their care. The
Department also has a major responsibility for American Indian reservation
communities and for people who live in island territories under U.S.
Administration.

Cape Cod

Illustrated features and nearly 200 color photographs and historic images
complement Robert Finch’s narrative about Cape Cod’s rich natural and
cultural history. Maps and a guide section make this a practical handbook
for travelers to the Cape and the National Seashore.

ISBN 0-912627-56-5

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPE COD ***

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