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 Atlantic cod typically weighs 10 to 25 pounds but ranges up to 200 pounds. Its bountiful numbers sparked Massachusetts’ first major maritime industry in the 1600s. A bottom dweller, the cod soon attracted Cape fishermen to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and to Georges Bank off Cape Cod.
The thin glacial soil, exhausted by repeated cropping and left unprotected by deforestation, soon blew away. In Provincetown, unregulated cutting and grazing in the Province Lands let loose the dunes, which threatened to bury the town and fill up the harbor. By 1800 dune ridges were advancing at a rate of 90 feet a year. In 1847 Massachusetts geologist Edward Hitchcock, visiting the Lower Cape, felt as if he were “in the depths of an Arabian or Libyan desert.”
Though the Cape’s soil was never very rich, the waters around it teemed with abundance, and in the sea Cape Codders found their true destiny. Thrust some 30 miles out into the Atlantic, the Cape partakes of two distinct marine environments. Cape Cod Bay is part of the larger Gulf of Maine ecosystem, a cold-water habitat influenced by the south-flowing Labrador Current. The waters of Nantucket Sound, averaging some ten degrees warmer, are influenced primarily by the northward-flowing Gulf Stream.
Such a range of temperature in its surrounding waters, combined with numerous estuaries of varying salinity, has produced one of the richest diversities of marine habitats on the East Coast. A National Park Service report states that the difference in flora and fauna “between Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay is greater than that between Cape Cod Bay and the Bay of Fundy, or between Buzzards Bay and the coast of Virginia.” Warm-water species such as whelks, bay scallops, diamondback terrapins, blue crabs, striped bass and tuna inhabit the same waters as do more northerly species such as blue mussels, Jonah crabs, winter flounder, halibut, and, of course, cod.
Of all the creatures nourished by the sea, none has been more important to the history of Cape Cod than the Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua. In 1602, the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold was so impressed by the schools of codfish surrounding his vessel, the Concord, that he named this peninsula after them, a name so apt that, in the words of Truro historian Shebnah Rich, “blow high or low, cold or hot, thick or thin, fish or no fish, it has hung on like a lamper-eel from that day to this.”
A few Pilgrims left Plymouth and returned to the Cape and settled in the Eastham area. So, too, did this windmill. It was built in Plymouth in the 1600s and was moved to Eastham in 1793. The mill was used in producing flour. Some mills were used to pump seawater as a part of saltworks.
The cod has always been what Captain John Smith described in 1616 as “the maine staple” of the New England fishing industry. More than a century before the Mayflower landed, fleets of small ships from Holland, Portugal, and the Basque region of Spain had braved the North Atlantic annually to fish the rich spawning grounds of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, salting their fish ashore and returning with their catch to European ports. It is more than likely that the first European visitors to Provincetown Harbor—originally called Cape Cod Harbor—were Portuguese fishermen who came ashore to cure, or “make,” cod on the long sandy stretches there. Some permanent European settlements may even have existed there in the 1500s.
If the Plymouth settlers were unskilled as fishermen, they were smart enough to sell the rights to fish to others, and in 1670 a tax on the Provincetown fisheries was established as a means of funding public schools in Plymouth. As Thoreau put it, schools of fish were used to provide schools for children. As early as 1730, however, Cape fishing captains were making voyages to the Grand Banks in a “triangle trade:” taking salted cod to the West Indies, exchanging fish for molasses and rum, and bringing them back to the mainland where they were sold to finance new and larger ships for more fishing trips. But during the 18th century most fishing remained inshore, or close to shore, and part-time. Cape Codders remained half-farmers, half-fishermen, and most took only enough for themselves and local markets.
The British embargo on shipping during the American Revolution was disastrous for the Cape’s nascent fishing industry, but after the war it began to come into its own. Shorter and more profitable runs were made in smaller boats, and lightly salted “fresh” fish was brought directly back for sale in Boston. Fish flakes—low wooden slatted platforms on which split cod was salted and sun-dried—became the common method of curing fish. Because of its capacious harbor, “where a thousand sail may safely anchor,” and its extensive sandy beaches providing ideal sites for fish flakes, Provincetown soon became a magnet for the Cape’s burgeoning fish exports. From a mere ten houses in 1755, it boasted a thousand residents in 1802, and by 1840 the Cape-tip community had become the preeminent fishing port on Cape Cod, harboring more than 100 cod trawlers. When Thoreau visited its narrow streets in 1849, he counted over 200 mackerel schooners alone.
The whaler Charles W. Morgan can be toured today at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.
One of the major events in the growth of the Cape’s fishing industry was the opening up of the Georges Banks in 1821. Much closer than Newfoundland’s Grand Banks, but just as fertile, this vast glacial deposit, the work of the same ice sheets that formed Cape Cod, had long been shunned because of its dangerous shoals and currents. But the rising price of cod and halibut tempted more and more fishing captains to its waters. By the mid-1800s a distinctive “banker” version of the Provincetown schooner had evolved, sleeker and faster than the old tub-hulled vessels, giving greater maneuverability on the shoals and greater speed in getting the fish to market first for the best prices. The schooners also began carrying dories aboard. These small, double-ended, highly seaworthy boats were launched from the mother ship with two-man crews, who set out hundreds of yards of hooked lines on floats, hauled in their catch by hand, and waited to be picked up at the end of the day. Deep-sea dory fishing, though it greatly increased the yield of each voyage, also increased the risks for the crews, especially if, as frequently happened, these small rowboats became separated from the schooners in fog or squalls.
After the Civil War the industrial revolution hit the fishing market. Greater concentrations of capital, larger boats, more expensive gear and faster transportation for landed fish were required. Most Cape towns did not possess the resources, the anchorage, or the facilities to compete. They turned instead to local handlining, trap, and weir fishing, or, as in Wellfleet’s case, began to develop local shellfish industries. But Provincetown, reinvigorated by the arrival of the railroad in 1873 and by an influx of Portuguese fishermen from the Azores in the late 1800s, remained a prominent New England fishing port until the end of the century, when the increasing demands of capital investment and labor forced the town to yield to the ports of Boston and Gloucester.
Today Provincetown, Chatham, and several of the other Cape towns still support small but tenacious fleets of local draggers, trawlers, and lobster boats. Declining stocks, smaller quotas, oil spills, competition from foreign “factory ships,” and ever-more-expensive gear have made it even harder for the small fisherman to stay in business. But the independence, challenge, the hope of a “big haul,” and the unexplainable lure of the sea continue to attract local residents to this ancient profession, and it is likely they will continue to do so as long as there are fish to catch.
Colorful boats line up in Provincetown harbor ready for another day of commercial fishing.
Though whaling was never as important to Cape Cod as were its fisheries, it nonetheless formed an significant chapter in the Cape’s maritime history. In the early colonial days drift whales came ashore frequently enough that they formed a portion of some Congregational ministers’ salaries. Live whales were common in Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound, and a modest inshore whaling industry developed in the 17th century. In fact, in 1694 a Yarmouth captain, Ichabod Paddock, was invited to Nantucket to teach the Quaker residents the trade. He apparently did such a good job that Nantucketers soon became the preeminent New England whalers.
Try yards—areas where whale blubber was boiled down, or “tried out,” to obtain the oil—were established early in the 18th century on Barnstable’s Sandy Neck, and in 1715 that town boasted some 200 inshore whalers. But such intensive exploitation soon diminished the nearby stocks, and by 1750 the inshore whaling industry was dying out.
As in fishing, so in whaling, Provincetown with its unrivaled harbor became the Cape’s most important port. At its peak, in 1876, seventeen deep-sea whaling vessels sailed out of Provincetown. The last two Cape whaling vessels made their final voyages from Provincetown in 1920-21. They were the schooner Cameo and the bark Charles W Morgan. The Morgan is preserved at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.
One species of cetacean has had a peculiar attachment to the Cape shores over the centuries. The pilot whale, or blackfish, is a medium-sized toothed whale, 15-22 feet in length. It tends to travel in tight groups, and large numbers of pilot whales frequently strand themselves in the tidal creeks and on the shallow flats of Cape Cod Bay, particularly in the labyrinthine channels around Wellfleet Harbor. Scientists are still trying to fathom the causes of these mass strandings, but to the early Cape Codders they were obviously a gift from God, providing both meat and high-grade whale oil from the rounded “melon” in the front of the whale’s head.
A humpback whale displays its tail stock and flukes off the Provincetown coast. Other species of whales are also commonly seen from spring through fall, including finback, minke, and right whales. These marine mammals, once hunted for their blubber and baleen, now support a thriving whale-watching industry.
Before long lookouts were posted to spot pods of pilot whales coming inshore. Fleets of small boats would then be launched, and their crew members would circle the whales and beat their oars and blow horns to “help” the panicked herd ashore. In 1855 Thoreau witnessed hundreds of blackfish driven ashore at Great Hollow in Truro, and in 1880 a school of more than 1,300 stranded in South Wellfleet at Blackfish Creek, giving it its present name. Strandings of pilot whales continued to be a source of local income for Cape towns into the 1930s, when, for reasons not clear, they largely disappeared. But since the mid-1970s strandings have become common again; in November 1982, sixty-five pilot whales came ashore at Wellfleet’s Lieutenant Island.
In the eyes of many, Cape Codders attained their greatest seafaring eminence as shipmasters in the merchant marine. As captains during the early days of the Republic, they were, as Cape historian Henry Kittredge noted, “the first ambassadors of a young nation.” Later, in command of the great clipper ships of the mid-19th-century, they set a number of transoceanic sailing records that still stand today. They also made considerable fortunes for their owners, and for themselves. This monetary bounty was translated into the hundreds of substantial “captain’s houses” that still stand along the streets of their home towns from Sandwich to Provincetown. Brewster alone is said to have counted more than 50 sea captains residing there at one time.
But perhaps even more important than the fortunes and exotic souvenirs these ship captains brought home from foreign ports was the broad perspective gained by their experience. It was said that many a Cape Codder had been to China who had never gone to Boston by land. Wives and children often sailed with the shipmasters, and several of Cape Cod’s small villages boasted a cosmopolitan culture unusual among mid-19th-century New England towns. Many of the retired ship captains became selectmen in their towns, and, as Kittredge put it, “Narrow-mindedness found barren soil in a district where two houses out of every three belonged to men who knew half the seaports of the world and had lived ashore for months at a time in foreign countries.”
But the sea that brought such bounty and prosperity to Cape Codders during the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was not always kind. There was a dark side to the Cape’s relationship to the ocean, a side reflected in the numerous slate and limestone markers in the Cape’s small burying grounds that bear the inscription “Lost at Sea.”
Over the years the sea has taken the life of many a Cape Cod fisherman. This stone, in the Burying Ground of the First Congregational Parish of Truro, honors Mrs. Rebecca Snow, who died Nov. 4, 1832, and her husband, Capt. Reuben Snow, who was lost at sea in January 1825. The inscription at the bottom reads: “Tho’ in the dust, or in the sea, their mortal bodies rest, their spirits dwell in paradise.”
The 30-mile stretch of land between the Monomoy Shoals on the south and Race Point on the north is one of several East Coast stretches known as “Graveyards of the Atlantic.” The Cape’s sandy outer shore does not look as menacing as, say, the rocky coastline of Maine or Nova Scotia. Its threats take more subtle shapes, in the form of submerged sandbars and treacherous rips, that can easily run a ship aground, and where in winter gales waves will pound a vessel to pieces as effectively as if it were on solid rock.
The first recorded shipwreck on Cape Cod was the Sparrowhawk, an English vessel that struck a sandbar off Orleans in 1626. Since then an estimated 3,000 vessels have been lost in the waters off the Cape, most on the stretch of open Atlantic from Chatham to Provincetown. One of the most famous of the early wrecks was the pirate ship Whydah, a 300-ton galley commanded by “Black Sam” Bellamy, which broke up on the bars off Eastham (now South Wellfleet) on May 8, 1717. More than 145 lives were lost in the wreck, and of the nine survivors, seven were tried for piracy and hanged on Boston Common.
Cape Codders early on recognized that those who went “down to the sea in ships” did not always come back. The most deadly areas were the shoals and rips off Monomoy—places known as “Cape Mallebarre” and “Tucker’s Terror”—and the infamous Peaked Hill Bars off the Atlantic, or back side, of Provincetown. Not all losses occurred close to shore, however. Once fishing vessels began making trips to the Georges and Grand Banks, entire fleets were sometimes caught in furious fall northeasters, winter gales, and hurricanes. Perhaps the worst single storm, in terms of its effects on local Cape communities, was the disastrous October Gale of 1841. Dozens of ships and more than 100 men were lost on Georges Banks. Truro alone lost 57 men. When Thoreau passed through Truro a decade after the storm, the community was still in mourning: “‘Who lives in that house?’ I inquired. ‘Three widows,’ was the reply.”
The first organized attempt to aid shipwrecked sailors was made in 1794, when the Massachusetts Humane Society began to build a series of Humane Houses, or Charity Huts, along the Outer Beach. Located at the “hollows” in the sea cliff for ease of access, these Humane Houses were at first no more than crude huts, irregularly stocked with straw, matches, and a few other items of survival that might see a shipwrecked sailor through the night. Later they were equipped with small boats and rope lines with mortars that volunteer crews might use to try to reach sailors stranded offshore.
Cape Cod, or Highland, Light, the first lighthouse on the Cape, was erected in 1796 atop the clay cliffs in North Truro. In the next 70 years others followed: the twin lights of Chatham in 1808; Race Point in 1816; Monomoy in 1823; Long Point in 1826; the original “Three Sisters of Nauset” in 1838; and Wood End in 1872. The establishment of these lights significantly reduced the number of wrecks off the back shore. But lighthouses and beacons were of little help during intense fogs or furious northeast storms when anchors dragged and sailing ships caught rounding the Cape could not manage to stay offshore. More often than not ships became trapped between the outer and inner bars, and Cape residents had to stand helplessly on the shore as men froze in the rigging or were washed overboard into icy seas only a hundred yards from land.
A major step in aiding these wreck victims was taken in 1872, when Congress established the U.S. Life Saving Service, the culmination of a series of federal measures that had begun in 1847 with an appropriation to subsidize the Massachusetts Humane Society. Nine stations were initially built, and eventually four others joined them. In 1915 the U.S. Life Saving Service was merged with the Revenue Cutter Service to form the U.S. Coast Guard.
Ironically, the sea disasters provided yet one more way of making a living for Cape Codders. Compassionate and selfless as they were in their efforts to save lives and aid victims of wrecks wherever possible, they were also pragmatic. Salvaging, or wrecking, as it was called, provided windfalls for the local populace. This practice gave rise to the legend of the nefarious “mooncussers,” men who deliberately lured ships to their doom with lighted lanterns on the beach on dark, moonless nights.
There is no evidence that “mooncussing” was ever engaged in by Cape Codders, but they were both philosophic and industrious about what the sea threw up on their shores, whether drift whales or freighters filled with useful cargo. During the 19th century wrecking became a true business. Salvaging crews were organized and hired by owners of wrecked ships to refloat or unload the vessels. Some local farmers spent as much time on the beaches as they did in their fields. E. Hayes Small of North Truro was one such man. On one occasion, using heavy block and tackle, cradles and eight horses, he hoisted 15,000 board feet of lumber off the beach to the top of the 150-foot bluffs north of Highland Light.
In 1914, however, a long-envisioned project finally became a reality and forever changed the history of wrecks, wrecking, and lifesaving on Cape Cod. A canal across the Cape, eliminating the entire arduous and dangerous outside passage for ships sailing between Boston and New York, had been dreamed of by Pilgrim leader Myles Standish, proposed as early as 1676, and approved in principle by George Washington. However, despite numerous government studies and the formation of at least four private canal companies, nothing substantial was accomplished until 1906, when New York financier Augustus P. Belmont took control of the Boston, New York, and Cape Cod Canal Company. Construction began on June 19, 1909, and the first vessels sailed through the newly completed Canal on July 29, 1914. The longest sea-level canal in the world, it was widened to 500 feet in 1935, and the present Sagamore and Bourne bridges were constructed. Today some 30,000 vessels annually sail through its protected passage.
With the canal’s completion, the number of shipwrecks off the back side of the Cape declined precipitously, and so did the need for the 13 manned Life Saving stations. In 1915 they were incorporated into the newly-formed U.S. Coast Guard. Today the Outer Cape has only two Coast Guard stations, one at Chatham Light, the other in Provincetown Harbor.
Birds of the Shore
Red-breasted merganser
American oystercatcher
Canvasback pair
Sanderlings
Lesser and greater yellowlegs
Ruddy turnstone
Ring-billed gull
Osprey
Dunlin
Common terns
Great blue heron
Willet
Snowy egret
Spotted sandpiper
Green-backed heron
Common eider family
Workers flood and then corral floating ripe cranberries in the annual fall harvest.