Many early accounts attest to the extent and scale of the Cape’s original woodlands. Even at Provincetown, which must have always been the most barren area of the Outer Cape, the Pilgrim leader William Bradford observed “The whole countrie, full of woods and thickets, wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, some ash, walnut, the wood for the most part open and without underwood, fit to go or ride in.”
Archeologists now believe that the Cape Cod Indians may have practiced a form of low-level woodland management, burning underbrush, or wooded ridges, to provide browse for game and to make hunting easier. Such burns may have promoted the Cape’s characteristic pine barrens, tracts of open woodlands composed primarily of pitch pine, a tree adapted to periodic fires.
Some glacial lands, now vanished, still existed in historical times. There are many early references, for example, to Ile Nauset, or Nauset Isle, a point of land that lay off Nauset Beach, perpendicular to the coastline. It may have formed part of Cape Mallebarre, the place of “dangerous shoals and roaring breakers” that turned back the Mayflower from its intended destination of Virginia. Nauset Isle had sunk beneath the waves by the 18th century, but another piece of early glacial real estate survived much longer. In the late 19th century, Billingsgate Island, off Jeremy Point in Wellfleet, was a flourishing 60-acre fishing community with livestock, a schoolhouse, and a lighthouse. By 1915, however, the island had been abandoned, and by 1942 it had vanished, the victim of gradual erosion by currents, storms, and rising sea levels. Today, at low tide, one can view the remains of this Wellfleetian Atlantis from the southern bluffs of Great Beach Hill: an extensive spread of granite boulders brought over on ships as riprap in a futile attempt to stem the tides.
In Capt. Myles Standish the Pilgrims had both a military and temporal leader. He helped found the Plymouth Colony, led a group that bought the colony from London investors, and served as assistant governor and treasurer for 5 years. Metacomet, or King Philip, shown in an engraving by Paul Revere, was killed leading the Wampanoags in an unsuccessful war concerning land disputes with the English settlers in 1676.
To get some idea of the scope of erosion on the Outer Beach, consider this: in 1990 an ancient prehistoric site was uncovered at Coast Guard Beach; archeologists have estimated that at the time of its occupation, nearly 9,000 years ago, it was five miles inland. More recent evidence of erosion can often be observed on the Seashore’s ocean side. At Nauset Light Beach, a circular brick foundation from one of the former “Three Sisters” lighthouses (replaced in 1923 with the present single light) is frequently uncovered in winter at the base of the cliffs, having survived a 50-foot slide to the beach. Farther north, at the Marconi Site in South Wellfleet, Guglielmo Marconi constructed his original transmitting towers in 1901-1902, set back 165 feet from the edge of the cliff. Today only two of the foundations remain; the other two have fallen into the sea.
Few things remain in place on the edge of the cliffs or on the dunes. They either move or disappear. Cape Cod Light, first built in 1796, has been replaced twice; the current tower sits some 600 feet back from the site of the original one, though only a little more than 100 feet from the present cliff edge. The present Eastham Coast Guard Station, built in 1936, is a successor to the first one, which succumbed to beach erosion. When the Seashore was established in 1961, more than 80 cottages existed on its barrier beaches. Today, as a result of subsequent storms, less than one quarter of them remain.
Logs and other objects, including the remains of old shipwrecks, are frequently uncovered by eroding dunes and beaches. During a dramatic storm, while he was staying in the Outermost House in the 1920s, Henry Beston described how the blackened skeleton of an ancient ship that had been buried in a dune for more than a century “floated and lifted itself free ... thus stirring from its grave and yielding its bones again to the fury of the gale.”
