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.”
