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.