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
