| Part 1 | A Fragile Coastal Retreat | [4] |
| A Cape for All Seasons | [7] | |
| Part 2 | A Great Arm in the Sea | [20] |
| A Sliver of Sand | [23] | |
| The Bountiful Sea | [45] | |
| The Cape’s Transformation | [69] | |
| A Glacial Base | [26] | |
| The Restless Shore | [28] | |
| Wampanoag Indians | [32] | |
| Pilgrims First Landing | [34] | |
| The Cape Cod House | [38] | |
| Whaling’s Heyday | [48] | |
| Cape Codders and the Sea | [50] | |
| Fisheries | [54] | |
| Saltworks | [56] | |
| A Coastline Littered With Shipwrecks | [60] | |
| Lighthouses and Lifesaving | [62] | |
| Two Henrys: Thoreau and Beston | [72] | |
| The Cranberry Bog | [74] | |
| Marconi’s Wireless Station | [78] | |
| Part 3 | Guide and Adviser | [84] |
| Visiting Cape Cod | [86] | |
| Map of the National Seashore | [88] | |
| The National Seashore | [90] | |
| Water Activities | [92] | |
| Whale-Watching | [94] | |
| Recreation Ashore | [96] | |
| Birdwatching | [98] | |
| Orleans, Brewster, and Chatham | [100] | |
| Eastham and Wellfleet | [102] | |
| Truro and Provincetown | [104] | |
| Nearby Attractions | [106] | |
| Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket | [107] | |
| Safety, Other Management Concerns | [108] | |
| Armchair Explorations | [109] | |
| Index | [110] | |
Preceding pages: The sun sets over Provincetown and the towering Pilgrim Monument. Such tranquil scenes can be misleading, for the Cape is a place of shifting sands and struggling grasses.
Part 1
A Fragile Coastal Retreat
Summer, fall, winter, spring, the interaction of the sea and the land is clearly evident on Cape Cod’s Outer Beach.
A Cape for All Seasons
Majestically eroded, the great glacial bluffs of Cape Cod’s outer beach rise from the open Atlantic, separating the ocean from Cape Cod Bay. Its many-colored sands and clays flow grain by grain, or in sudden shelving slabs, to replenish the shore below. The beach, broad and gently sloping in summer, short and steep in winter, arcs northward for more than 20 miles, giving the walker a curved prospect two or three miles ahead at most. And always, coming onto the shore and reforming it, with measured cadences in calm weather, with awesome fury during northeast gales, is the sea. Here, as Henry Beston put it, “the ocean encounters the last defiant bulwark of two worlds.” There is no other landscape like it anywhere.
Cape Cod holds a special place in America’s landscape, history, and collective imagination. As the world’s largest glacial peninsula, it juts farther out into the Atlantic Ocean than any other part of the United States. It was one of the earliest landfalls of the European explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its purported identity as the “Wonderstrand” of the Viking sagas remains apocryphal, but it was—as every Cape Codder will be quick to tell you—indisputably the first landing place of the Mayflower Pilgrims in 1620, and it became one of the oldest settled areas in the country.