At one time it may have great holes cut through it, and at another time it creeps along and closes up the gaps, and alters the whole character of the country behind it. Its queer habit of creeping along the shore in certain places has given such parts the name of travelling beaches. Really, I suppose, there are no beaches in the world that do not travel about at some time. They are all restless things, and while we may not see them move, we feel very sure they can and do travel for miles wherever the winds and waves compel them. People who live on these travelling beaches try to stop them by building heavy stone walls, or by driving rows of piles across them. They do not seem to care much, and in some places the sand and rolling pebbles climb over the walls, and travel on very much as they please. Coney Island is one of these travelling beaches, Rockaway is another, Sandy Hook is part of another.
The only thing that can stop one of these creeping beaches is a river. The Hudson River, flowing out of New York Bay, breaks the beach in two between the Highlands of Navesink and Long Island. There has been a big fight here between the beach and the river. Coney Island has crept out like a crooked finger from the east, and Sandy Hook has travelled up for several miles from the south. If the river were not the strongest, the beaches would creep out from each side and grow right across the great bay, and Sandy Hook would touch Coney Island. Then, in place of the wide bay open to the sea, there would be a long beach, with the ocean on the outside and a fresh-water lake on the inside.
All the rivers that flow east from the mountains in the Eastern States below New York Bay have had to fight with this creeping beach before they could escape into the sea. In some places the beaches have crept right across the streams, and compelled them to turn aside and go another way.
NEW JERSEY COAST SOUTH OF SANDY HOOK.
Here is a map showing one place where long years ago there was a strange fight between the creeping beach and two poor little rivers. The place is on the New Jersey shore not far from New York. At the bottom of the map is a part of the Shrewsbury River. Just north of it is another and larger stream called the Navesink. Still farther north are the high hills called the Highlands of Navesink. In front of these two streams and the hills is a narrow strip of beach, and outside of this is the Atlantic Ocean. There is a carriage-road and a railroad on top of the beach, and from the car windows you can see the surf breaking on one side, and the still waters of the two rivers on the other side. It is so narrow that often the sea breaks entirely over it, and in the summer-time you can walk from one side to the other in less than two minutes. To the north this beach extends to Sandy Hook, and to the south it stretches for hundreds of miles, with here and there a break, as at the Chesapeake or at the Delaware Capes, far down to Florida. Pine-trees grow on it here. Far away to the south the wild palmetto, the orange-trees, and the bananas grow along the shore.
The strange thing about the place shown on this map is found just where the two rivers meet. A long time ago—so long that no one can tell when it may have happened—the rivers ran into the sea just where the beach is now. Where the hotels and cottages stand was once deep water. There are two ways in which this may have happened: it may have been a storm that threw up a bar across the river's mouth, or the creeping beach may have slowly pushed its way along and closed it up. It may have been both the storm and the creeping sand. At any rate, we may feel pretty sure the river was dammed up, and the water, finding no other outlet, turned to the north, and burst through into Sandy Hook Bay. It cut a path along the front of the hills, and there we find it to-day, a narrow river running to the north between the beach and the high-lands. Steam-boats pass up the Navesink River this way, and a bridge has been built over the stream to the beach. All this, as it is to-day, is shown on the map.
This creeping motion of the beach is very curious. The waves when the wind blows from the south or southeast strike the shore obliquely; that is, instead of rolling in "broad-side," as the sailors would say, or squarely in front, they strike at an angle. One end of the wave strikes the bottom first, and the breaking surf seems to run along the beach, instead of falling all at once, for some distance. The waves, as you have seen, push the sand along before them, and so it happens that these southeast waves drive the sand along as well as up the beach. The sand slides and rolls toward the right, or north, and the beach is said to creep or travel. If there is an opening in the beach, the waves push the sand from the south into the opening, and it grows out into the deep water just as you saw in the picture of the sand-bar. This beach has already crept three miles out into the water, and made Sandy Hook.
One thing is quite certain. There was at one time a deep channel through the beach just here. At one time not many years ago a storm broke through the beach, and a ship, losing its way, ran in there, and was wrecked. Not a trace of the old hull can be found now. The beach long ago crept over the place, and to-day the sand makes a solid strip of land there, just as we see it.
Look at the map again. Opposite the two rivers, outside the beach, you see a curious tongue or spit running out from the shore. This is under water, out of sight. The United States Coast Survey sent their boats all over this place, and measured the depth. The numbers on the map show the depth of the water in feet. Just here it is shallow. A little farther north, directly opposite the two rivers, it is much deeper. Again, farther along, there are more sandy spits and bars running out under water. This shows that at one time there was a deep channel here between the two shoals. It is fair to suppose this deep place was the old mouth of a river. It is said there are even some old teeth left in it yet, for on the southern spit is a buoy that marks a dangerous place called the Shrewsbury Rocks. All these things tell us that at one time these two rivers ran into the sea where now the beach stands, and that the waves and the creeping sand got the best of the rivers, and altered the whole face of the country hereabouts. Where once was an inlet and a swift river is now a beach and a broad shallow-stream, lined with marshes, and slowly filling up with salt grasses and soft mud washed down from the red soil of the hills. What will happen next may be quite as strange as that which has gone before.