Chapter XV: The Canal

As soon as Governor Bradford established an outpost at Manomet in 1627 for trade with the Dutch at New York, the route of the Cape Cod Canal was virtually fixed. Nature had already done a large part of the work; on the north, Scusset Creek wound inland through marshes and low land, until it came within striking distance of Manomet River, which flows south into Buzzards Bay. Then, too, this route cut off the entire Cape--not part of it, as a canal farther east would have done. The Indians used to carry their canoes across the mile or two that separated the headwaters of the two streams; blockade-runners in the War of 1812 did the same with their whaleboats. Every prospect pleased; only man and machinery were needed.

Man was ready to undertake the job and was already talking about it in 1676, as appears from an entry in the diary of Samuel Sewall--that ubiquitous New-Englander whose active mind touched every phase of life and thought. On this occasion he was visiting Mr. Thomas Smith in Sandwich:

26 Octo’r, 1676. Mr. Smith rode with me and showed me the place which
some had thought to cut, for to make a passage from the south sea to
the north. He said it was about a mile and a half between the utmost
flowing of the two seas in Herring River and Scusset--the land very
low and level.... Moniment harbor said to be very good.

The project got no farther for the moment than to serve as a subject for speculative conversation, but Smith was still interested twenty years later, when the General Court ordered Mr. John Otis, of Barnstable, and Captain William Bassett and Mr. Thomas Smith, of Sandwich, to look the ground over and report what the cost of a canal would be and whether the scheme was feasible.

Yet the subject was not dropped. Men were fascinated by it who had never been on the Cape, and the chance traveler could hardly get through Sandwich without being taken to inspect the route. Prince, in 1736, refers to ‘the place thro’ which there has been a canal talked of this forty years.’ The King’s ships which hovered offshore during the Revolution brought the matter up again with an urgency it had never had before. The General Court sent a committee, consisting of the Honorable James Bowdoin and others, to Sandwich to look into the question and report. The committee very sensibly sought the advice of local talent before deciding on anything, and invited Colonel Nathaniel Freeman and others to join them in their labors. They were favorably impressed with the scheme, and engaged a Government engineer, Thomas Machin, to draw up plans and furnish an estimate of the expenses. But Machin’s work was interrupted, as appears from a letter which General Washington wrote to James Bowdoin at Boston:

NEW YORK, June 10, 1776

SIR,--Congress having requested my attendance in Philadelphia, I
was in that city when your letter of the 11th ultimo came to this
place,--this day’s post therefore, affords me the first opportunity
of acknowledging receipt of it.

I am hopeful that you applied to General Ward, and have received all
the assistance that Mr. Machin could give, in determining upon the
practicability of cutting a canal between Barnstable and Buzzard’s
Bay ere this, as the great demand we have for engineers in this
department, Canada, &c., has obliged me to order Mr. Machin hither to
assist in that branch of business.

I thank you most heartily for your kind congratulations on the
departure of the troops from Boston, and am, with very great esteem,

Sir, your most obedient, humble servant,
GEO. WASHINGTON

HON. JAMES BOWDOIN, BOSTON.

Before this order came, Machin had gone so far as to propose a canal fourteen feet deep with two double locks at each end and two bridges. The expense he estimated at £32,148, 1_s._, 8_d._--very nice figuring!

The struggling colonies had no money or men to spare for such work during the next seven years; but almost as soon as the war was over, they were at it again, this time sending young James Winthrop from Cambridge to the Cape, first to examine the old route, and second to survey a possible new course from Barnstable Harbor to the anchorage at what is now Hyannisport, taking in the two Hathaways and Nine Mile Ponds on the way. Winthrop submitted detailed figures for the Sandwich Canal, but merely rode over the ground from Barnstable to Centerville, took the Reverend Mr. Mellen’s word for the height of Kidd’s Hill, and relied on local information as to the depth of the various ponds. He rightly regarded the high ridge that runs all along that part of the Cape as a discouraging obstacle, and gave the project of a canal there no further thought. Mr. Mellen, who accompanied Winthrop over the Barnstable-Hyannis course, mentions two others which were contemplated at least as early as 1794. One led from the Bass Hole in Yarmouth to the eastern part of Lewis Bay in Hyannis. This scheme apparently died at birth. The other, which included Bass River, in South Yarmouth, was so alluring that it was not abandoned for more than a century.

It had, indeed, much to commend it, for Bass River is the noblest of all the tidal creeks which wind inland from the Sound, and it terminates in a chain of ponds in Weir Village at no great distance from White’s Brook, Yarmouth, which flows into the creeks that thread the beautiful marshes of Hockanom on the Bay shore. Thus the high ridge of the Cape that frightened Winthrop would be avoided, and the route, though by no means straight, presented few obstacles to the engineer. No less eminent a geologist than Professor Shaler thought that this way through the Cape would be better than the Monument River route. He points out that there were only four places where a canal might easily be dug: Monument River, Bass River, Town Cove, Orleans, and Pamet River, Truro. The last two he eliminated because vessels using them would still have dangerous waters to navigate. Of the remaining two he prefers Bass River because it could be used at the last minute in case of bad weather by a vessel whose captain had planned, other things being equal, to sail all the way round and save the toll. If the canal was at Monument River, a captain would have to decide very soon after leaving port whether or not to use it, for it would mean a different course almost from the outset. Shaler’s arguments, however, went unheeded, for the old route was still, in the opinion of most people, the best one.

The citizens of Orleans and Eastham, with proper local pride, pinned great faith to the course which Cyprian Southack followed in his whaleboat in 1717. He crossed the Cape by water from the Bay to the Ocean, using Boat Meadow Creek, Jeremiah’s Gutter, Town Cove, and Nauset Harbor--all of which he found connected. This was unusual, but certainly not unprecedented, for geological evidence indicates that at a remote period the water had a free sweep through this cut, which was then much wider. While a small canal at this point would have been easy to dig and a great convenience for local traffic, it would have eliminated neither the Monomoy Shoals nor Peaked Hill Bars. This wrote its death warrant. It is said, to be sure, that the citizens of Orleans and Eastham cut a passage through at this point during the War of 1812 to enable small boats to run the blockade, and five years later a more elaborate canal was contemplated by a corporation known as the Eastham and Orleans Canal Proprietors; but it was never dug.

Meanwhile, the old Monument River passage was receiving more attention than all the others put together; and it will be wise to follow the crowd back to it. On the strength of Winthrop’s report in 1791, the Legislature was convinced that a canal was practicable and agreed to authorize any person to construct it and charge a reasonable toll. But it was one thing to ride over the ground with surveying instruments and announce that the project was an easy one; it was quite another to construct the canal. Every one, in fact, seemed anxious that a canal should be dug, but no one seemed at all anxious to dig it. Wendell Davis, in his description of Sandwich in 1802, urged it with exuberant eloquence and asserted (on what authority he does not say) that the owners were ready to _give_ the land along the proposed route to any company that would undertake the work. At about the same time a certain James Sullivan and twenty associates appeared at the State House in Boston with a mysterious scheme which they declared was far better than any of the old ones, and asked that they be allowed to incorporate and put it through. Nobody paid much attention to them, and they were heard of no more. Still the ground was surveyed every few years by one person or another until, in the language of the late Senator McCall, every grain of sand along the whole route had been made the victim of an algebraic equation. In 1812, the strategic advantages of such a waterway in time of war were repeatedly demonstrated by local blockade-runners. Here was proof enough, said its supporters, that the canal was necessary as a war-time measure, and in 1818 they sent Loammi Baldwin to Sandwich to resurvey the ground that had been trodden hard by the surveyors of a hundred and fifty years. But Baldwin’s report, if he ever made one, inspired no more diggers than the reports of his predecessors.

Thanks to the efforts of Senator Lloyd, of Massachusetts, the taverns of Sandwich echoed in 1825 to the pompous tread of Government engineers from Washington with Major Perault at their head. This officer’s careful report was just as fruitful as all the others had been, and for a generation after 1830 the legislators in the State House and the Congressmen in Washington had a rest from the monotonous subject of the Cape Cod Canal. The reason for the welcome silence was that the merchants of New England had by this time worked up an impressive foreign trade. Boston capitalists were thinking in terms of big ships and long voyages; coasting was too small game for them, and without their influence and support it was idle for the small fry, who would have used the canal, to keep up the clamor. Short railway lines began to cut into the coasters’ business. With the fifties came the clipper ships. During all these activities, the project for a canal took a long and well-earned nap. When in 1861 a few wise shipowners began to realize that the days of sail were numbered, the scheme stirred for a moment as though to awake, half listening to the favorable utterances of Governor Banks in his inaugural message to the Legislature. It came wide awake a little later when a committee arrived with the familiar surveying instruments, but dropped off to sleep again as soon as it saw the same old maneuvers and heard the same old technicalities. But this committee struck one new note when it asked the coöperation of the United States Coast Survey, and incidentally of the United States Treasury. Henry Mitchell, a real authority on tides and their effect on coast lines, was sent down by the Government, together with specialists in other departments, and it began to look as if something might happen at last. But the war drove the subject from everybody’s mind for the next four or five years, and by the time Lee had surrendered, the elaborate reports of Mitchell and his colleagues were of academic interest only. It is significant that nobody, from Governor Bradford in 1627 to the group of engineers who went over the ground in 1861, ever reported that a canal was inadvisable or impracticable, but that, almost without exception, they recommended locks rather than a free-water passage.

After the war, in spite of the fact that considerable New England capital began to head westward and that some was still tied up in sailing ships, a group of enthusiasts in 1870 applied for and received incorporation as the Cape Cod Canal Company with authority to raise money and dig the ditch if they could. The Legislature further suggested that the Federal Government might properly pay for the construction of a breakwater at the end of the passage. Washington was still in a friendly mood and sent General Foster to look the situation over. He, like all previous engineers, found nothing to prevent the construction of a canal, but unlike the rest, he recommended a free-water passage rather than one that depended on locks. He also declared that ‘its military value in time of war equaled its commercial value in time of peace,’ but after seven years in irons, the corporation had apparently done nothing. The Legislature ordered an investigation of their activities or inactivities; the investigators reported that it was doubtful whether that company would ever construct a canal, but they seized the opportunity to add, with more truthfulness than originality, that a canal would be a splendid thing for New England! The State House gave the Cape Cod Canal Company three years more to get started. Clemens Herschel, a distinguished civil engineer, wrote a somewhat rhetorical pamphlet in behalf of the company in 1878, entitled ‘The Cape Cod Ship Canal,’ but this seems to have been the extent of the organization’s accomplishments.

Since nothing was done, a new charter was given in 1880 to Henry M. Whitney and associates under the name of The Cape Cod Ship Canal Company. Whitney’s engineer made a number of borings along the route and reported great quantities of quicksand. This so alarmed the corporation that they announced that the work would cost nearer seven million than four million dollars, which was all their charter authorized, and so stepped out of the running. Before they withdrew, however, they made a futile, and as it turned out a disastrous, move toward excavation by importing several hundred Italians from New York and setting them to work with shovels and wheelbarrows. The Cape was not so used to foreigners in the eighties as it has since become. The arrival of even one or two strangers was then an event; the arrival of five hundred was an earthquake. Before long trouble arose between them and the townspeople. It has been alleged that the Italians were not paid regularly and that they took it out on the town by breaking into shops and terrorizing the inhabitants. Politicians called the disturbance ‘the Neapolitan revolt’ and declared that ‘Sandwich was for a week under arms; ... life and property were exposed to the hungry mob, and the entire community terrified at the presence of an army of houseless, starving, unpaid rampant foreigners.... The State came to her protection and assisted in keeping the peace.’ Senator McCall refers more mildly to the incident, yet speaks of the ‘depredations committed by these Italians.’ It was at least a very unfortunate incident and shows clearly enough the incompetence of the Whitney Company’s management.

A new company filled the breach and was incorporated in 1883 under the same name as Whitney’s--The Cape Cod Ship Canal Company. The chief mover in this company was William Seward, Jr., and another member of it was Samuel Fessenden, of Sandwich. They contracted with Frederick A. Lockwood, head of a construction company in East Boston, to do the work, and from this time on the organization was generally known as the Lockwood Company, for the charter parties remained silently in the background, leaving the whole arena to Lockwood.

They were very soon in trouble. The exact nature of their difficulties does not appear, but the introduction to a reprint of Herschel’s pamphlet, which they got out in 1884, states that: ‘The same delightful selfishness which has in the past endeavored to maintain the undue tax and impost it has so far collected from the public, is again opposing the work which has been begun, and is seeking to throttle it, in the selfish fear that its foothold for such undue tax and impost might suffer a slight deterioration.’ The railroad had given Whitney trouble in the Legislature, and was perhaps still clogging the wheels of progress for the new company. But whatever the vague language quoted above may refer to, the Lockwood Company met with two very definite obstacles in the first year of its existence. One was a suit by a certain Mr. Fox, of Montreal, alleging that he had had a contract before Lockwood. The other was a suit for land damages brought by one Briggs, who owned some land along the line of the canal and was dissatisfied with the price that Lockwood had condemned it for. All this litigation delayed the work, and the company had to apply for an extension of their charter (the original terms had stipulated that the work should be finished in four years). At the same session of the Legislature, two other persons, Gerard C. Tobey, of Wareham, and Alfred D. Fox, of Montreal, also applied separately for incorporation and authority to dig the canal.

Here was a different state of affairs with a vengeance! Instead of its being impossible to find a company that would tackle the job, as had formerly been the case, the Legislature was now besieged by three rival concerns, all clamoring for the privilege! Beacon Hill became a battle-ground, resounding to the forensic endeavors in behalf of this petitioner or that. Fox, the Montreal applicant, though his claim to a contract antedating Lockwood’s had been denied by the Court, was now applying to the Legislature for authority to incorporate separately. The fact that he was a Canadian and relied at least in part on Canadian capital told heavily against him in Boston and is one reason why his application failed. Tobey, the Wareham applicant, was certainly a more logical candidate for the job. He was familiar with the upper Cape and was a man of wide business experience and varied interests. If he and his associates had been given corporate powers on this occasion, they would probably have done at least as well as Lockwood; but because Lockwood was first in the field, already had a charter, and was seeking only an extension of the stipulated time--a courtesy which the Legislature had frequently shown on other occasions--he came off victorious in the triangular bout.

It must be confessed, too, that though he did not accomplish great things, yet he did more than any of his predecessors. At his works in East Boston, he built a dredge specially designed to dig the canal. It arrived off the Sandwich Beach in the early spring of 1884, was floated through a cut in the beach, and began to eat its way through the Scusset marshes while the whole town cheered. This dredge, more than anything else, established Lockwood firmly in favor with the citizens of Sandwich, but it achieved nothing remarkable. By spasmodic activity it dug a deep ditch for a mile into the marsh. Then it stopped for good; there was not money enough to keep its fires stoked, and the dredge was sold where it stood, was quickly dismantled, and finally sank into the grave its own bucket chain had dug, the hull remaining a dilapidated landmark for years.

Fox meantime had formed a corporation which he said could get all the money it wanted from Canada. Some estimable men were on its board. Fox left them in Boston and went to Canada to raise the money; but it was not forthcoming. The board had made pledges which they wished to redeem; by degrees it became evident that they never could redeem them if they relied on Fox. They therefore asked Lockwood to join them and tackle the job again. This Lockwood did--apparently regarding his contract with the Seward-Fessenden Company as dead. Seward instantly bombarded Boston bankers with circulars alleging that his company was the only legal and authorized one, and warning them to beware of Lockwood. Judgment of the rights and wrongs of the question must be sought elsewhere than in the pages of the present volume, for it is quite beyond the author’s powers to decide them. If ever a strip of land was a parade-ground for surveyors first and a battle-ground for legislative vituperation afterwards, it was the route of the Cape Cod Canal. One thing, however, is clear; Lockwood’s chances of actually completing the job vanished when his dredge was sold. His activities from then on were those of a minor capitalist, a solicitor and a lobbyist, rather than an engineer. If he had lived longer, perhaps he would have succeeded. But his health failed, and he died without digging another cubic yard of sand on the Cape. His backers (among them Colonel Livermore, Quincy A. Shaw, John M. Forbes, and Henry L. Higginson) turned their energies into other channels. So ended the long and complicated struggle among the three applicants, Fox, Tobey, and Lockwood. Though Lockwood was for most of the time on the top of the heap, yet he failed after all to accomplish what had become the dominant desire of his life.

Two other companies were organized between 1892 and 1898--the Massachusetts Maritime Canal Company and the Old Colony and Interior Canal Company--but neither of them came anywhere near joining the waters of the two Bays.

In 1898, in fact, the citizens of the Cape were commenting with amused cynicism on the amount of activity and oratory expended in their behalf on the floor of the State House. The Barnstable ‘Patriot’ voiced the sentiment of the majority when its editor wrote, ‘No less than seven projects for a Cape Cod Canal are to come before the legislature this year. Meanwhile, despite all threats, the Cape hangs on the mainland with the grim determination characteristic of its people.’

The beginning of the end came on June 1, 1899, when the Legislature granted a charter to the Boston, Cape Cod and New York Canal Company. The incorporators were William Flannagan, De Witt Flannagan, and other New-Yorkers. They bought the land along the proposed route from Colonel Livermore and spent several years in perfecting their arrangements, while their engineer, Charles M. Thompson, of the old Lockwood Company, camped on the ground that he already knew so well. They had moderate success in arousing the interest of capitalists, but never until they applied to Mr. August Belmont did they actually see their way clear to constructing the canal. It was in 1906 that De Witt Flannagan first brought the project to Mr. Belmont’s attention. Belmont became so much interested that he consulted a group of the most eminent men in the fields of engineering, transportation, and maritime affairs. Mr. Belmont then spread all their figures before Mr. Barclay Parsons, one of the greatest engineers of his day and a member of the Panama Canal Commission, and requested him to go over the whole problem. Mr. Parsons did so and then went to Sandwich, where he met Mr. Thompson, who exhibited some samples that had been taken from borings along the route under the Livermore régime. The samples contained quicksand, and Parsons was dubious. But Thompson explained that all the borings had been made in the lowest land along the line--the very central axis of the future waterway--and that naturally all the quicksand in the valley had accumulated during the ages along that line. This proved to be the case; no other deposits of quicksand were found; Parsons reported favorably to Belmont, and the work began.

Mr. Belmont’s reasons for embarking on the enterprise, in which so many had failed, were numerous. Chief among them was the consideration that if New England was to continue as a manufacturing center, it was imperative for her to import raw material cheaply. Every vessel wrecked involved not only loss of life and property, but in many cases had a far-reaching effect on industry by diminishing the supply of raw material for New England looms. Any means that would help to keep the supply of coal and cotton large and regular deserved the support of all who were interested in New England’s prosperity. This state of affairs turned the Canal’s old foe, the Railroad, into a friend, for its prosperity depended on the prosperity of New England.

Another element which had great weight with Mr. Belmont was the change which had taken place in the method of coastwise transportation. Coasting schooners, which had carried nearly all the freight that did not go by rail, were being crowded out by barges in tow. The great advantage of these lay in their regularity (provided the weather was good), and in the enormous amount of material they could transport in a single trip. Their disadvantage was that in rough water they were helpless. The Canal would, therefore, be a blessing to them, and might rely on doing a far bigger business than it would have done if the coasting schooner had remained supreme. Furthermore, the Canal was not an isolated and independent waterway, but was to be the northernmost link in a contemplated ‘chain of improved inland waters from Panama to Massachusetts.’ Here were reasons enough for Mr. Belmont. Capital presented no difficulties to him. From now on the work was in the hands of contractors and engineers.

The first block of granite for the breakwater was dropped on June 19, 1909; the first trickle of water flowed through a gap that the dredges made in the last dam, on April 21, 1914; and on July 4, Mr. Belmont, with his son and Mr. and Mrs. Parsons, rowed the first craft through the finished breach. The Canal was officially opened on July 29, when eight vessels went through. Its channel is 25 feet deep, 250 feet wide at water level, and 100 feet wide on the bottom; the approaching channels are wider, measuring 250 feet. Exclusive of these approaches, the Canal is 8 miles long. Since its completion, the Canal has been used increasingly. From moderate beginnings, its business by 1920 had reached a gratifying figure: in that year 120,000 passengers and 2,000,000 tons of cargo passed through it on 8140 vessels.

Almost as soon as it was announced that Mr. Belmont was to finance the work, the report went round that the company intended to sell it to the Government. Whether or not this was the case is a question of no importance. The canal was built entirely by private capital, and its financiers got back what money they could on their investment during the fourteen years that it continued under their management. Finally, Western oratory to the contrary notwithstanding, Congress voted to buy it for $11,500,000. The transaction was completed during the winter of 1927-28, and the Government officially took charge of the Canal on April 1. The Cape as a whole favored the change, though it cost the towns of Sandwich and Bourne the taxes on some $1,000,000 worth of real estate.

Such at present is the status of this new waterway--new in reality, old in the dreams of men. What the future has in store for it is a question on which wise men prefer to hold their peace. One reads of plans maturing in the Federal incubator, to spend $10,000,000 of the Nation’s money to make the Canal wider and deeper. If events march as slowly in the future as they have in the past, the present generation’s grandchildren will see no change in the Canal. But the ways of governments are past finding out. It would hardly be a surprise to the older and shock-proof citizens of Sagamore and Bourne if they awoke some morning to the tune of steam shovels and dredges; if they saw an army of laborers swarming about the Canal, until they had made it big enough for the Leviathan herself to sail through. In the mean time it has its past which nothing can change; Bradford’s dream, Sewall’s polite interest, George Washington’s letter, and Machin and young James Winthrop at the head of a column of surveyors and capitalists that stretches clear to Boston. At the end of the pageant come Belmont and Parsons, each with a crown of laurel and a victor’s smile.