Chapter IV: Part 2: A Great Arm in the Sea (2)

The Wisconsin Stage Glacier reached into southern New England 25,000 years ago and melted away more than 17,000 years ago, leaving behind moraine and outwash deposits that became the base of Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Elizabeth Islands (see illustrations at right). But this was only the latest in a series of Pleistocene glaciers that covered Cape Cod during the past 1.5 million years. Even the deposits of these earlier glaciers may rest on a much older and more stable land form, a wide, seaward-sloping surface called a coastal plain or, if submerged, a continental shelf. The plain and shelf are underlain by sediments. The shelf was exposed during the ice ages by a concomitant drop in sea level of some 400-500 feet, but today it lies drowned under rising waters. Even more deeply buried, some 500-800 feet beneath the surface, lies the ancient granite bedrock that is so characteristic of most other New England areas. There is evidence that the post-glacial landscape looked very much like arctic tundra. Deep in the bottom of Truro’s Great Pond, twigs of arctic willow have been retrieved with 11,000-year-old scale insects still attached to the bark. Caribou, arctic fox, and perhaps musk ox, roamed lichen-covered plains where white-tailed deer and red fox live today. Gradually a boreal forest of spruce and fir took root, much like the forests that now cover northern Canada.

Outwash Plains and Kettles

_As the Buzzards Bay, Cape Cod Bay, and, perhaps, the South Channel glacial lobes waned, they left behind moraines (above right). Meltwater streams carried sand and gravel that then formed outwash plains beyond the ice (above and below). Sometimes these materials buried large blocks of ice. In time, the ice blocks melted, leaving steep-sided depressions called kettles that became freshwater ponds if they were deep enough to intersect the water table. Some of these ponds became connected to the sea and turned into salt ponds, such as the one near the Seashore visitor center in Eastham. Over the years peat has filled in many of the ponds._

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The Restless Shore

Within a person’s lifetime, the Cape’s shape changes dramatically. The waters of the ocean and bay and the wind constantly erode material here and deposit it there. Major storms can create islands, sandbars, and dunes and revamp other land forms. A storm in 1931 weakened playwright Eugene O’Neill’s home—the old Peaked Hill Bars Coast Guard Station—and sent it into the ocean in 1932 (below). Summer winds generally come from the west or southwest. In the winter, the most severe winds come from the northwest or northeast. The Outer Cape as a whole is moving westward and diminishing as these forces tear at the landscape and as ocean currents move sand northward and southward from about the Marconi Station Site. For every 5 acres of sand eroded, about 2 acres are deposited up or down the coast, thereby elongating (see map at right) the hook at Provincetown and North Beach and Monomoy Point off Chatham. On the bay side, sands have extended Jeremy Point southward to a point almost directly west of Marconi Beach. An 1889 U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey report says that the entire Outer Beach from 1848 to 1888 lost 323,233,030 cubic yards of earth and sand, enough to cover the 55-acre U.S. Capitol grounds to a depth of 375 feet. Similar changes are taking place today. Some residents have seen North Beach, the southern extension of Nauset Beach, lengthen itself from just south of Orleans to Chatham and then break in 2 pieces in a fierce northeaster in 1987. The breach, which has grown to more than a mile in width, has opened Chatham’s shoreline to the full force of ocean storms, increasing erosion and claiming more than a dozen houses (inset below). But the breach has also increased tidal flushing of Pleasant Bay, reinvigorating the marine community. In November 1991, a 4-day gale breached the dune line at the head of the Pamet River, carrying sand and saltwater 500 feet into the river.

_Parabolic sand dunes occur on the narrow stretch of land east of Pilgrim Lake in the Province Lands of Truro. Prevailing northwest winds blow obliquely to the shoreline and create belts of these unusual dunes with the sands of former beaches_.

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Wampanoag Indians

The first human beings to live here did not arrive by sea. In all likelihood they came on foot from the south, southwest, and east, perhaps following caribou or other game up the river valleys across the then wide coastal plain. These people, known as Paleoindians, arrived at least 9,000 years ago. Little is known about them, but they appear to have been a nomadic people, hunting and gathering in small groups. The earliest period represented by a variety of archeological sites is 3,000 to 6,000 BP (Before Present). An archeological site uncovered recently by the ocean at Coast Guard Beach suggests more permanent settlements. This site has been carbon-dated to more than 2,000 BP, and contains post holes indicative of shelter construction. These early Native Americans created chipped stone tools, fished in kettle ponds, and likely wintered in the Cape’s coniferous woodlands. By the early 1600s American Indians used or inhabited all the lands now encompassed by Cape Cod National Seashore. These Wampanoags lived in 6 villages along the creeks and bays from Chatham to Wellfleet, relying on both the land and sea for food. When French explorer Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod in 1605 and 1606, he noted that villagers in what became Eastham and Chatham were raising corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. They tilled their fields with wooden spades after burning off the vegetation. They used crabs as fertilizer but ate clams, quahogs, oysters, and other shellfish. Champlain noted that the Monomoy band at Stage Harbor in Chatham stored corn in grass sacks buried 5 to 6 feet in the sand. He thought they were better fishermen and farmers than hunters. The Wampanoags lived in domed shelters (below), which consisted of a frame of saplings bent into semicircles. These semicircles were linked by circles of saplings running parallel to the ground. The Indians covered the frames with grass, reeds, and bark and left a large hole in the roofs so smoke could escape from fires in a stone-lined pit in the center. The dwellings were not clustered but separated by cultivated fields.

_Native Americans broil fish in this Theodore de Bry 1590 engraving (below) of a John White watercolor. Samuel de Champlain’s 1606 map (below right) of Chatham’s Stage Harbor area, which he called Port Fortune, shows Wampanoags attacking the French upon learning that they intended to settle there. The French had stayed in the harbor for 2 weeks drying out their ship and repairing its rudder._

_Henry Botkin’s early 20th-century painting depicts the Wampanoags and Pilgrims signing a treaty of friendship._

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Pilgrims First Landing

The _Mayflower_ Pilgrims settled in Plymouth—but only after rejecting Cape Cod as unsuitable. On November 9, 1620, these emigrants from England sighted the Cape, the first land they had seen in the 2 months since they left Holland. Though they had intended to continue south and settle in the Hudson River area, they decided, because of treacherous waters off the Cape, to stay. They sailed around the northern end of the Cape, set anchor off what became known as Provincetown, and drew up the “Mayflower Compact,” an agreement by which the group of 102, a bare majority of whom were Pilgrims, would govern themselves. During the next month 3 different small groups made “discoveries” of the area. They found a freshwater spring in the Truro area, encountered a few Indians, and discovered several baskets of Indian corn buried on a hill near the Pamet River. On December 6 a group of 19 men led by Myles Standish left the _Mayflower_ in a shallop, or small boat, camped for the night in Eastham, and crossed Cape Cod Bay to the mainland. They decided this would be a good place to settle and returned to the ship. On December 16, the _Mayflower_ dropped anchor in Plymouth Harbor, and the story of a new English settlement in the New World began. A few passengers and their offspring later settled in the Cape’s Eastham area.

_The_ Mayflower, _a 90-foot square-rigger, left England on August 15, 1620, with a smaller vessel called the_ Speedwell. _Both vessels carried English exiles from Holland and England, but the leaky_ Speedwell _caused two aborted departures. An overcrowded_ Mayflower _finally left the docks on September 6, making the arduous Atlantic crossing in a sluggish 65 days_.

_The_ Mayflower _arrived at Plymouth from Provincetown on December 16, 1620, after failing to cross December 15 because of bad weather. The Pilgrims came ashore on December 18. A few of them and their offspring later settled in the Cape’s Eastham area. Graves of_ Mayflower _passengers Constance Hopkins Snow, Giles Hopkins, and Joseph Rogers are in Eastham’s Old Cove Burying Ground_.

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The Cape Cod House

If anything distinguishes Cape Cod nationally, it’s a house style. Essentially the Cape Cod House is a modest story-and-a-half frame structure that hugs the ground and has a steep roof that sheds the rain and snow and provides protection from buffeting winds. Usually the wooden shingles on the sides are left unpainted, and thus the sides—and the roof—take on a natural grayish to dark brown patina depending on the effects of the sun and wind-driven sands and salt. Sometimes the front, shingle or clapboard, may be painted, and if so most likely white. Many of the oldest Capes were built in stages. A half house might become a three-quarter and later on a full house, depending on the needs or wealth of the family. A full Cape, such as the park’s Atwood-Higgins House (right and cutaway below), is deceiving: it has much more room than you might expect from its external appearance. Inside the front door is a small hallway or entryway. To the left and the right are small parlors. In the center of the back is a large keeping room, or kitchen, that later was divided into 2 rooms, where most of the daily household activity took place. At both ends of the kitchen are a buttery, or pantry, and a bedroom, or a borning room. At the center of the house is an intricately-designed brick chimney serving fireplaces in the parlors, kitchen, and front hall.

The chimney divides the upstairs into 2 bedrooms, probably for children. The eastern part (right) of the Atwood-Higgins House was built in Wellfleet about 1730 by Thomas Higgins; the western side was built about the same time but attached later. The house remained in the Higgins family until 1805, when Thomas Atwood became the owner. The Higgins family later regained ownership.

_The half house version of the Cape Cod House has 2 windows to the left or right of the front door. The three-quarter house has a third on the other side of the door, and the full Cape has 2 on each side._

_The post-and-beam construction method used in the Atwood-Higgins House was commonly used on Cape Cod until the early 1800s. Posts and beams were put together by mortising a hole in one and inserting a tenon from the other._

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Whaling’s Heyday

Wellfleet and Provincetown were Cape Cod’s premier whaling ports in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Some whaling ships sailed out of other Cape towns, but these 2 ports were crowded and bustling with ships and crews and related tradesmen and merchants. Both places eventually gave way to Nantucket and New Bedford, but many Cape captains continued to pursue the leviathan in distant seas. Settlers had been intrigued by whales since Native Americans taught them how to use beached whales for food and oil not long after the _Mayflower_ anchored in Cape Cod Bay. They soon erected towers on beaches to look out for whales, which they would pursue in small boats along the coasts. As whale oil grew in importance as a lighting fluid and as whale bone and baleen were used for more household and personal products, sloops and small schooners gave way to larger schooners and square-riggers, such as barks, and even full-rigged ships. And the ships extended their hunting grounds first to the South Atlantic and then to the Pacific and Arctic oceans as their quarry changed from right whales to sperm whales and bowheads. Whaling’s peak years were between 1825 and 1860. The decline is traced to the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859, the loss of many ships in the Civil War, and a surge in other fisheries. Edward Penniman of Eastham went to sea at age 11 in 1842 as a cook and at age 21 as a harpooner aboard the New Bedford whaleship _Isabella_. By 1860 he was captain of the bark _Minerva_. When he retired in 1883, he had made 6 voyages as a whaling captain.

_In this painting, a sperm whale overturns a whaleboat crew that has harpooned it._

_Harpoon styles improved over the years. Early harpoons were double-flued (left). Later refinements included the toggle head, invented in 1848, which was less likely to come loose from the whale._

_While whaling crews were on long sea voyages, many of the men whiled away the time making scrimshaw objects, including such intricate pieces as this sewing box._

_When Augusta Penniman accompanied her husband on voyages, she kept detailed whaling-trip logs in which she used symbols to indicate kills and misses. In 1868 the Pennimans built a French Second Empire mansard-roofed house (above) with a cupola overlooking the ocean and bay in Eastham. The Penniman House, now a part of the National Seashore, sports a pair of whale jaws at the entrance to its walk._

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Cape Codders and the Sea

Coastal packet boats, the first commercial vessels on Cape Cod, flourished in the first half of the 19th century carrying mail, passengers, salt, and other cargo to Boston and New York. These boats were built in local yards from local lumber and captained by local men. The rivalry and pride among the various Cape towns for the fastest and most seaworthy packets stood the Cape men in good stead when the new Republic began to engage in international trade. Cape Codders, in fact, were among the first to sail the American flag into many foreign ports and uncharted seas. Captain John Kendrick of Harwich sailed from Boston in 1787 in the _Columbia_, the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. A Brewster captain, Elijah Cobb, was captured by a French frigate during the French Revolution and made a successful appeal to Robespierre for release. After the War of 1812, many Cape Codders captained the first of the transatlantic Liverpool packets. But their true glory awaited them on the decks of the clipper ships, those majestic sailing vessels of the 1840s and ’50s. With their sleek hulls and tapered sterns, towering masts and double courses of sails, their speed and maneuverability in sailing into the wind, the “Yankee clippers” were generally regarded as the finest wooden ships ever made. They counted scores of Cape Codders among their captains, many of whom set transoceanic sailing records that still stand today. To cite only one, and not the most modest example, the following gravestone for Freeman Hatch, 1820-89, can be found in an Eastham cemetery: “He became famous making the astonishing passage in the clipper ship _Northern Light_ from San Francisco in 76 days 6 hours—an achievement won by no mortal before or since.”

_This waterfront pass was issued to lighthouse keeper C. E. Turner of Wellfleet._

_This sailing card is for a clipper ship named after its owner, Osborn Howes, a Dennis native who with his brother-in-law ran an international shipping fleet out of Boston in the 1800s. He managed or owned 43 vessels in his 87 years._

_Decked out in top hats about 1855, Brewster sea captains Charles Crosby (left) and James Edwin Crosby flank an unidentified English captain._

_Asa Eldridge (right) of Yarmouth served as captain of the clipper ship_ Red Jacket _(above) when it set a record crossing from New York to Liverpool of 13 days, 1 hour. Eldridge was lost in the North Atlantic in February 1856 with the steamer_ Pacific.

_Sailors in the 19th century used octants to determine their latitude by measuring the sun’s angle above the horizon at noon. Tables converted that figure for the day, month, and year into distance north or south of the equator._

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Fisheries

As the name implies, Cape Cod and fishing are nearly synonymous. The Wampanoag Indians were primarily farmers, but they also dug clams, gathered oysters and scallops, caught crabs, and fished for herring and other fishes, mostly in freshwater or where it mixed with saltwater. They used bone hooks, spears, nets made of plant fibers, and wooden-staked weirs. The first European settlers on the Cape also were farmers, but they soon learned how bountiful the sea was and quickly refined and developed various kinds of fisheries. “I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing,” Henry David Thoreau observed in the mid-1800s. How they fished, where they fished, and what they fished for have changed greatly over the years as some species were over-fished and as technological changes were introduced. The Atlantic cod was the first fish to spark a major industry. In 1878, 63 vessels sailed out of Provincetown in search of cod and returned with more than 7.5 million pounds. Wellfleet led the Cape in fishing for mackerel; in 1879, 30 schooners followed the schools north May to November from North Carolina to Maine. The ships returned to Cape ports from long voyages with their catches salted and dried for market. After brief trips, the fish were dried on the docks in Provincetown and other ports (below left and continuing counterclockwise). Hard-shelled clams—called quahogs and pronounced as ko-hogs by Cape Codders—were and are harvested in deep water with wooden-handled rakes up to 56 feet in length. Sometimes nets were stretched between poles to form weirs; high tides would bring the fish in; and at low tide men would go out—sometimes with wagons and horses—to remove their catches. Early on fishermen used small boats or dories to fish with lines, then with nets and wooden traps, in nearby waters; trawling schooners carried dories to the fishing grounds of the banks for cod, haddock, and groundfish. At first lobsters were so plentiful they were used as bait and then as food for servants; today they are not plentiful and are among the highest-priced seafood in America. Fishermen in small boats still go out to pull up lobster traps.

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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.”

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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_.

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Lighthouses and Lifesaving

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.

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Two Henrys: Thoreau and 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.

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The Cranberry Bog

Cranberries are among the true natives of Cape Cod. The plant, _Vaccinium macrocarpon_, is a low evergreen shrub of the heath family that grows in bogs. Legend has it that the plant originally was named craneberry because its small, bell-shaped, pink flowers look like the neck and head of a crane, or heron, that stalks marshes and bogs. The deep red, nearly round, acidic berry is almost a half-inch in diameter. Indians called cranberries sassamanesh. They used this fruit as food and medicine; they mixed ripe berries with dried venison to make pemmican and placed roasted unripe berries on wounds. They also taught Pilgrims to use wild cranberries in their foods, and the colonists shipped 10 barrels of them to Charles II, but he found them too tart. Cranberries remained popular on the Cape, however, and by 1773 anyone caught picking more than a quart in Provincetown before September 20 would be fined a dollar—and would have to surrender the berries. Sailing ships served cranberries to their crews to prevent or cure scurvy. In 1813 Henry Hall of North Dennis made a discovery that led to commercial production: the berries became invigorated when sand drifted on the plants.

Soon other Cape Codders were purposely sanding their bogs, and production was rising. By 1855 Cape Cod was a major Massachusetts producer with 2,408 acres in cranberries. Today about 1,250 acres are in production, 10 percent of the state’s total. Besides needing bogs with good peat bottoms, growers must have a water supply for sprinklers or enough water to flood their bogs through a series of ditches. Between November and March, and occasionally at other times, bogs are flooded to prevent frost from killing the vines. Ice up to 8 inches thick is allowed to form and the water below it is drained off. To sand the bogs, the ice is covered every 3 to 5 years with up to an inch of sand, which sinks to the bottom when the ice melts. In April the meltwater is drained off. Harvesting starts in September and continues through October. In this old postcard (below), pickers armed with wooden-toothed scoops move across a bog harvesting the berries. Today the process has been mechanized. More than 100 cranberry varieties have been developed, but the Early Black and Howes are direct descendants of the wild ones growing on the Cape. Processors now produce sauces, juices, and relishes that have become as closely associated with Thanksgiving as the Pilgrims and turkeys.

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Marconi’s Wireless Station

In these days of instant worldwide communications via satellites, it is difficult to imagine the excitement that came with the advent of wireless telegraphy and radio. In the 1890s, the idea of transmitting long-distance messages via electromagnetic waves captured the imagination of Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian. In 1899 Marconi succeeded in sending a radio message across the English Channel, and, he went to work on developing a transatlantic system. Two communications cables already had been laid on the bottom of the ocean between France and Cape Cod. Marconi, too, selected a site for a station on the Cape, high on a cliff overlooking the ocean in South Wellfleet. He built others at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and at Poldhu in Great Britain. At first the antennas at South Wellfleet and Poldhu consisted of huge rings of masts, but these were destroyed by gales before any messages could be transmitted. They were replaced at each place by 4 towers 210 feet high. In December 1901, at an experimental site in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Marconi received the first transatlantic signal, 3 dots for the letter “S,” from Britain. In December 1902 his Glace Bay station received a complete message from Poldhu. On the night of January 18, 1903, he transmitted from South Wellfleet this message, in Morse code, from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII: “In taking advantage of the wonderful triumph of scientific research and ingenuity which has been achieved in perfecting a system of wireless telegraphy, I extend on behalf of the American people most cordial greetings and good wishes to you and to all the people of the British Empire.” The king replied in a similar vein, making this the first 2-way wireless communication between Europe and America. Soon newspapers and others were transmitting messages across the Atlantic, and the wireless became the common way of communicating with ships. For 15 years telegraphers sent out messages on the South Wellfleet spark-gap transmitter. But in 1917 the Navy closed the station. It was dismantled in 1920 and scrapped. Its successor, WCC in Chatham, operated until 1993.

_Guglielmo Marconi displays his wireless telegraphy equipment in England in 1896. The Leyden jar capacitor and boxlike transformer (below) represent an application of Marconi’s invention in World War I for national defense, maritime safety, and commercial communications._

_At South Wellfleet Marconi first built a circular antenna consisting of 20 ship masts 200 feet high about 165 feet back from the edge of the ridge overlooking the Atlantic. The masts were blown down in a storm November 25, 1901._

_This ironstone plate commemorates the first wireless message, received from President Theodore Roosevelt by King Edward VII on January 19, 1903, and shows the 4 towers that replaced the 20 masts._

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