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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 7, part 3
Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2002 12:19:10 -0600
References: <200112191104.fBJB48Q10270@lists2.rootsweb.com>


======================================================================
Cape Cod Pilot, by Jeremiah Diggs, American Guide Series, published by
Modern Pilgrim Press, Provincetown, MA, 1937. This was a work
underwritten by the Federal Writers Project, Works Project
Administration (WPA) for the State of Massachusetts.
======================================================================

Chapter VII - ORLEANS [part 3]

The "Sparrowhawk," though by no means the first wreck along the
back-side of the Cape, begins a long list of lost ships, identified
and recorded. Your general direction changes here, as the map shows
you, from east to north. On your left is still Cape Cod Bay, but on
your right, and across the Cape, instead of the more merciful waters
of Vineyard Sound and Nantucket Sound, the surf rolls in unchecked
from the ocean itself, over shifting sandbars, treacherous shoals.

"Nauset Beach," Kittredge says, "which stretches along the whole
coastline of Orleans and Eastham, holds in its fatal sands the
shattered skeletons of vessels from half the seaports of the world;
while farther north, the outer shores of Wellfleet and Truro have
gathered in the hulls of a thousand ships, driven helplessly upon them
by northeast gales." In a northeaster, this back-side of the Cape is
a lee shore, and in a strong flow tide, coursing towards its shoals
and bars, few sailing vessels could keep away. No cable was stout
enough, no anchor they were capable of carrying could hold fast
against that pull. The tide off Monomoy is so swift that lightships
have many times been cast from their moorings, and these vessels are
equipped with mushroom anchors weighing from 5,000 to 7,000 pounds,
held by a length of chain of nine tons.

A map has been made of the approximate locations of Cape wrecks down
to 1903. So many tragedies are crowded in with the tiny numerals on
the map as to leave it barely legible.

With the decline of seafaring depression came to another major
industry of the lower Cape - "wrecking."

As in most commercial arts, there were amateurs and professionals in
wrecking. The amateurs were often heroes - men whose one interest was
the saving of life; and the story of heroism is a long one on the
Cape. The professional wrecker had a number of interests, and the
order of importance, as between life and property, was not quite so
definitely established.

The stories, the dark hints, the baleful traditions, are hotly denied.
There was no such thing, the Cape says today, as "mooncussing," yet
the term has come down in a country where Keeper COLLINS, of Nauset
Light, "found obstinate resistance on Cape Cod to the project of
building a light house on this coast, as it would injure the wrecking
business."

"Mooncussing" now means simply the search for whatever the tide
carries in. But the origin of the word, and its ancient meaning, are
well known to this day on the Lower Cape. On a dark night a skipper
unfamiliar with the back-side shoals and beset by wind and tide might
easily have been led by a lamp, swung slowly through a wide arc, in
the belief that he was following some man better informed than he. If
such a lamp were swung from ashore, he would thus be lured into waters
from which there was no escape. But this could not be accomplished in
the light of the moon. Hence - mooncussers.

The Reverend Enoch PRATT, writing his history of Eastham early in the
last century, said, "The law requires that this should be done
[reporting of a wreck to the town clerk] yet it cannot be denied that
it was frequently evaded, and the property found appropriated to
private use, which has often been the case since."

The laws of salvage, since that time, have become so complex that
there are men in Boston and other coast cities today who make a very
good thing out of convincing the court a certain way on one day and
the opposite way the next. But the unwritten law of the professional
wrecker was simple enough - finders keepers - and was complicated only
when the wrecked crew showed up alive to mar the even tenor of the
industry. There is an old tradition, mentioned by Kipling and many
others before him, that it was worth a man's life to reach the shore
of Truro, or of "Helltown" (Provincetown) in a wreck, for the chances
were he'd be "met by a wrecker's wife with a brick in her stocking."
And Provincetown still talks of certain leading citizens who were over
on the Back Shore with a relay of drays, the day after the Portland
Gale, in '98, and who came off with enough to insure a comfortable old
age.

But there never has been proof enough to convict on a charge of
"mooncussing," and if you ask a Lower Cape surfman of the Coast Guard
if he ever heard of a case, the chances are he'll tell you "no, all
that stuff comes out of books." So don't, for heaven's sake, believe
all you read in books!


[more to come]
transcribed by and all errors attributed to
Bobbie Hall








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