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From: Bobbie Hall <>
Subject: [MABARNST] Cape Cod Pilot, Ch. 19, part 2
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 11:41:37 -0500
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 XIX - BOURNE [part 2]

Although the Pilgrims probably wished they had a canal, they made no
immediate plans for digging one. But long before the trading post shut
down, the idea was being talked; and with its closing, the colony had
even more reason for speculating on the possibility of a waterway.
Samuel SEWALL, after a visit to Sandwich, which at that time included
BOURNE, writes in his diary for October, 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 [Manomet] River and Scusset - the land very low and
level."

In the years that followed, the subject was brought up again and
again. During the Revolutionary War, it was a topic of speculation
among Continental generals who saw in it a strategic aid, and a
government engineer was sent to make a survey. George WASHINGTON, in a
letter on the subject, wrote to James BOWDOIN: "I am hopeful that you
... have received all the assistance that Mr. MACHIN [the engineer]
could give, in determining upon the practicability of cutting a canal
between Barnstable and Buzzards Bay."

The engineer estimated the cost down to the last penny - £32,148, 1s.,
8d. - but luckily for the estimate, its accuracy was never put to a test.

In 1791 James WINTHROP was engaged by the colonists to make another
survey for the canal. He looked things over briefly, and left a record
dealing mainly with the ladies he met on his trip from Cambridge to
the Cape. His findings were along the following lines:

"Sabbath 15th. Attended meeting, drank tea at Mrs. WINSLOW's. Two
agreeable daughters, both amiable. In the evening Major THOMAS and
Lady, the Misses WINSLOWs, Miss GORHAM and Miss BARR came to see Miss
H. all the young ladies about her time of life. We had an agreeable
evening. Monday 16th - etc. "

In fairness to Master WINTHROP, however, it should be added that among
his paragraphs approving of the Cape Cod girls, he did slip in a word
here and there for the Cape Cod Canal; and those who had been
agitating for it seized on his report and made what use of it they
could. They brought the proposal before the Massachusetts Legislature,
urging it chiefly on the ground that it would save life at sea.
Scarcely a northeast gale swept in from the Atlantic in those years
without leaving on Cape beaches the broken bones of some ship, the
bodies of her crew.

The worthy members of the Legislature agreed with everything that was
said about the treachery of the Back Shore run, and the number of
sailors who had lost their lives there. And they promptly voted the
project down by a large majority - for among these statesmen its
defeat had been neatly engineered by men who were acting for the stage
- coach operators! Through the Nineteenth Century, company after
company was formed to dig the channel. Other routes were proposed;
there was not a town from Sandwich to Orleans where no hopeful lines
had been laid out for it. If all the paper "Cape Cod Canals" produced
in this period had been scooped out, one alongside the other, they
would have made a corduroy of the upper Cape. As one official put it,
"every grain of sand was made the victim of an algebraic equation."

Although the day of the sailing ship had passed, and the terrors of
the "Back Shore run" had been further reduced by wireless and other
aids to mariners, the project was still decidedly worthwhile when
August BELMONT became interested in it early in the present century.
It would cut off seventy miles, New York to Boston; and even for
modern power ships, the stretch to be eliminated was a wicked run. In
the years 1900-1920, there were 974 wrecks in Cape Cod waters, most of
them on the Back Shore.

BELMONT tackled it in 1909. His company spent five years and
$13,000,000, and Cape Cod at last had a canal, of a sort; not a very
good one, not even good enough for large freighters to go through
safely; but that it was a canal, and that BELMONT had been a jolly
good fellow to dig it, no one could deny.

The engineers had faced numerous problems, but the greatest had been
raised by the decision of the company to put the channel through
without locks. The Panama Canal was first attempted that way, and the
scheme had failed.

When you don't put locks in your canal, you have the tides to reckon
with. Unless the tide-times and tide-levels of the two connected
bodies of water coincide, the current set up, in the narrow channel
joining them will be spasmodically swift; and in that case, though the
canal may make beautiful newspaper photographs and lend itself well to
all sorts of publicity, it will not be safe for navigation.

Until the War Department took over the work, sinking many more
millions of dollars into it, this was one of the troubles of the Cape
Cod Canal. In Cape Cod Bay, the average rise and fall of the tide is
five feet greater than in Buzzards Bay, on the other end of the
channel. Also, between the two bays there is a tide-time difference of
three hours. Thus Buzzards Bay is rising while Cape Cod Bay falls.
Sometimes, in "spring tide" and high wind, there is a difference of
nine feet between the two levels. To offset the dangerous currents
thus created, the Canal had to be made almost half again as deep,
three times as wide. The government took it off BELMONT's hands
temporarily in 1918, as a "wartime measure," and a few years later
bought him out for $11,500,000. I don't know whether the deal made the
government as happy as it did Mr. BELMONT, but by worrying through
many a headache since, the War Department engineers have developed it
into a really practical waterway for large seagoing craft; and by
insisting that it is still "of definite strategic importance," the
Army has managed to keep tolerably happy.

The engineers just can't leave it alone. They have dug it down and
scooped it out; they have put two fine highway bridges over it, and
one railroad bridge; they have primped it up, with improved highway
approaches to the vehicular bridges; they have created a yacht basin
on the Buzzards Bay side; in the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, in Boston, they have built a 115-foot working model of it,
reproducing in miniature all the tidal currents and other conditions
affecting it; and if inspiration for yet another finishing touch
doesn't come to them on the scene at Bourne, they can go to Boston and
contemplate the model.

The bill for the Cape Cod Canal and all that goes with it currently
figures to more than $40,000,000. With a thousandth part of that sum,
the Pilgrim Fathers could have paid off "those deepe interests that
kepte them, low," and the principal as well. If we could turn back the
calendar three hundred years and hand them the price of the bridge we
cross in leaving Cape Cod today, their children and their children's
children would be relieved of the "strain of making religion and
profit jump together."

[... and here ends the book. Hope you've all enjoyed it.]

transcribed by and all errors attributed to
Bobbie Hall






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