Haupt.] T-t)b . [Jan. 18, 



Storms and ebb scour. It has maintained a channel 600 feet wide and 

 over thirty feet deep through the shoals, which have been built upon 

 either hand, all the way to the deep water of the Atlantic, and notwith- 

 standing this concentration of the ebb forces through this funnel-shaped 

 passage, the flood was not prevented from rolling Cape Henlopen about 

 800 feet farther north since the commencement of the construction of the 

 breakwater. These detached instances, with that of the Dublin harbor 

 north wall, are all conclusive, so far as any precedents can be, as to the 

 effects to be expected from my plans, and when it is remembered that the 

 cost of executing them would be less than half that of the high and tight 

 jetties now proposed, and that the effects of time will be to reinforce and 

 strengthen rather than to destroy them, it would seem that, in justice to 

 the commercial interests of the country, an opportunity should be found 

 for at least giving them a fair trial. 



In further confirmation of the requirement that the jetty should be on 

 the side toward the flood component, reference is made to the experience 

 of a private company, at Aransas pass, on the Texas coast, in 1869, which 

 is believed to be the only case of this kind on record. 



Here the movement of sand is southward at the rate of over 200 feet per 

 annum, and this company expended less than $10,000 in building a short 

 jetty only 600 feet long from the north shore and extending out on the 

 north side of the channel. 



"These jetties, crates or caisons, as they are variously called by the 

 builders, were made of live-oak poles, spiked together in the general form 

 of a triangular prism and placed longitudinally. Each crate was about 

 eight or ten feet long, six feet high and six feet wide at the base. * * * 

 They were ballasted with a few hundred weight of stone, filled with 

 brush and sunk in two or three parallel rows. They were expected to 

 act as a nucleus about which the sand would settle, and close up the sec- 

 ondary channel, thus directing the flow of water directly through the 

 channel of the bar. From the fact that the secondary channel has shoaled 

 about two feet, and the main channel deepened about two feet since 

 placing the crates, it may be supposed they have contributed to produce 

 this result."* 



In a later Report, dated February 1, 1879, Maj. Howell, then in charge, 

 in commenting upon this early precedent, remarks : 



" From my remembrance of a verbal description of the work * * * 

 the cribs were triangular in cross-section (dimensions not known), and 

 their parts very imperfectly fastened together, and besides seem to have 

 been made of any timber and lumber that came handy — some live oak, 

 but mostly yellow pine scantling, four inches by six inches. 



"Some of these cribs were filled with brush and stone when sunk in 

 place, but it is said that others were simply ballasted so as to sink them. 



* Report of the late Lieut. E. A. Woodruff, Corps of Engineers, dated April 1, 1871, tucfe 

 Report Chief of Eugiueers, 1871, p. 526. 



