DAVIS. — OUTLINE OF CAPE COD. 305 



attention to the repeated occurrence along our coast of bars built 

 northward from coastal bluffs, such as Sandy hook, N. J., and Cape 

 Cod, and suggested that " a generic term " should be applied to these 

 forms. He mentioned a place of division of the tidal currents on the 

 east side of Cape Cod, near Nauset inlet, from which the flood tide 

 flows north and south. 



Thoreau's narrative of his excursions on the Cape in 1849, 1850, 

 and 1855, tells of various changes in the coast line known to the 

 people there. A log canoe, buried long before on the inner side of 

 the bar that forms the eastern wall of the marshy East harbor at the 

 north end of the mainland, was found many j'ears afterwards on the 

 Atlantic side of the bar ; that is, the bar had been pushed westward 

 over the buried canoe as the sea cut away the outer beach. Swamp 

 peat was sometimes found on the exposed beach, although it was 

 originally formed undoubtedly on the inside of the bar. Stumps had 

 been seen off Billingsgate point ; the implication being, not that the 

 land had been depressed, but that it had been washed away, leaving 

 the stumps mired in their native soil.* A writer in the " Massachu- 

 setts Magazine " of the previous century is quoted to the effect that 

 an island, called Webbs island, formerly existed three leagues off 

 Chatham, containing twenty acres of land ; the people of Nantucket 

 carried wood from it ; but in the writer's day a large rock alone 

 marked the spot, and the water thereabouts was six fathoms deep. 

 (Cape Cod, in New Riverside edition of Thoreau's works, 1894, pp. 

 182, 183.) 



Freeman's History of Cape Cod (1860) attributes much wasting of 

 land to reckless cutting of the trees, — a doubtful conclusion as far as 

 it refers to shore work, although probably applicable to the interior 

 district of the dunes. He says: "'The work of devastation was too 

 extensively accomplished ; as is seen on the shores of the Cape since 

 washed away by tides aided by the force of the winds, so that vast 

 flats of sand extend in some places a mile from the shore, now, at low 

 water, dry, or nearly so, and in some instances these flats disclose 

 large stumps of ancient trees embedded in their native peat " (752). 



H. L. Whiting prepared a " Report on the special Study of Prov- 

 incetown Harbor, Mass." (Rep. U. S. Coast Survey, 1867, pp. 149- 

 157). He distinguishes Truroland, the mainland of the Cape, " by the 



* I have found this explanation of the occurrence of tree stumps on the shoals 

 off Chatham current among the fishermen of the Cape. See Proc. Bost. Soc. 

 Nat. Hist., 1893, XXVI. 173. 



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