CAPE COD GEOLOGY 



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it appears that at the time of the American Revolution Nauset Bar lay farther 

 out than it now does and that there was an open lagoon between it and Nauset 

 Head. 1 Until the great storm of November, 1730, there was an opening in this 

 bar into" Pleasant Bay at a point east of Strong Island. South of this opening 

 a bar extended southward toward Chatham. Inside of this bar, near Allen's 

 Point, lay Ram Island, which appears to have been enclosed on the north by 

 the hook of the bar of Champlain's chart which joined the land at North Chatham. 

 Ram Island, Cotchpinicuit or Scotchpenacot, as it was known to the aborigines, 

 is shown on Des Barres' chart as lying east by south of Allen's Point. Mitchell 2 

 describes the island as shown on the first topographical map by Gluck in 1847 

 as then having an area of 13_ acres, an elevation at some places of 20 feet, and 

 some kind of building on it. A breach in the beach lay directly before the island, 

 so that it was exposed to storm waves, but it continued to be used as a pasture 

 down to 1851, when the Minot's gale washed it away, though traces of it could 

 be seen for a few years later; but in the topographic survey of 1868 it could not 

 be found. 



Whiting 3 states that the Minot's lighthouse gale, which occurred in the 

 middle of April, 1851, breached the outside bar at Nauset for 500 feet. The 

 channel thus produced, which was 11 feet deep, remained up to 1867. 



Numerous changes have taken place in the position and extent of the bar 

 and the openings at Chatham since reliable charts of the locality were made. 

 In Des Barres' time the inlet had the general form shown on the chart of 1887, 

 except that the Monomoy Beach bar broke off from the beach flat south of the 

 inlet and joined the land in front of the village, about as it did in 1915-16. In 

 an easterly gale on November 15, 1871, the bar opposite Chatham lights was 

 broken through (Plate 34, fig. 2.) This breach appears to have rapidly shifted 

 southward by the wearing away of the north end of Monomoy Beach and the 

 southwestward building of the Nauset Beach, which according to a survey 



1 Mitchell, Henry, Additional report on the changes in the neighborhood of Chatham and Monomoy, 

 U. S. Coast Survey Rept. for 1873, Appendix 9., pp. 103-107. Mitchell's first report was also printed 

 in the Seventh Annual Report of the (Massachusetts) Board of Harbor Commissioners, House No. 65, 

 Jan. 1873, Boston, pp. 94-108, 1873. Townsend, C. H., Notes on an early chart of Long Island Sound 

 and its approaches, U. S. Coast and Geod. Survey Rept. for 1890, Appendix No. 20, pp. 775-777; illus- 

 tration No. 71 reproduces Captain Southack's (?) chart of Cape Cod. Mitchell, Henry, Monomoy 

 and its shoals, Ann. Rept. of the (Massachusetts) Harbor and Land Commissioners for 1886, Public 

 Document No. 11, Appendix A., pp. 37-46; with map showing changes in Nantucket Sound from 1784 

 to 1885, Boston, Mass., 1887. Des Barres, Joseph F. W., The Atlantic Neptune, London, 1774-1781, 

 3, charts of the coasts and harbors of New England, from surveys taken by Saml. Holland . . . Survr. 

 general . . . and Geo. Sproule, Chas. Blascowitz, Jams. Grant and Thos. Wheeler ... for the use of the 

 royal navy of Great, Britain. 



2 Report concerning Nauset Beach and the Peninsula of Monomoy. 



3 U. S. Coast Survey Rept. for 1867, p. 157. For an account of the "Lighthouse" storm of 1851 see 

 Sidney Perley, Historic storms of New England, Salem, 1891, Chap. 70, pp. 302-310. 



