284 



CAPE COD GEOLOGY 



most if not all of them had troublesome experiences with the shoals off Monomoy 

 beach. There is thus no seaman's record of a lost island lying southeast of 

 Chatham from 1606 onward. 



In his cautious remarks upon the "lost island" Mitchell notes that a map 

 of Nantucket Sound and Nantucket Shoals in The English Coast Pilot of 1707 

 shows a "Webb's Island" as a part of the sand flat in Monomoy Beach, south- 

 west of Chatham Harbor. The Southack (?) chart, which bears an inscription 

 noting the crossing of the Cape at Orleans by a whale boat in 1717 and which is 

 probably the same chart as that of 1707, also shows Webb's Island. This name 

 was well established in Chatham for a part of the Monomoy bar as it existed 

 in 1738, half a century before the legend started in the Massachusetts Magazine, 

 as shown by a record reproduced by Smith J from the files of the Superior Court 

 of Judicature describing lands on Monomoy Great Beach, in which it appears 

 that there is a reference to the "marsh which lies to the northward of a place 

 called Webb's Island." It would appear that Webb's Island was an integral 

 part of the shifting winged beach of Monomoy. There seems no good reason to 

 believe that "Webb Island" lay outside of the beach. 



Mitchell notes that on the Atlantic Coast Pilot chart of 1707, and the 

 Southack (?) chart in use in 1717, there is inscribed off the south end of Webb's 

 Island the words, "the Seal Island sunken channel way," presumably a refer- 

 ence to land that disappeared before 1707. 



THE PROVINCELANDS HOOK 



At the north end of Cape Cod peninsula there is a historic sand hook 

 known as the Provincelands, the title to which is held by the Commonwealth. 2 

 Several detailed maps of Provincetown harbor and the surrounding dunes and 

 bars or barrier beaches have been made from time to time, because the harbor 

 is a port of refuge and a fishing station. The most elaborate study of the origin 

 and mode of development of the hook is that made by W. M. Davis 3 in 1896. 

 It constitutes the northern complement of Monomoy flying beach, the wing- 

 bar of Gulliver's winged beheadland of Cape Cod. Davis called attention to the 

 fact that before this wing-bar or sandy hook was formed, the sea played freely 



1 Smith, W. C, A history of Chatham, Mass., Part II, p. 208, footnote 27, Hyannis, 1913. 



2 For the history of the control of these lands by the State and the attempts to regulate the work of 

 the winds in blowing the sand, see Second Ann. Rept. of the Trustees of Public Reservations, for 1892, 

 Appendix III, House No. 339, pp. 63 et seq., Boston, 1893. The original State document contains a 

 map of the dunes drawn with a 5-foot contour interval. 



3 Davis, W. M., The outline of Cape Cod, Proe. Am. Sci, 31, pp. 303-332, 1896. Also reprinted in 

 Geog. Essays, edited by D. W. Johnson, Chap. 25, pp. 690-724, Boston, 1909. 



