536 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 
5. Wauwinet-Coscata Tombolo, Nantucket, Massachusells. 
By F. P. Guuiiver. 
The tombolo connecting Coscata Island with the Wauwinet or eastern end 
of the Island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, was a continuous bar of gravel 
and sand from the time of the first settlement of the Massachusetts coast up 
to 1896. During the fall of 1896 there were several unusually heavy storms, 
and on December 17, 1896, the sea cut a narrow channel across the tombolo 
at a point which had been used by the fishermen for many years as a place 
for hauling small boats from the head of the harbour to the open ocean. 
The strong north and north-east storms of the fall of 1908 finally closed 
this opening, which had moved progressively north from Wauwinet towards 
Coscata during the years from 1896 to 1908. 
Thus on November 12, 1908, the new tombolo was completed, connecting 
Coscata Island with the Wauwinet headland. 
During these eleven years and eleven months, when there was a tidal inlet 
across the sandy tombolo, the eastern coastline of Nantucket Island had been 
cut back from 300 to 500 feet. 
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 
The following Papers were read :— 
1. The Progress of Geographical Knowledge of Canada, 1497-1909. 
By James WHITE. 
2. The Economic Development of Canada, 1867-1909. 
By James WHITE. 
3. A Great Geographer. By J. B. Tyrreuu, M.A. 
The author claimed that David Thompson, of whose achievements but 
little note has been taken, was the greatest land geographer that the British 
race has produced. 
A poor boy from a London charity school, he spent his life between 1784 
and 1812 on the northern part of this continent when it was a wilderness, 
peopled only by the natives and by a few fur-traders, who had little groups 
of houses or factories, often hundreds of miles apart, scattered along the 
principal waterways. 
He was a fur-trader in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay and North-West 
Companies, and in the prosecution of this trade he travelled more than 
50,000 miles in canoes, on horseback, and on foot through what was then a 
vast unmapped country, extending from Montreal on the east to the Pacific 
Ocean on the west, and from Athabasca Lake on the north to the headwaters 
of the Mississippi River on the south. Wherever he went he made surveys, 
and wherever he stopped he took astronomical observations for latitude, 
longitude, and variation of the compass. When he left the Western country 
in 1812 he had the material for a great map, which he drew in the following 
year, and which has been the basis for every map of Northern and Western 
Canada published since that time. 
After retiring from the fur trade, he was engaged for thirteen years on 
the part of Great Britain in surveying the boundary line between the United 
States and Canada under the Treaty of Ghent, subsequent to which he 
settled down quietly in Montreal. He died in 1857 at the age of eighty-seven 
years. 
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