THE WARFARE OX OUR EASTERN COAST 



201 



authority who gathers statistics on the 

 subject says that every year England 

 loses a tract of land larger than Gibral- 

 tar, and the English east coast alone is 

 deprived of a tract larger than half of the 

 area of Heligoland. The same authority 

 estimates that, since Waterloo, England 

 has lost to the sea a fragment of its ter- 

 ritory larger than the county of London. 



ONCE A DKER PARK, NOW AN ANCHORAGE 



The Anchorage Basin, off Selsey in 

 Sussex, is still called "The Park" because 

 it was once a shooting preserve of Henry 

 VIII, who filled it with deer, and as fur- 

 ther proof old court records show that 

 certain deer stealers were severely dealt 

 with for poaching in its confines. 



In a great number of instances along 

 the Atlantic coast of the United States 

 one may see lands in the process of dis- 

 appearing and others coming to the sur- 

 face or shifting their positions. Sable 

 Island, in the mouth of the St. Lawrence, 

 is gradually being banished from the map 

 by the attrition of the sea ; Xo Man's 

 Land, a lonely island on the Massachu- 

 setts shore, is yielding ground inch by 

 inch, and it is estimated that before the 

 second centennial of Waterloo it will 

 have entirely disappeared from the face 

 of the earth. 



From Portland, Maine, to Cape Flor- 

 ida there is a fairly well connected bar- 

 rier of sand-reefs, all of them built up by 

 the sea and its ally, the wind, from the 

 material pounded from the shore-line by 

 the waves. From Chesapeake Bay to 

 Biscayne Bay, Florida, a distance of 700 

 miles, there is a natural rampart of sand 

 so continuous, fencing such an unbroken 

 series of lagoons in from the sea, that it 

 is possible to make the entire journey 

 through inland waters without exposure 

 to the open sea. 



JACK-IN-THE-BOX ISLANDS 



We need only to turn to our Alaskan 

 possessions to see that other sort of ap- 

 pearance and disappearance that has 

 turned the bed of the sea into mountains 

 and mountains into the bed of the sea. 

 In the Aleutian Peninsula are found the 

 Bogoslof group of islands, some of which 

 have for many years been playing "jack- 



in-the-box," with the sea for its audi- 

 ence. Now and then one of these islands 

 sinks away, and where land was there 

 comes a void of water. Years pass, a 

 submarine volcano comes into play, and 

 where yesterday there was water, todav 

 a volcanic peak towers high above the 

 waves, uncharted and unknown until re- 

 ported by some surprised and mystified 

 mariner. 



In its incessant warfare against the 

 land, the sea literally takes its captured 

 hosts and makes them do battle under its 

 command. The boulders that are shat- 

 tered from the face of a cliff are dashed 

 up against it again and again, hammer- 

 ing others loose, the while being worn 

 round and smooth as the projectiles of 

 big guns must be. As the process goes 

 on, these huge shells are worn down and 

 crumbled until there remains nothing to 

 tell the story of forced fighting against 

 their own stronghold, save grains of sand 

 on some distant beach or the soft carpet 

 spread upon the floor of the sea many 

 fathoms deep. 



How rapidly this process goes on is 

 sometimes strikingly shown. A schooner 

 laden with bricks is beached on some bare 

 shore in a storm ; these bricks are rolled 

 and tumbled a distance of five miles or 

 so in the course of a year, and by that 

 time attrition has usually completed its 

 work. Authorities say that on the shores 

 of Cape Ann a fragment of stone as big 

 as a nail keg has been worn completely 

 round by its constant turning during the 

 course of but five years. 



A rover's Eate 



Some years ago there was discovered 

 in the British Records Office an elaborate 

 map of the X^orth American coast from 

 Cape Cod to the X^avesink Hills, which is 

 believed to date from about 171 5. It gives 

 a wonderful illustration of the changes 

 that a coastline may undergo in 200 years. 

 To begin with, it shows that Cape Cod 

 was at that time an island, and that near 

 the point where the new Cape Cod Canal 

 now cuts off the toe of the peninsula 

 there was a natural passage from the At- 

 lantic to Cape Cod Bay. The point is 

 located where the channel existed, and 

 the following notation was put in by a 



