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Seven Fun Facts About Cape Cod National Seashore

Before it became the Cape Cod National Seashore, the 40 miles of sandy beach along the Outer Cape was known as the Great Beach. It deserved that name as one of the longest expanse of sandy shoreline along the East Coast.

The Great Beach remained pretty much unspoiled until World War II. But after the war, Cape Cod’s population swelled. Real estate development took up vast tracts of land on the peninsula. By the 1950s, Cape Codders feared the Great Beach would turn into Atlantic City.

Cape Cod National Seashore in green.

And so on Aug. 7, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed the law creating the Cape Cod National Seashore. As a longtime summer visitor to Cape Cod, he said he knew the new national park would be “useful.”

Here are seven more fun facts about a place you ought to go to if you haven’t been.

1. The Cape Cod National Seashore isn’t just seashore.

Of the 26,810 acres of land it comprises, only 1,700 acres are beach and tidal flats — or about 6 percent of the whole. That still leaves plenty of beach: Coast Guard Beach, Nauset Light Beach, Marconi Beach, Head of the Meadow Beach, Race Point Beach, Herring Cove Beach, Ballston Beach, Longnook Beach, Cahoon Hollow Beach and White Crest Beach. To name a few.

The seashore also includes 3,375 acres of grassland, 3,765 acres of deciduous forest, 11,500 acres of mixed pine forest, 2,550 acres of wetlands and ponds, 1,875 acres of salt marsh, 1,700 acres of beach and tide flats, 1,150 acres of developed land and 895 acres of heathland. The National Park Service makes special note of the protected heathland because of its rarity.

Heathlands are open spaces covered with low vegetation like heather, gorse, broom and grasses. Cape Cod heathlands have a lot of broom crowberry, something you won’t find much of in the rest of the world. The entire national park provides a home to 25 rare and endangered species, including the spadefoot toad, the piping plover and the common tern (not so common anymore).

Kinnikinnick, red bearberry, broom crowberry, pitch pines in Wellfleet.

2. The Great Beach has inspired several literary classics.

Henry David Thoreau wrote the first one, Cape Cod, in 1865. He had visited the Cape several times and described hiking the Great Beach — now the Cape Cod National Seashore. Critics call it a classic.

Henry Beston wrote another classic in 1925. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod tells the story of his yearlong sojourn in a seaside cottage in Eastham. He only intended to stay two weeks, but the nature surrounding him kept him there for a year.

More than a few great works, though not about the beach itself, were written seashore-adjacent. Writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Mary Oliver, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut spent summers or lived in Provincetown.

Other books about the Great Beach include The Great Beach by John Hay, The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod by Cynthia Huntington and The Shores of Bohemia:: A Cape Cod Story by John Taylor Williams.

3. The FBI took 50 years to solve a mystery of the dunes.

In 1974, dog walkers discovered a body in the dunes at the Cape Cod National Seashore. Her killer had nearly severed her head and cut off her hands, presumably to prevent identification.

Provincetown dunes

He (or she) succeeded for 50 years. Called The Lady of the Dunes, she was the oldest unidentified homicide victim in Massachusetts when the FBI announced in late 2022 they now knew who she was. Ruth Marie Terry. She was 37 years old and came from Tennessee.

Law enforcement officials used investigative genealogy, which combines DNA analysis with genealogical research. They still haven’t found her killed.

4. It used to be called the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

More than 3,000 ships wrecked off the Outer Cape from Chatham to Provincetown. For a century and a half, ships wrecked on the Outer Cape about every two weeks. People said you could walk from one end of the Outer Cape to the other on the bones of ships that sank.

Silver recovered from the Whydah

The Great Beach’s most famous shipwreck was a pirate ship that sank in 1717. Black Sam Bellamy had captured the Whydah Gally, but it sank in a terrific Nor’easter on April 26, 1717 off the coast of Wellfleet. Black Sam Bellamy and all but two of the 142 men on board perished.

In 1984, underwater explorer Barry Clifford rediscovered the Whydah in 14 feet of water and five of sand. He also found its loot and, quite possibly, the bones of Black Sam Bellamy.

5. There was a fight to create the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Two senators from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall, introduced the bill to create the national park in 1959. Then the fight was on.

The Great Beach wasn’t like Yosemite or Yellowstone, unclaimed wilderness with few permanent structures. The seashore stretched across private property in six established towns.

Race Point Beach at Sunset

Saltonstall put the controversy in a nutshell. “The most important and complicated problem before us is to preserve the scenic and historic features of Cape Cod without injuring and unduly restricting the towns and individual citizens directly concerned,” Saltonstall said.

People who lived in the area proposed for the park didn’t want their homes taken. Real estate developers didn’t want to give up the chance to turn the Great Beach into a honky-tonk mecca. Not everyone liked the idea of setting aside beachfront property for conservation, or banning off-road vehicles. Still others thought the government should clear off all the homes.

White Crest Beach, Wellfleet

The final compromise reached earned the name “Cape Cod model” for other national parks. The National Seashore was the first U.S. park to let private property owners keep their land and dwellings inside the park.

Buildings, lands and homes were purchased by the government or donated by the towns or the property owners. It didn’t make everyone happy, but millions of people every year enjoy their visit to the seashore.

6. Eventually the Cape Cod National Seashore will disappear.

Anyone who owned a property developed before 1959 could keep the house. In some cases, they couldn’t keep it for long. The sea eats away at the Great Beach at the rate of 3.8 feet a year. Houses in Chatham have fallen into the water. The storm of 1978 took off the Coast Guard’s 300-car parking lot, and lighthouses have had to be moved to new sites farther from the shoreline.

Highland Light in North Truro had to be moved

The sea doesn’t erode all of the Great Beach, though. It picks up sand in Chatham and Orleans and deposits it in Provincetown. But the Cape loses more than it gains. Geologists say erosion will reduce it to a few islands in 2,000 years.

7. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places 25 times.

The seashore doesn’t just have historic homes, it has entire historic districts. The Nauset Archaeological Site includes artifacts of ancient settlements since at least 4,000 BC. There’s also the Truro Highlands Historic District, made up of Highland Light, Highland House and buildings along Highland Light Road. The Fort Hill Rural Historic District comprises 100 acres of what used to be two farms.

The Old Harbor Lifesaving Station

The seashore also has the Marconi Wireless Station Site, which sent the first wireless transatlantic message to Europe in 1903. It has half a dozen lighthouses, a cemetery, a life saving station and a number of historic homes. They aren’t all 18^th century Cape houses, either. You can find historic mid-century modern houses within the seashore.

Marconi Wireless site

One 18^th century Cape house, the John Newcomb House, had a famous visitor in the mid-19^th century: Henry David Thoreau. He described the house and its inhabitants in his book Cape Cod. People know it as the Wellfleet Oysterman’s House.

Images: Map By EricM – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26489659. White Crest Beach By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21367219; White Crest Beach Von This image or media was taken or created by Matt H. Wade. To see his entire portfolio, click here.@thatmattwadeThis image is protected by copyright! If you would like to use it, please read this first. – Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15837066; Old Harbor Lifesaving Station By JCefaly – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21669791. Race Point By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1411213. Heathland by Doug McGrady via Flickr, CC BY 2.0/.

Provincetown dunes By LEONARDO DASILVA, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46696548. Race Point Beach at Sunset By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5,, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1411219. Highland Light By John Phelan – Own work, , CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23654849. Silver from the Whydah Gally By Theodore Scott – Flickr: Look At That Booty, CC BY 2.0/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22019309.

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Camp Edwards, Cape Cod’s World War II City

One year before Pearl Harbor, many Americans thought the United States would never enter World War II. They might have thought otherwise had they visited Camp Edwards, where workers toiled at a blistering pace to build a city for 36,000 soldiers.

The Army brass, like many others, had been slow to realize war was coming. Or that it would have to shelter and train millions of new soldiers. Only when Hitler’s armies marched into Paris in June of 1940 did the Army put its building program into full gear. It succeeded, in part, because of one man, Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, and one army camp – Camp Edwards, at the western end of Cape Cod.

Soldiers training at Camp Edwards om 1942.

It had taken three centuries for the Cape to develop into 15 towns with 37,295 people in them. The Army would nearly double its population in 125 days. Contractors would build 1,406 structures, including barracks, mess halls and officers quarters – along with 13 chapels and 217 recreation buildings. Workers at their busiest put up 30 buildings a day.

As one of the first of 159 military installations built for World War II, Camp Edwards was the proving ground for the construction of nearly every other army camp. New construction techniques were developed amid the scrub pine and sand. At Camp Edwards, contractors started using standardized plans, prefabricated units and assembly line construction.

After the war, large developers used the methods adopted at Camp Edwards to build new suburbs. Many G.I.s returning from war would buy a home in a new suburban development built in much the same way their old barracks had been built.

Charles Hartman

In 1941, Sen. Harry Truman led a committee investigating the military’s hasty build-up for the war. He singled out Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman, who had headed the Construction Division of the Quartermaster Corps in the crucial months before the United States entered World War II.

“You seem to have been the only man in the War Department dealing with construction matters that at least contemplated a plan for the future,” Truman said.

Brig. Gen. Charles Hartman

Hartman, a West Point graduate and Harvard MBA, was a colonel in the Quartermaster Corps when he began working on modern designs for military installations. The Army at the time had plans from World War I called the Series 600 cantonment. They included drawings for crude barracks heated with stoves, outbuildings and administrative quarters.

Hartman saw problems. Standard barracks, for example, were designed for 250 men. In a fire, many of them wouldn’t get out. The plans also depended on lengths of lumber no longer available.

Series 700 Cantonment

So he began updating the drawings, called Series 700, in 1934. He had to do it on the side with just a few men.

“But we had no money, and whatever money and men we could devote to the job had to come out of anything we could get — a sideline rather than a fixed job,” he later told Truman’s committee.

In 1938,as Hitler rose to power, money finally became available. So Hartman found a warehouse and filled it with 80 architects and draftsmen. They designed everything an army camp would need, from barracks to bakeries.

Basketball courts at Camp Edwards

They didn’t know why they were doing it. After the senseless carnage of World War I, most Americans wanted to stay out of European wars. Hartman’s boss, Gen. Owen Seaman, wouldn’t approve the plans.

“I don’t think myself or anybody else ever contemplated we would have the army that we have now … Or that we would have a war,” Seaman said in 1941.

The drawings for the 700 series cantonments remained in draft form, unapproved, unused. Hartman then left for California on another assignment.

Hitler

On Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. President Roosevelt issued an order adding 27,000 men to the army and 100,000 to the National Guard. The War Department didn’t really come up with a plan to put them anywhere, other than in tents on old fairgrounds. Then , the brass figured, they could train in Europe. They didn’t reckon with Hitler.

In April 1940 German troops occupied Denmark and Norway.

In June, France fell. England prepared for an invasion. And America finally began planning for war.

German soldiers march along the Champs Elysees, June 14, 1940

On June 26, 1940, four days after France surrendered, Congress expanded the army again to 375,000 men. In August, it federalized the National Guard. Then in September it created the first peacetime draft by passing the Selective Service Act.

Housing Shortage

Hitler’s occupation of Europe caught the Army flat-footed. Within U.S. borders, the Army only had space for 300,000. Within nine months it would need to shelter and train more than a million soldiers. That number quickly increased – to 2 million — and then, by 1942, 8 million.

Draftees would start showing up in two months, but plans to put them in tents did not fly. The American people had made it clear that their boys needed to be treated well if they were going off to fight a war. Congress had bowed to that public pressure. The Selective Service Act ordered that no soldier could be drafted until the government had provided “such shelter, sanitary facilities, water supplies, heating and lighting arrangements … as may be determined … to be essential to public and personal health.”

A Series 700 barracks at Camp Edwards. 100,000 others were built.

Charles Hartman returned to head the Construction Division in March of 1940 as Seaman’s replacement. He discovered some of the Series 700 plans had been modified and some destroyed. There were no layouts for the hundreds of camps that would soon be built. So he quickly assembled a group of draftsmen to redraw plans for over 300 kinds of buildings.

Meanwhile, he anxiously waited for Congress to appropriate the funds to start building. That didn’t happen until September of 1940.

Alma Mater

In the middle of the war, an Australian newspaper described the “graduates” of Camp Edwards.

“Ack-Ack crews on Guadalcanal, “seahorses” of the Army’s Engineer Amphibian Command in North Africa, submarine-hunting pilots over the North Atlantic and even cooks in Port Ethan Allen, Vt., call Camp Edwards, New England’s largest military establishment, their ‘alma mater’,” the story read.

But in the fall of 1940, Camp Edwards was little more than a rustic National Guard facility called the Massachusetts Military Reservation. It had been chosen because it was flat, well-drained, cheap, near transportation and a population center, and it had a good water supply.

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration had built 63 buildings and two 500-foot grass runways, called Otis Field.

But as Camp Edwards it would need 1,406 structures, including 438 barracks, 184 mess halls, 54 officer quarters, 28 storage buildings and 82 hospital units. They would accommodate 1,674 officers and 30,159 enlisted men, including a medical battalion and a signal battalion.

One feature of Camp Edwards and all the army camps would persist after the war: segregation. The Army built separate accommodations for two quartermaster truck companies of “colored” troops at Camp Edwards.

Building Camp Edwards

On Sept. 12, 1940, three days after federal money became available, construction began. The site hadn’t even been laid out yet, and no one had ever actually used Hartman’s Series 700 designs.

The Army hired the Charles Main architect-engineering firm of Boston and Walsh Construction of New York. Eighty-one field architects worked frantically – laying out corners and staking out footings — to keep one step ahead of the builders.

Series 700 buildings

Another 300 architect-engineers adapted 600 drawings to the site, making as few revisions as possible and then handing them over to Walsh. Then Walsh’s draughtsmen added specifications for things like footings, framing, heating and electrical. Those documents were checked and then sent to Main’s drafting department, which came up with blueprints the construction foremen could use.

The blueprints worked so well that 50 copies were made and sent to the other Army camps under construction.

Concrete Poured

Walsh began pouring concrete on Sept. 18, 1940, six days after signing the contract.

A rail spur was built from Falmouth to bring a staggering amount of building materials: 63 million board feet of lumber, 5 million square feet of fiber board and 26,000 kegs of nails.

The Army’s low wages didn’t attract enough skilled carpenters. By Sept. 28, Walsh had hired 930 carpenters – but needed as many as another 1,500. So the contractor divided up the construction crews into two primary groups. One worked on substructure and one worked on superstructure. Walsh divided those groups into 30 subgroups, each headed by a superintendent. Those subgroups were further divided into 15-man work crews, each with its own motor pool and timekeeper. Every crew did one thing – pouring foundations or framing the deck or framing the walls and so forth. Prefabricated doors and windows arrived by train.

Peacetime Army

On Nov. 15, 1940, a wire service reported more than 12,000 workers were putting Camp Edwards in shape for the new peacetime army. Thousands more would join. To manage that enormous workforce required another innovation: a central office handled payroll. Armored cars drove to the construction sites to distribute paychecks. At peak construction, armored cars delivered 18,593 paychecks.

Nearly a year before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the 68th Coastal Artillery arrived at Camp Edwards. Then on Dec. 19, 1940, the first batch of draftees arrived. In January came the Yankee Division of the Massachusetts National Guard.

Construction continued after the soldiers came. Contractors poured concrete for the runway in 1942 and built facilities for the Army Air Corps.

Amphibious Training

Camp Edwards added an Amphibian Training Center after the military drew up plans to invade North Africa in December 1942. Army contractors then built satellite camps for training amphibious assault units along the Cape’s beaches. In the summer of 1942, soldiers practiced invading Wellfleet, Cotuit, Osterville, Martha’s Vineyard and Washburn Island in Falmouth. They also tested the first seasickness pill.

American troops launching an amphibious assault on North Africa.

With the invasion of Africa came German and Italian prisoners. To house them, the Army built a camp for 2,000 POWs at the southern end of the runway. Soon members of Rommel’s Afrika Korps went to work harvesting cranberries, building Sandwich Road in Bourne and cleaning up trees blown down by the hurricane of 1944.

There was still more building to be done. The Army built a convalescent hospital at Camp Edwards for wounded soldiers. Some 2,500 nurses who had joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps trained there.

To train soldiers for urban combat during the invasion of Europe, the Army built a mock German village within Camp Edwards. Called Deutschedorf, three main streets were lined with Gestapo headquarters, a beer garden, a restaurant, houses and shops. Most had only three sides, with details like flowerboxes and birdhouses to add authenticity.

And still there was more. Camp Edwards built a processing center for soldiers that had gone AWOL. Then it built a processing center for soldiers returning from war. By 1944, Camp Edwards had capacity for 1,945 officers and 34,108 enlisted personnel.

Influence of Camp Edwards

In the late 1980s, the Department of Defense and the National Park Service undertook a history of the U.S. Army’s mobilization effort during World War II.

In a case study of Camp Edwards, author Keith Landreth called it one of the most well-organized and resourceful programs of the mobilization effort.

“Innovative techniques … were all developed at Camp Edwards and all served to enhance and facilitate efficiency and speed in construction,” he wrote.

Authors of the overall study concluded that the Army’s camp structures represented a building technology that would soon sweep the country.

Aerial view of Levittown, Pa., in 1959.

“In the push for speed in the mobilization construction a variety of construction techniques were developed that would soon have mass application,” they wrote.

“From a moribund depression-era construction industry rose a national effort that not only met the demands of the war, but changed forever many design and construction practices and techniques,” the authors wrote. “The effect of the mobilization program can still be seen across American, particularly in the construction of residential developments.”

Aftermath

Camp Edwards was designed to be temporary, and much of it is gone now. The Army deactivated it after World War II. It got busy again when the Korean War broke out.

Collapsed buildings at Camp Edwards

The Air Force then took it over and it evolved into Otis Air Force Base. Closed, then reopened, it is now Joint Base Cape Cod. These days it provides training for the Massachusetts Army and Air National Guard and facilities for the U.S. Coast Guard.

Charles Hartman was hospitalized in December 1940 and soon retired from the Army. He died on Feb. 14, 1962. He belongs to the Quartermaster Hall of Fame.

Images: German troops marching in Paris By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-036-09A / CC-BY-SA, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483600. Photos of Camp Edwards courtesy Library of Congress. This story updated in 2022.

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The True Story of the Jenny Lind Tower (and a Few Good Tall Tales)

People often wonder how and why the Jenny Lind Tower ended up on the sand dunes of North Truro, Mass. It’s an improbable sight, a medieval stone tower like a rook on a chessboard, rising high above the scrub oak of the Outer Cape. Even odder, it stands next to a radar tower that looks like an upside-down ice cream cone, a feature of the North Truro Air Force Station.

You can’t really get close to the Jenny Lind Tower, as no road or footpath leads to it, but you can see it from the Highland Links golf course.

The Jenny Lind Tower

It’s named after Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano. P.T. Barnum brought her to the United States in 1850 for a 15-month concert tour. Lind dreamed of raising enough money for free schools throughout Sweden, so she agreed to the exhausting, but lucrative tour.

Her tour had a lasting impact on both the United States and Sweden. Baby cribs and cottage furniture bear her name, and so do parks, streets and a town in California. She did pay for free schools in her native country. And a couple of legends about her persist on the Outer Cape.

The Jenny Lind Tower Story

Before Jenny Lind arrived in the U.S., Barnum mounted a publicity blitz promoting “the Swedish Nightingale.” Lindmania swept the country. When her ship docked in New York, as many as 40,000 people greeted her on the piers.

Barnum saw to it that people could buy all sorts of Lind merch. A grocer in Lynn, Mass., sold Jenny Lind sausages. A Boston barroom opened under the name Jenny Lind Hotel. You could buy Jenny Lind change purses, watches and shoes. A Jenny Lind tea kettle even sang after a few minutes on the stove.

Lindmania reached a fever pitch by the time she reached Boston, where she gave several concerts. The biggest venue was the Fitchburg Railroad Depot, which had a second-floor auditorium.

P.T. Barnum

Barnum, typically, oversold the tickets for the Fitchburg Depot concert. That angered the people who couldn’t get in and they began to riot. So Jenny Lind climbed to the top of the railroad depot’s stone tower and began to sing, calming the crowd.

A railroad lawyer from Boston, Henry M. Aldrich, got swept up in Lindmania and attended that concert. Then in 1925, fire destroyed much of the railroad depot. Two years later, Aldrich paid to have one of the still-standing towers removed to land he owned on Cape Cod.

So goes the story.

The Fitchburg Railroad Depot

The Real Story

But Henry M. Aldrich could not have seen the Jenny Lind concert at the Fitchburg Depot in 1850. He wouldn’t be born until 1867.

Perhaps his father had seen the Swedish Nightingale. The senior Aldrich, like his son, was a lawyer for the Fitchburg Railroad. So Henry M. Aldrich probably had the tower moved to Truro because of his family’s association with the railroad, not with Jenny Lind.

In 1927, Henry Aldrich and his wife May bought property in Truro. They then hired five men to rebuild the Jenny Lind Tower on it. Eventually they built five cottages on their 100-acre property around the tower.

According to the only record of anyone using it, Aldrich and his family climbed it to watch a solar eclipse in 1932.

When Henry Aldrich died, his children sold or donated the property to become part of the Cape Cod National Seashore.

What Really Happened

There really was a riot over Jenny Lind at the Fitchburg depot. An eyewitness, Charles G. Rosenberg, described what happened that night, Oct. 12, 1850, in his book, Jenny Lind in America. He did not, however, witness any singing from any tower.

Jenny Lind

The Fitchburg Depot was on Causeway Street, an unfashionable part of town. People weren’t allowed inside until 8 p.m., but many showed up two hours earlier. By 6:30 p.m., a thousand people surrounded the train depot. Many lost their wallets to the pickpockets who followed Jenny Lind and may have loved her even more than her audience did.

At 7:50 p.m., the crowd burst through the doors and up the narrow stairways. The surging mob tore coats off shoulders, crushed hats and ruined gowns. Some women fainted, wrote Rosenberg.

The auditorium had poor acoustics and poor visibility from many seats. When the orchestra began playing, few could hear it. Meanwhile, the heat rose to an intolerable degree, so people began smashing windows to let in cool air. The tumult then paused briefly when Jenny Lind appeared.

“I caught a few notes, with sufficient distinctness, to see that at the least, one half of her voice had been frightened out of her,” wrote Rosenberg.

During the evening, half of the hall had emptied, and the remaining half crammed to suffocation. What was more singular, he wrote, was that no one left until the end, even though they couldn’t hear or see anything.

Jenny Lind only got angry at Barnum the next day, after her fears had subsided.

Back to Boston

She made a return trip to Boston on the tour. At 31, Jenny Lind came back to secretly marry her 22-year-old piano accompanist, Otto Goldschmidt. Samuel Ward, her banker and brother of Julia Ward Howe, had offered his home in Louisburg Square for the ceremony.

Jenny Lind and Otto Goldschmidt

Goldschmidt was a serious musician, not a boy toy. They’d known each other for six years. He came from a wealthy German Jewish family and had studied under Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann.

On May 29,1852, the couple left for home in Europe. They had three children and lived – it’s true – happily ever after.

Ghosts of the Jenny Lind Tower

But there’s another legend associated with the Jenny Lind Tower. It has to do with Black Sam Bellamy, the pirate who died in a shipwreck off Cape Cod (and whose bones may have been recently discovered). Bellamy had a mistress, Maria Hallett, who gave birth to Bellamy’s baby. The child died and she spent a short time in jail.

According to local lore, she lost her mind or withdrew from society and moved to a shack in Wellfleet. People called her ‘Goody Hallett’ or ‘The Witch of Wellfleet.’ Today her ghost is said to haunt the Outer Cape. At sundown she screams and curses at the passing ships. The ghost of Jenny Lind then climbs the tower to sing and drives away Goody Hallett. Or maybe she sings to calm the rage of Goody Hallett.

Image of Jenny Lind Tower: By Kevin Rutherford, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15579473. Jenny Lind Tower poster By Chemical Engineer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62154874. This story last updated in 2022.

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Mr. Marconi Builds a Radio Station on Cape Cod and Comes to the Rescue of the Titanic

On Jan. 18, 1903, Guglielmo Marconi sent a message from his Cape Cod station, the first radio transmission to cross the Atlantic from the United States.

Nine years later, his Cape Cod wireless station would send a message to the Carpathian, requesting its help in rescuing survivors of the sinking Titanic.

Marconi was a 29-year-old Italian nobleman whose ambition, inventiveness and love of fine food took him to a windy cliff in South Wellfleet, Mass.

He aimed to transmit news and private messages to ships sailing the Atlantic that paid for the service. By the time his invention played a key role in rescuing the RMS Titanic‘s passengers, Marconi had a monopoly on the business.

Marconi

Born April 25, 1874, Marconi made his first wireless transmission at the age of 20 by making a bell ring across a room.

Guglielmo Marconi

After his successful bell experiment, he went outside on his father’s estate and transmitted signals a mile and a half away. He gradually figured out how to send wireless signals over longer and longer distances.

He moved to England with his mother, where he managed to send a signal 3.7 miles over Salisbury Plain in 1897. Two years later, his signal crossed the English Channel. He then went to the United States to demonstrate his wireless signal, sending reports of the America’s Cup race off Sandy Hook, N.J., to the New York Herald.

In December 1902, Marconi sent a signal from a station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, to his station in Cornwall, England, the first radio transmission to cross the Atlantic from North America.

But he had bigger ambitions: a U.S. wireless station that would compete with the undersea cables that crossed the Atlantic.

South Wellfleet

The inventor had spent months hunting for the right land on which to build his first U.S. station. He searched along the coasts of New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. He wanted a remote spot, but not too far from drinking water, labor, supplies, a rail line and a hotel.

In February 1901, Marconi arrived in Provincetown with his assistants. A Cape Codder named Ed Cook showed them around in his wagon.

When Cook took him to Highland Light in North Truro, Marconi believed he found his spot. But the locals thought Marconi was a charlatan and refused to sell him land.

Wellfleet

Next they went to South Wellfleet, where Marconi found an eight-acre parcel of land on top of a 130-foot cliff. Wellfleet Harbor was nearby, and so was a railroad station and a telegraph office.

Marconi in 1901

Cook owned the land. Marconi bought it from him for a song, then made him general contractor. While laying plans for the station, Marconi stayed at a nearby inn, but couldn’t stand the food. He earned a lasting reputation as a snob among the locals because he had food and wine shipped from Boston and New York.

Marconi left Richard Vyvyan to supervise construction of the station, including cottages, a transmitter building, a kerosene engine and an array of antennae mounted on 20 200-foot masts.

Men called riggers built the masts as they swayed in the slightest breeze. The locals predicted the masts wouldn’t withstand the first Atlantic storm. They were right.

When the station was finally finished, the transmitter sent off such a spark it could be seen four miles away. It made a sharp, deafening crack that forced workers to cover their ears. The electricity escaped through drainpipes and stove flues, even the clothesline. The housekeeper grew used to getting a shock when she hung up the washing.

In late November, a nor’easter struck Cape Cod and toppled the masts, nearly killing Richard Vyvyan. Another crashed through the roof of the transmitting room.

Success, And a Rescue

Marconi decided to rebuild the station, with four 210-foot towers that supported the antennae. By January 1903, it was ready.

He sent a message from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII in London. It praised wireless telegraphy and greeted the monarch.

Edward replied from Sandringham with thanks and good wishes.

RMS Titanic

Marconi raced to notify the press, and congratulations poured into Cape Cod.

Marconi realized the South Wellfleet station was unstable, and built a new station in Chatham.

The company had put its operators and equipment on board some of the most prestigious ocean liners of the day. Two Marconi operators aboard the Titanic sent distress messages for several hours after the ship struck an iceberg. A neighboring vessel, the Carpathia, received the messages and steamed 58 miles to rescue 700 passengers.

After an inquiry into the tragedy, the U.K.’s postmaster-general concluded, “Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi…and his marvelous invention.”

Today, little is left of the Wellfleet station. Much of it was dismantled during World War I as a security measure. The sea claimed much of the rest of it. The site is now part of the Cape Cod National Seashore and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photo of the remains of the Marconi Station in Wellfleet by Flffy’d. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. With thanks to Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. This story was updated in 2022.

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Black Sam Bellamy, The Pirate Who Fought Smart, Harmed Few, Scored Big

Black Sam Bellamy became the wealthiest pirate in history not because of greed but because of anger – anger at the English system that exploited poor country boys and sailors like him.

British press gang

After his early death in 1717 he left a legacy of folklore on Cape Cod and a ship loaded with treasure off its coast. In 1984, treasure hunters found his ship and in 2018 archaeologists believed they found his remains.

Black Sam Bellamy ran his pirate operation democratically. His men were slaves and Indians and sailors pressed into service. Bellamy treated them equally and let them vote on important decisions.

In a famous speech attributed to Bellamy, he scorned the wealthy merchants he plundered: “They rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.”

Pirate historians have traced Bellamy’s career, summarized by Colin Woodard as ‘Fight smart, harm few, score big.’

Robin Hood of the Sea

Bellamy and his crew captured 53 ships before he died in a shipwreck at 28. They called him Black Sam Bellamy because he eschewed the fashion for powdered wigs and wore his black hair tied with a black satin bow. He had good manners, dressed neatly in fancy clothes, and he always wore four ornate dueling pistols in his sash.

Black Sam Bellamy called himself ‘Robin Hood of the Sea,’ and his men called themselves ‘Robin Hood’s men.’ There is no record of him ever killing a captive, and he often returned captured ships and cargo if they didn’t suit his purpose.

We know little of Black Sam Bellamy’s early life, though he is presumed to have been born in Devon in the west of England. The woman who was probably his mother died in childbirth and was buried Feb. 23, 1689. His parents were likely tenant farmers, hovering on the edge of starvation like half of England.

Bellamy left home at a young age for a port – London, Bristol or Plymouth. He became a ship’s boy at 13 at the outset of the War of Spanish Succession. By the end of the war in 1712 he was a skilled sailor.

Turn to Piracy

Gold recovered from the Whydah

No one knows how Black Sam Bellamy ended up on board a British ship. A press gang may have grabbed him. In the early 18^th century, Britain didn’t have anywhere near enough sailors. The press gangs tricked country boys into signing up or simply kidnapped and forced them on board ships.

Once in service, ship captains routinely cheated sailors of their wages. They gave the sailors vague IOUs instead of wages, or paid them for their last voyage just before they left port for the next. Sometimes they simply didn’t pay them at all.

Black Sam Bellamy sailed to Cape Cod in 1714 or early 1715 to seek his fortune, arriving in Eastham where he may have had relatives. There he had an affair with the beautiful Maria Hallett, all of 15. After impregnating Maria he sailed to Florida to recover Spanish treasure with his friend from Rhode Island, Paulsgrave Williams. Others got to the treasure first.

The two men turned to piracy under Benjamin Hornigold, but the crew mutinied and elected Bellamy as their captain.

Hen-hearted Numbskulls

In 1717 Bellamy and his crew captured the Whydah Gally, a slave ship he refitted as a flagship with 28 guns. The Whydah had an advanced weapons system capable of attacking any man-of-war in the Americas.

In a year, Black Sam Bellamy and his crew raided 54 ships along the U.S. East Coast and the Caribbean. All in all they captured treasure worth $120 million today, according to Forbes magazine. That made him the top-earning pirate.

The Whydah Gally also captured a sloop under the command of a Capt. Beers. Black Sam Bellamy wanted to let him keep his ship, but his crew had voted to burn it. Bellamy asked the captain to join the pirates, and Beers declined. That allegedly inspired the speech attributed to the pirate:

I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you.

Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls.

They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?

Black Sam Bellamy Lost and Found

Map of the Whydah wreck

The Whydah and the Mary Anne, commanded by Williams, headed north to New England. Williams and the Mary Anne broke off to Rhode Island, where he wanted to visit his family. Bellamy continued on, perhaps to Eastham to see Maria, but a terrific Nor’easter on April 26, 1717 wrecked the Whydah off the coast of Wellfleet. Black Sam Bellamy and all but two of the 142 men on board perished.

Eventually, 102 of the bodies from the Whydah Gally were buried in a mass grave. The Mary Anne was shipwrecked a few days later, leaving seven survivors.

In 1984, underwater explorer Barry Clifford rediscovered the Whydah in 14 feet of water and five of sand. The Whydah’s artifacts can be seen at Expedition Whydah Sea-Lab & Learning Center in Yarmouth, Mass.

Since Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah, archaeologists continued to search the site. In 2018 they announced they may have found the remains of Black Sam Bellamy himself.

Legacies

The U.K. Telegraph reported scientists found a femur encased in a mass of iron, stone, silver, gold, tools and weapons. They also found pieces of a crushed helmet, indicating a violent death. And they discovered an ornate pistol wrapped in a ribbon that probably belonged to Black Sam Bellamy.

In 2016, an Englishman from Devon came to the Whydah Pirate Museum with documents that showed he was descended from Black Sam Bellamy. Scientists from the University of New Haven tested the bones for a DNA match with the presumed descendant. They found the man’s DNA didn’t match Sam Bellamy’s.

However, in 2021, investigators from the Pirate Museum announced they’d found six pirate skeletons in hard masses of minerals from the shipwreck site. Clifford said he hoped to identify the pirates and connect them with any descendants.

Black Sam Bellamy did leave another legacy. Maria Hallett gave birth to Bellamy’s baby, who died. She spent a short time in jail. According to local lore, she lost her mind or withdrew from society and moved to a shack in Wellfleet. People called her ‘Goody Hallett’ or ‘The Witch of Wellfleet.’ Today a meadow in Wellfleet is known as Goody Hallett Meadow.

With thanks to The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard. This story about Black Sam Bellamy was updated in 2023.

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