Explore "The Wardens of Cape Cod" by Henry Beston on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
There are two Cape Cods in the world, one the picturesque and familiar land of toy windmills, picnickers and motorists, the other the Cape which the sailors see, the Cape of the wild, houseless outer shore, the countless tragic wrecks, the sand bars and the shoals. This unknown Cape begins at Monomoy; Monomoy where the silver-gray bones of ancient wrecks lie in mouldering lagoons; it leaps the open waters of Chatham and Orleans, and beginning again at Nauset sweeps on, league upon lonely league, to the hook of Provincetown.
Beyond the broad swath of the churning breakers, lies the North Atlantic, most masculine of seas. Now betrayed by a long smear of churning water in the outer green, now buried treacherously under an unrevealing tide, off-shore bars lie hid. Standing well enough in, the greasy one-stack tramps, the fishing schooners coming and going from the Georges, the vanishing steel windjammers with their Mediterranean or Negro crews, the little unromantic "sugar bowls," and the big tugs with their solemn barges linked behind, all day pass to and fro.