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Just a little more than a mile ofland lay between the Manomet River (from the Buuards Bay side) and the Scusset River, which flowed into Cape Cod Bay, making it a logical site for a canal. This 1824 survey was just one ofmany made in the nineteenth century to plan fo r a canal.
until the twentieth century. Nautical charts were iffy, reefs were hard ro avoid (especially if you didn't know they were there in the first place), and safe harbors hard ro find in fog or darkness. Classical civilizations of the Old World were built most often nea r water. Food could be grown in river valleys; heavy cargoes moved by boat. The Romans built paved roads sufficient for people and high value goods, but it was cheaper for them to tran sport bulk cargoes of grain from Africa in ships than ro haul ox cam fifty miles inside Italy. The lasting advantages of oceangoing transport a re twofold: containers ca n be made ever larger and routes can often be more direct. Both factors lower per-ton transportation costs. Transportation by sea is why we still use "ship" as a verb-even if the item in question is ordered from Amazon.com and delivered by FedEx. And it's no coincidence that the world's biggest internet retailer is named for the wo rld 's larges t navigable river. Rivers have disadvantages for shippin g. Many are sha llow, and, except in the lower reaches, currents run only one way. It is easy ro bring goods downstrea m, slower a nd tougher to drag cargoes up. The two-way tidal features of the Thames and Hudson estuaries provided special advantages for seaports serving a hinterland, while many of the world's land masses have mountains blockin g direct routes. One ofhisrory's first major man-made waterways was China's Gra nd Ca nal, 1,100 miles of inland waterway in service by 900 ACE . The Grand Canal eased transport of grain from the Yangtze Valley ro the northerly capital at Pekin g without having to sail around the rocky Shantung peninsula. The Grand Canal boosted prosperity in the densest eastern regions of China. Reliable waterborne transport was one of the "wonders of Cathay" that Marco Polo repo rted back ro Europe. Polo's chronicles awa kened Europeans' desires for increased trade and greater technical knowledge,
and inspired the Age of Exploration that would change the world forever. By the eighteemh century, pioneering lighthouse engineers, like the fat her of adventure writer Robert Louis Stevenson, erected beacons to mark coastal hazards and coupled them to powerful horns fo r times of poor visibility. For commercial shippers and pleasure sailors alike, there are few thrills as palpable as ending a period of tooth-gnashing uncertainty by finding a clearly identifiable landfall.
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(right) In 1321, the Atlantic Coast Fisherman published a list of known shipwrecks in the 40-mile stretch at the eastern end of Cape Cod-nearly 600 vessels, with this accompanying sketch of their locations. This is not a record ofall the wrecks in this region but rather records from a 33-year period. According to the Army Corps of Engineers, during the late 1880s, shipwrecks occurred along the outer cape at the rate of one every two weeks.
SEA HJSTORY 147, SUMMER 2014
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