Before long lookouts were posted to spot pods of pilot whales coming inshore. Fleets of small boats would then be launched, and their crew members would circle the whales and beat their oars and blow horns to “help” the panicked herd ashore. In 1855 Thoreau witnessed hundreds of blackfish driven ashore at Great Hollow in Truro, and in 1880 a school of more than 1,300 stranded in South Wellfleet at Blackfish Creek, giving it its present name. Strandings of pilot whales continued to be a source of local income for Cape towns into the 1930s, when, for reasons not clear, they largely disappeared. But since the mid-1970s strandings have become common again; in November 1982, sixty-five pilot whales came ashore at Wellfleet’s Lieutenant Island. In the eyes of many, Cape Codders attained their greatest seafaring eminence as shipmasters in the merchant marine. As captains during the early days of the Republic, they were, as Cape historian Henry Kittredge noted, “the first ambassadors of a young nation.” Later, in command of the great clipper ships of the mid-19th-century, they set a number of transoceanic sailing records that still stand today. They also made considerable fortunes for their owners, and for themselves. This monetary bounty was translated into the hundreds of substantial “captain’s houses” that still stand along the streets of their home towns from Sandwich to Provincetown. Brewster alone is said to have counted more than 50 sea captains residing there at one time. But perhaps even more important than the fortunes and exotic souvenirs these ship captains brought home from foreign ports was the broad perspective gained by their experience. It was said that many a Cape Codder had been to China who had never gone to Boston by land. Wives and children often sailed with the shipmasters, and several of Cape Cod’s small villages boasted a cosmopolitan culture unusual among mid-19th-century New England towns. Many of the retired ship captains became selectmen in their towns, and, as Kittredge put it, “Narrow-mindedness found barren soil in a district where two houses out of every three belonged to men who knew half the seaports of the world and had lived ashore for months at a time in foreign countries.” But the sea that brought such bounty and prosperity to Cape Codders during the years between the War of 1812 and the Civil War was not always kind. There was a dark side to the Cape’s relationship to the ocean, a side reflected in the numerous slate and limestone markers in the Cape’s small burying grounds that bear the inscription “Lost at Sea.”