[Illustration: _Over the years the sea has taken the life of many a Cape Cod fisherman. This stone, in the Burying Ground of the First Congregational Parish of Truro, honors Mrs. Rebecca Snow, who died Nov. 4, 1832, and her husband, Capt. Reuben Snow, who was lost at sea in January 1825. The inscription at the bottom reads: “Tho’ in the dust, or in the sea, their mortal bodies rest, their spirits dwell in paradise.”_] The 30-mile stretch of land between the Monomoy Shoals on the south and Race Point on the north is one of several East Coast stretches known as “Graveyards of the Atlantic.” The Cape’s sandy outer shore does not look as menacing as, say, the rocky coastline of Maine or Nova Scotia. Its threats take more subtle shapes, in the form of submerged sandbars and treacherous rips, that can easily run a ship aground, and where in winter gales waves will pound a vessel to pieces as effectively as if it were on solid rock. The first recorded shipwreck on Cape Cod was the _Sparrowhawk_, an English vessel that struck a sandbar off Orleans in 1626. Since then an estimated 3,000 vessels have been lost in the waters off the Cape, most on the stretch of open Atlantic from Chatham to Provincetown. One of the most famous of the early wrecks was the pirate ship _Whydah_, a 300-ton galley commanded by “Black Sam” Bellamy, which broke up on the bars off Eastham (now South Wellfleet) on May 8, 1717. More than 145 lives were lost in the wreck, and of the nine survivors, seven were tried for piracy and hanged on Boston Common. Cape Codders early on recognized that those who went “down to the sea in ships” did not always come back. The most deadly areas were the shoals and rips off Monomoy—places known as “Cape Mallebarre” and “Tucker’s Terror”—and the infamous Peaked Hill Bars off the Atlantic, or back side, of Provincetown. Not all losses occurred close to shore, however. Once fishing vessels began making trips to the Georges and Grand Banks, entire fleets were sometimes caught in furious fall northeasters, winter gales, and hurricanes. Perhaps the worst single storm, in terms of its effects on local Cape communities, was the disastrous October Gale of 1841. Dozens of ships and more than 100 men were lost on Georges Banks. Truro alone lost 57 men. When Thoreau passed through Truro a decade after the storm, the community was still in mourning: “‘Who lives in that house?’ I inquired. ‘Three widows,’ was the reply.”