In the Wellfleet and Truro areas you can still see how the houses were located here and there along the old highway, or dotted around in sheltered hollows back of the beach. In the wintertime you are very likely to meet no one, since there are comparatively few year-round residents. Once the place was full of local need, local talk, or tragedy. What wrecks now occur along the treacherous offshore bars can usually be taken care of by men of the Coast Guard who can get to the area quickly in a jeep and sound the alarm by phone. When there was no radar for ships, hardly any means for wide and quick communication with authorities on land, localities were responsible for the wrecks that might occur off their own shore. There were volunteer lifeboat crews composed of men from neighboring houses, with a boat kept ready in a hollow above the beach, ready to be launched out to the rescue, in terrible seas that were a common part of existence. In the early part of the nineteenth century Cape Cod towns had between three and four hundred sailing ships between them and a majority of their men went out to sea. In a great storm occurring in October of 1841 the town of Truro lost fifty-seven men, being already burdened with a large population of widows, and on the day after the storm nearly a hundred bodies were recovered along the Cape Cod shores. Most of them were caught while they were fishing on George’s Banks or were making a desperate trial of returning home, with a northeast gale screaming and the sea sweeping their decks. The bars off the Outer Beach from Peaked Hill to Monomoy have been responsible for an incredible number of shipwrecks in the past, and taking the measure of the storms that strike the coast, it is hard to see how there could have been as many survivors as there were, even with the gallantry and local experience of the amateur lifesavers. Many ships ran aground too far offshore to be reached, and were pounded to pieces. The death-dealing power of the offshore sea in these storms seems unparalleled. The surf has the turmoil and roar of an avalanche. It chews and churns at the cliffs taking great volumes of material away so that it seethes with foam and sand, the masses of teeming waters plunging in, heaving and conflicting, an amalgam of unapproachable violence.