When the young explorer Champlain visited the Cape in 1605 he sailed into Nauset Harbor, and at that time, judging by old records, the inlet was about halfway down the sandspit behind the beach. Since then it apparently has moved about a mile south, but its entrances have changed now and then, with long periods of relative stability in between, which might be broken at any time and then followed by some new arrangement of forces. In his _Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States_, Edward Howe Forbush pointed out that this long protective spit, or “beach ridge” extending from Nauset to Monomoy had been pushed back a considerable distance, perhaps a mile, since the early seventeenth century. It used to lie far to the eastward, judging by early charts, of where it is now, and took the form of a long narrow island some twelve miles in length “with several small islands north of it and outlets to the ocean at either end--the northern one at Eastham and the southern lying between the end of this beach ridge and the Chatham shore.” “In 1854 during the great storm that wrecked the lighthouse on Minot’s Ledge, the sea broke through the barrier into Orleans water at Nauset, and afterwards much of Nauset Harbor near the entrance filled partially with shifting sands.” The recent Woods Hole beach studies report that: “The spits literally broke into pieces and the inlet itself became quite complex in 1957. Nauset Inlet has done this before. A study of coastal charts shows that Nauset Inlet opened hard against the cliffs on the south side from 1856 (the first good chart available to us) until 1940. Charts of 1941 show that in a single year a spit grew from south to north against the littoral drift and shifted the inlet a mile to the north.” For some length of time, the storms of 1956 and 1957 resulted in two entrances along the spit, one of which closed up subsequently. Other temporary break-throughs can be seen along the spit, varying from 150 feet to a few yards across, extending down its length until it joins a broad, high stretch--almost a long mount--of sand which ends at the present inlet, with North Beach on the other side. This sand is subject to storm flooding and to winds, to being removed and added to, recut and carved by the waves, and except on the marsh edge of it, beach grass is not able to gain a foothold. In recent years four or five hundred pairs of terns have nested there, and are protected.