The Wardens of Cape Cod The Achievements of the Coast Guard Patrol By Henry Beston The World’s Work - December, 1923 Volume 47, Issue 2 [Illustration] There are two Cape Cods in the world, one the picturesque and familiar land of toy windmills, picnickers and motorists, the other the Cape which the sailors see, the Cape of the wild, houseless outer shore, the countless tragic wrecks, the sand bars and the shoals. This unknown Cape begins at Monomoy; Monomoy where the silver-gray bones of ancient wrecks lie in mouldering lagoons; it leaps the open waters of Chatham and Orleans, and beginning again at Nauset sweeps on, league upon lonely league, to the hook of Provincetown. Beyond the broad swath of the churning breakers, lies the North Atlantic, most masculine of seas. Now betrayed by a long smear of churning water in the outer green, now buried treacherously under an unrevealing tide, off-shore bars lie hid. Standing well enough in, the greasy one-stack tramps, the fishing schooners coming and going from the Georges, the vanishing steel windjammers with their Mediterranean or Negro crews, the little unromantic “sugar bowls,” and the big tugs with their solemn barges linked behind, all day pass to and fro. Once a sailor has picked up Nauset Light on his way north to Provincetown, the only signs of life he will find along the beach will be the coast guard stations and the little cottages which the surfmen build about them for their families. Thirty miles of the thunder of the breakers, thirty miles of Nature in the elemental mood, thirty miles where night reveals no welcoming window light, and the world vanishes into a darkness full of unutterable mystery, keen, moist, ocean smells, and thundering sound. It is the task of the surfmen to warn vessels standing into danger, to rescue them and their crews from positions of peril, to furnish fuel and food and water to ships in distress, and even, should occasion arise, to navigate a ship into the nearest port. Including the Monomoy and Chatham region, the patrols of the outer Cape cover a length of fifty wild, breaker-beaten miles. The little harbor openings which have been mentioned alone break the line, elsewhere along it men go south and men go north, and station links with station through the night. There is nothing quite like the night patrol of the Cape in all the seaboard world. The stations on the Cape stand on an average some six miles apart, and house a crew of eight men together with the life boat and life line cannon used in case of a wreck. The men upon patrol, however, do not walk from station to station, but to a halfway house built in some more or less sheltered nook upon the bank. A man going south from the Highland station for example, leaves a kind of brass ticket to be collected at his southern halfway house by a man coming north from Pamet River; a man going north from the Highland exchanges tokens with a man coming south from Peaked Hill.