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Robert
H. Farson
THE CAPE COD CANAL (1977. 1993) 177 pages. ISBN-10: 0961674008 Reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) biblio.com 07/18/2011 Yes. * * * * * review: How important is the Cape Cod Canal in Massachusetts? For starters it is the world's "widest artificial waterway." Secondly, although not completed before 1914, it was proposed in the 1620s by Pilgrim hero Miles Standish: the first "conceived" public works project in the new world. Robert H. Farson's (1977, 1993) book has five chapters. Covering the greatest time span is Chapter I: "From the Pilgrims to 1899: False Starts and Pipe Dreams." Throughout the book one question is repeated over and over: why did it take so long to build a relatively short (at its current length, 17.4 miles long) canal? The great era of American canal building (e.g. Erie Canal) came and went and no Cape Cod Canal emerged. The usual answer is that the motivation behind earlier canals was usually trade and commerce. But the motives behind the less than 18 mile Cape Cod Canal were non-commercial: -- (1) maritime safety
(hundreds of avoidable wrecks strewn all around Cape Cod) and
-- (2) national defense (a need demonstrated in both the Wars of the Revolution and of 1812). A question never raised, therefore never answered, is: why with so much earlier experience in canal building (Erie, Suez with Kiel and Panama about to be built), were so many avoidable mistakes made in Massachusetts, particularly in choice of dredgers? Had those mistakes not been made, the canal would have opened in 1912, not 1914 and for far less cost. The book's driving heroes are Miles Standish (the Pilgrim realist who paced off the route of a canal and August Perry Belmont, the entrepreneur who built it between 1899 and 1914. A new, third, motivation to build the Cape Cod Canal was as a filial tribute to Belmont's seafaring maternal ancestors, the Perrys (of Lake Erie and Japan fame). The book has 80 pages of text followed by 89 pages of black and white photos with comments, a bibliography up to the early 1970s and a brief index. There are 161 photos. Five of them are either aerial photos or maps of Cape Cod Bay and environs and proposed and actual routes of the "17.4 miles of the canal and the approach channels" (Ch. 5). The photos begin with a collection of early shipwrecks, then show personalities and varieties of equipment used to dredge and build the canal. A weakness of the book is that there are no footnotes or endnotes within the basic narrative explicitly linking text to photos. That said, the photos are arresting, well explained and definitely illuminate the text. This book (2nd edition of 1993) clearly contains at least one photo later than the 1977 first edition. Its front and back covers are memorable scenes of activity on a canal in continuous use since July 1914. Anyone keen for Cape Cod, for U.S. Congressional appropriating details or how to build (or in some respects not build) a canal will thoroughly enjoy Robert H. Farson's THE CAPE COD CANAL. Display it on your coffee table. Review it from time to time. -OOO- http://www.biblio.com/books/196123477.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (2) lunch.com 07/19/2011 name of review: In the 1620s Pilgrim military chief Miles Standish proposed "the first American public work project": the Cape Cod Canal -- rating: * * * * review: The 1993 Second Edition of Robert H. Farson's 1977 THE CAPE COD CANAL is strikingly handsome. It is, alas, merely a tall, wide paperback, not the hardback you normally buy to display proudly on your parlor's coffee table. But both covers are eye-catching. The front cover shows the two-stacked coastal vessel the New York gliding authoritatively into the canal's powerful current. The much more colorful back cover dispays a perky tug hauling four coal carriers through a strait within the early canal. So buy two copies! Display them both together, front and back! The pilgrims in 1620 built a colony at Plymouth on Cape Cod Bay. Military commander Miles Standish "made many trips down the coast. He discovered a valley the Indians used to portage their small boats across the isthmus at the cape's shoulder. ... the valley at his highest point was only twenty-nine feet above sea level. ... he suggested a canal be dug through the valley, connecting the two bays, and his idea, the first American public work project, was debated at Plymouth" (Introduction). 1620. 1720. 1820. No Cape Cod Canal. Elsewhere canals had erupted in France, England and the USA (the Erie, for instance), even in Egypt (Suez). When the Cape Cod Canal finally opened in 1914, its opening date was sandwiched between Germany's Kiel Canal and the mighty Panama Canal. By comparison with many others, Miles Standish's dream was not that difficult an engineering feat. When things finally got started in 1899, there were well-founded worries about Ice Age boulders (later 100 ton ones were found when the dredges dug 20 feet down) and some fairly elementary mistakes in selecting the most effective dredges made the work take two years longer than it should have. But why did it take so long? Why from the 1620s to 1914? Author Robert H. Farson says that the Cape Cod Canal was initially and for the longest time justified on two grounds: (1) it would prevent
recurrence of the hundreds of costly shipwrecks due to mariners' need
to approach and leave Boston skirting the treacherous northern edge of
the Cape. In the American Revolutionary and 1812 wars, the British
easily bottled up the one approach to Boston.
(2) So there was also a strategic motive. But these two proved weak by comparison with the commerical glitter behind the Erie Canal and others. Money trumped altruism and prudence as a motive for building canals, argues Farson. Robert Farson's THE CAPE COD CANAL has more pages of photographs than of straight narration. And the pictures (including a half dozen maps or aerial photos, episodes in Cape Cod history, famous wrecked ships, key figures in building the canal, etc.) -- all 161 of them -- are listed even before the narrative text. It is easy therefore to assume that assembling these remarkable black and white representations meant more to Robert Farson than penning his lucid, straightforward chronological narrative. They make up a proud collection. Who will read THE CAPE COD CANAL with pleasure? -- Readers of the Cape Cod-based "Doc Smith" mystery series by Edgar Prize winner Rick Boyer. That's where I first learned of the Cape Cod Canal and its intricacies -- in several detective yarns. -- People who live anywhere around Metro Boston and are keen on American and Canadian coastal hiistory. -- Readers who cannot get enough of canals anywhere: moving huge amounts of sand, dynamiting boulders, getting legislatures to authorize the project, the financing, the entrepreneurship entailed. -- Students of motivation. They will learn of a most unlikely third missing ingredient supplied by August Belmont, the man who finally financed and built the Cape Cod Canal: (3) family piety.
Belmont said that he built the canal as a monument to the memory of his
mother's seafaring ancestors, the Perrys, notably the victor on Lake
Erie in the War of 1812 and his brother who opened up Japan before the
Civil War.
This is a handsome book. It will indeed repose attractively on your favorite coffee table. And it is a wonderful guide to the waters and lands of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Not to mention its tides, currents, winds, howling storms, fogs and shipwrecks. -OOO- http://www.lunch.com/ubergizmo/reviews/d/UserReview-Robert_H_Farson_ THE_CAPE_COD_CANAL-64-1742497-210535.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (3) bn.com 07/20/2011 title of review The world's widest lock-free waterway. It tricked the Germans in 1941. rating: * * * * review: What, if anything, is interesting about the Cape Cod Canal? It is 400-plus feet wide, kept free of ice in winter by the currents of its lock-free tidal waters, but largely of local rather than global interest. Mystery writer Rick Boyer described its environs: "... Cape Cod. It is shaped like a cocked
arm, which joins the mainland at the shoulder. It is bent the way
Arnold Schwarzenegger bends his to make his baseball sized biceps pop.
Only the arm is a skinny one. ..." (Rick Boyer, BILLINGSGATE
SHOAL, (Ch. 11) .
A more famous description was penned by naturalist Henry David Thoreau, quoted in THE CAPE COD CANAL (1977, 2nd edition 1993) by Robert H. Farson: "Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of
Massachusetts; the shoulder is at Buzzards Bay, the elbow, or crazy
bone is at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro and the sandy fist at
Provincetown" (Farson, Introduction).
In the 1620s Captain Miles Standish proposed to the Pilgrim fathers that a canal be built across Cape Cod's "shoulder" at Buzzards Bay -- 16 miles south of Plymouth. Standish had scouted the route himself and knew that the location, at its highest point only 29 feet above sea level, was a popular short portage across the isthmus for Indian canoes. According to Farson, building a Cape Cod Canal thus became North America's "first public work project." Why it took nearly 300 years before canal moved from idea to reality in 1914 and why it continues to function today is the story of THE CAPE COD CANAL. Earlier canals were moved primarily by commercial considerations: including the Erie, Chesapeake and Ohio and Suez. According to Farson, commerce was never decisive for the Cape Cod Canal. The sea route from Manhattan to Boston was 169 miles and the waters above and near the Cape's northernmost "sandy fist" were among the most dangerous in the world. Hundreds of wrecks dotted the shores, many documented among Farson's 161 black and white photos. The primary motivation for a Cape Cod canal was humanitarian: to save lives. In the Wars of the American Revolution and 1812, the British navy bottled up sea commerce to and from Boston by patrolling outside "the sandy fist" at Provincetown. A canal would have given the Americans a second and more secure outlet to the Atlantic. Yet neither neither commercial nor strategic motive proved decisive in the end. Plans to build "a
through waterway" came and went. The final push began in 1899 and
climaxed in 1914 under the leadership of August Perry Belmont. Belmont
built the waterway as a monument to his maternal ancestors, the
sea-faring Perrys. Those included the victor of Lake Erie in the War of
1812, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry ("We have met the enemy and they
are ours"); and his younger brother Matthew Calbraith Perry, who opened
up Japan to trade with the West 1852 - 54.
THE CAPE COD CANAL by Robert Farson is notably handsome. It will adorn any coffee table. First nationalized in World War I by President Woodrow WIlson, the canal became definitively Federal Government property in 1928 and has since been widened and enlarged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to 17.5 miles of land and sea waterways and approaches. The Second World War was the backdrop for the canal's greatest years of glory, highest tonnage and providing deceptive cover for Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 as he met secretly with Britain's Churchill to create the Atlantic Charter. -OOO- recommended reading: -- RIck Perry - THE WHALE'S FOOTPRINTS; BILLINGSGATE SHOAL. -- Henry David Thoreau - CAPE COD. http://my.barnesandnoble.com/communityportal/review. aspx?reviewid=1767554 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (4) amazon.com 07/23/2011 title of review: By +/- 2023 The Cape Cod Canal will be 400 years old -- as an IDEA! rating: * * * * review: When you hear a phrase like "great canals of the world," which ones come to mind? At more than 1,000 miles (1794 kilometers) long there is China's Grand Canal linking Peking to the rice growing South. Its earliest portions date from the Fifth Century B.C. Even earlier (510 B.C.) Persian King ff Kings Darius linked by canal the Red Sea and Egypt's Nile River -- long before the 90 mile long 19th Century Suez Canal. In 1960 I steamed through the 4 mile Corinth Canal, separating the Peloponnesus from the rest of Greece. It was completed in 1893. And who does not know the vital 48 mile long Panama Canal, linking Atlantic and Pacific Oceans? Canals have been important for the Netherlands, Germany, France and the United States, among other nations. They are still important in the year 2011 as facilitators of bulk transportation at costs competititve with railroads and trucks. Local residents and tourists love to picnic on their banks and watch the ships and yachts pass through. A runt and a relative newcomer among American and world through artificial waterways is the one on Cape Cod. You know all about that one, right? Well let's start with Cape Cod, named for the codfish so vital to early modern Europe. Let's see it thorugh the eyes of mystery writer Rick Boyer: "... Cape Cod. It is shaped like a cocked
arm, which joins the mainland at the shoulder. It is bent the way
Arnold Schwarzenegger bends his to make his baseball sized biceps pop.
Only the arm is a skinny one. ..." (Rick Boyer, BILLINGSGATE
SHOAL, (Ch. 11)
In 1914, when it opened, this unsung canal severed Cape Cod from the Massachusetts mainland, much like the Corinth Canal 21 years earlier in Greece. As an idea the Cape Cod Canal dates from the 1620s when Captain Miles Standish, military leader of the Mayflower Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth, proposed digging one where the shoulder of Cape Cod meets the torso of Massachusetts at Buzzards Bay. Nothing effective happened, however, to realize Miles Standish's dream before 1899. In that year August Perry Belmont launched the final effort that in 1914 produced the earliest, narrower, shallower, shorter and for-profit version of today's government owned and operated Cape Cod Canal. President Woodrow Wilson nationalized the canal in World War I and in 1928 it became permanent Federal Government property, operated in peacetime by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Today it has been enlarged to a length of 17.4 miles and a width of more than 400 feet. That width is its greatest claim to fame: widest sea-level, lock-free, man-made waterway in the world. Its protected, safer sea lane has saved many lives from ships that would otherwise have been lost in the treacherous approach to Boston above the northern "sandy fist" (Henry Thoreau) of Cape Cod. The canal is normally open to traffic going both ways. Its racing tides keep the canal clear of ice in the winters. Fogs and storms can slow vessel traffic down. Its well kept banks attract persons who love simply to walk, sit or picnic just to watch the vessels pass through. This story is simply, clearly told and amply illustrated (161 black and white photos). Robert Farson's THE CAPE COD CANAL offers 80 pages of text followed by 89 pages of black and white photos with comments, a bibliography up to the early 1970s and a brief index. Five of the 161 photos are either aerial photos or maps of Cape Cod Bay and environs and proposed and actual routes of the "17.4 miles of the canal and the approach channels" (Ch. 5). The photos begin with a collection of early shipwrecks, then show personalities and varieties of equipment used to dredge and build the canal, passenger packets, ships struck by torpedoes in World War II and on and on. A weakness of the book is that there are no footnotes or endnotes within the basic narrative explicitly linking text to photos. -OOO- http://www.amazon.com/Cape-Cod-Canal-Robert-Farson/ product-reviews/0961674008/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt? ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= (5) epinions.com 07/20/2011 Title of review: The Canal's Role in my Journeying to Cape Cod Written: Jul 20 '11 Product ratings: Pros: Everything you need to know about the Canal: history, creators, maps, photos, tides, storms, currents. Cons: Photos not linked directly to narrative text. Local, regional significance. Little of global importance. The Bottom Line: CAPE COD CANAL is visually stunning. Front and back covers will grace your coffee table. As a proposal by Miles Standish: America's oldest public works project. Memorable photos. Splendid maps. aohcapablanca's Full Review: Robert H Farson - The Cape Cod Canal On Saturday June 4, 2011 my wife Mary and I were among six tourists traveling in a small bus from Boston to Hyannis, on the "ocean" side of legendary Cape Cod. Not long after entering the isthmus linking cape to mainland Massachusetts, we drove high above the Cape Cod Canal. That evening we attended Mass at the Hyannis church funded by President John F. Kennedy's mother Rose and where Maria Shriver had later married Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sunday we "did" Nantucket Island, the whaling museum, etc. There I also bought at the extraordinarily user-friendly Information Center a copy of Robert H. Farson's THE CAPE COD CANAL (1977, second edition 1993). Monday, en route back to Boston via Plymouth (the rock, the Mayflower replica and a great lobster restaurant) we first drove to a scenic spot on the Cape Cod Canal and absorbed a bit of its history and pre-history. We learned that the canal is the core of a 17.4 mile engineering feat that includes approaches by water through Buzzards Bay on the west and from the Sandwich coast on the east). The canal had been conceived in the 1620s by none other than the Pilgrims military chief, Captain Miles Standish. Standish "made many trips down the coast. He
discovered a valley the Indians used to portage their small boats
across the isthmus at the cape's shoulder. ... the valley at its
highest point was only twenty-nine feet above sea level. ... he
suggested a canal be dug through the valley, connecting the two bays,
and his idea, the first American public work project, was debated at
Plymouth" (Farson, Introduction).
Today's Cape Cod Canal was, however, not completed and opened until July 29, 1914 by August Perry Belmont. Why did it take nearly 300 years to make a reality of Standish's "idea of a through waterway" (Introduction). There was no lack of false starts. A easy to miss motive, curiously uncommercial and far less than cosmic, inspired Belmont in 1899 to launch the final 15 year effort that finally succeeded. Before I share with you Robert Farson's revealing of August Belmont's driving motive, let me set the stage by sharing my own several reasons for finally visiting the Cape Cod, its Bay and its Canal and how one relatively prosaic cause finally brought me there at age 75. Mayflower descendants in their legions have descended on Cape Cod Bay to Plymouth, a few miles north of the Canal. Now I am not a Mayflower descendant , but my two sons are, thanks to their mother and her ancestor Samuel Fuller and his family. Mary and I visited Plymouth for the first time last month. In 1994, On our own 30th wedding anniversary, our older son Atticus had married a Massachusetts girl a bit north of Boston. Why did Mary and I not go to Cape Cod then? I also had a third motivation far older. For decades I have read into the Pilgrims and Puritans of colonial New England, the Mayflower Compact, Governor William Bradford's OF PLIMOUTH PLANTATION and on and on. Still I did not go to Cape Cod Bay. So what finally propelled me at age 75 to visit that part of Massachusetts? What finally made me hunger to see Cape Cod flowed from meeting Edgar Prize winner Rick Boyer at a surprise lunch that Rick hosted in May 2010 for me and three other residents of our Western North Carolina retirement community. I then read all nine of Boyer's DOC ADAMS novels (and several other of his books) set in and around Cape Cod. BILLINGSGATE SHOAL was the very first DOC ADAMS detective story and it won the Edgar Award as best detective novel of 1982. In BILLINGSGATE SHOAL I first read about the canal. As would prove the case again and again, oral surgeon and amateur detective Doctor Charles Adams was unraveling a suspicious death. He intended to sail around in his little craft the Ella Hatton looking for clues inside, and possibly, outside Cape Cod Bay. "I would head west along the inside of the
Cape first, nosing my way into the small harbors of Barnstable and
Sandwich. From there I would either head north to Plymouth, or south,
through the Cape Cod Canal down into Buzzards Bay and the oceanside,
though I doubted this. Whatever was happening -- if anything -- was
happening in the Bay, or to the north" (Ch. 13).
Everybody knows that Italy looks like a boot. Many have compared Cape Cod to a human arm. Here is Rick Boyer's description: "... Cape Cod. It is shaped like a cocked
arm, which joins the mainland at the shoulder. It is bent the way
Arnold Schwarzenegger bends his to make his baseball sized biceps pop.
Only the arm is a skinny one. ..." (BILLINGSGATE SHOAL,
Ch. 11)."
In Boyer's 1988 THE WHALE'S FOOTPRINTS, Doc Adams and his grown son Jack, the latter chief suspect in a murder investigation, take Doc's cabin sail boat through the Cape Cod Canal from east (Bay) to west (Ocean). This day long episode throws light on father - son bonding but is otherwise inessential to the plot. This is also true of Doc Adams's many visits to all the major eating places between Boston and Provinceton. But I learned enough from Rick Boyer to want to visit the canal myself and more recently to learn even more from Farson's book. Doc and Jack arrived under sail at the eastern end of the canal about 3:45 on an unbusy Monday afternoon. Canal officials recommended the Ella Hatton wait 45 minutes for the "four to six knots" tide to turn in their favor. "We saw an increasing number of cargo
freighters anxious to save the 162-mile leg around the outside of the
Cape on the Boston-to-New York run." The canal "at over four hundred feet across (is)
the widest sea-level waterway in the world."
As required, Doc and Jack turned on the Ella Hatton's small engine and proceeded without mishap through the canal. They passed under the Sagamore bridge, the Bourne bridge and the railroad bridge. With canal lights turned on every 500 feet, father and son rode out into Buzzards Bay. Thanks to their tidal bore meeting an onshore wind, "We shot out of the canal mouth into waves
that were three and four feet high. They smacked into our little
catboat head on." And they still had five more miles to go "through the
dredged channel until we could veer off to our anchorage for the night"
(THE WHALE'S FOOTPRINTS, Ch. 7).
When time came to admire the covers of Parson's THE CAPE COD CANAL, I was already in love with Cape Cod Bay and the famous canal connecting it with "the Atlantic Ocean." Through 161 numbered black and white photos (including several maps) and a brisk narrative preceding them Robert Farson makes it clear why a canal should have been built centuries earlier, but was not. The Boston to New York route over the top of the arm of Cape Cod is one of the most dangerous to seamen in the world. Hundreds of wrecks adorn its rocks and coasts. All could have been avoided had the Cape Cod Canal been in place. A second motivation: in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 the British navy, in order to paralyze Boston's trade by sea, had only to blockade the narrow entrance to Cape Cod Bay north of Provincetown. There was ample strategic motivation to build a canal at the Bay's southwest corner. So why was it not built during the great age of world canal building? Why not when the Chesapeake and Ohio, George Washington's dream, or the Erie or the Suez Canals were on the rise? Why wait until 1914: sandwiched between the openings of the Kiel and the Panama Canals? Robert Farson argues that the motivations for most canals were trade and profits. A convincing comercial case was never, by contrast, made for the Cape Cod Canal. That canal was needed for saving lives and for national security. Another motive finally built the canal between 1899 and 1914. On his mother's side, August Perry Belmont was a sea-faring Perry. That family included the two brothers who were, respectively, victorious on Lake Erie in the War of 1812, and who opened up Japan prior to the Civil War. Belmont explicitly built the canal as a monument to his Perry lineage! The canal was nationalized in World War I by Woodrow Wilson and enjoyed its greatest traffic in World War II. In 1941, four months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an elaborate hoax made people think that President Franklin Roosevelt sailed through it en route to a falsely publicized vacation on Campbello Island. In reality he was en route from off Nantucke Island by naval cruiser to meet with Winston Churchill at Argentia, Newfoundland -- where the Atlantic Charter was agreed to (Ch. 4). Robert H. Farson in THE CAPE COD CANAL produces a mini-epic of men against the sea: rocks, shoals, currents, fogs, hurricanes, wranglings within legislatures in Boston and Washington, a tale of dredgers and railroads, bridges and tourism and an explanation of why the racing tides keep the Cape Cod Canal ice free in winter. There is far more to Cape Cod and its historic Bay than its canal. But that canal and its tale are good places to begin your own personal voyage of discovery. -OOO- p.s. thank you, epinions gatekeeper Pestyside Patsy, for making THE CAPE COD CANAL reviewable. Recommended: Yes http://www.epinions.com/review/Robert_H_Farson_ The_Cape_Cod_Canal_epi/content_557949947524 =-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-= |