It is New Year’s Day.
Dennis and Dory walk on ahead. Glowing pink and shivering like a dog, my extremities as navy blue as the sea, I struggle back into my clothes, unable to do my jacket up with my numb fingers, and run after them. Dory looks back, apparently relieved. Did she think I’d been lost for good? In the car park Dennis has to rub my hands in his, making jokes about hoping that none of his friends will be driving by. My teeth chatter and my muscles shiver, shaking me back to life. Skin and bone burn like a hard cold flame. And they continue to burn and shake for an hour afterwards, till my body is convinced that the threat is over. Every swim is a little death. But it is also a reminder that you are alive.
Out at sea, hundreds of eiders and mergansers bob in the waves. They must be among the most hardy of all animals, these sea ducks, forever riding on the freezing water, resilient and resigned. At the north end of Herring Cove – in the lee of the rip of the Race where the sea turns dark as it becomes the ocean – is a sandbar which traps a temporary lagoon at high tide. In the heat of summer it’s a wonderfully warm place to swim, as languorous as a Mediterranean pool, although once I was horrified to see half a humpback beneath me, its great white knobbly flipper all but waving to me from the sandy bottom, as if its part-carcase were preserved by the salt water. Today the tide is running fast, and would quickly carry me out to sea.
This entire rounded tip of the Cape is a curling catchment, a beneficiary of long shore drift, perpetually shifting to reveal shipwrecks sticking out of the dunes. After winter storms have destroyed most of the car park – leaving its tarmac hanging in slabs like cooled lava over the sand – a chunk of ship, stirred out of retirement, emerges up the beach. Was it washed up or merely uncovered by the storms, lying there all along as I walked there, its knees and ribs beneath me, rubbed and eroded by the decades in which they have rolled around on the sea bed, waiting to be revealed like some vast wooden whale? It might be the remains of a twentieth-century vessel or a Viking longboat. The splintered timbers and curled ribs of oak lie cloaked in emerald-green weed, bolted pieces of something whose shape can only be guessed at.
‘The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor?’ Thoreau wrote as he wandered from one end of the Cape to the other from 1849 to 1857, continually drawn back to this inbetween place. ‘How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld! Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand has witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.’
Walking towards Provincetown, Thoreau saw an arrangement of bleached bones on the beach ahead, a mile before he reached them; only then did he realise they were human, with scraps of dried flesh still on them. It was a sign Shelley had already foreseen, ‘On the beach of a northern sea’, as if in a premonition of his own demise, ‘a solitary heap, | One white skull and seven dry bones, | On the margin of the stones’.
On another walk Thoreau was told of two bodies found on the strand: a man, and a corpulent woman. ‘The man had thick boots on, though his head was off, but “it was along-side”. It took the finder some weeks to get over the sight. Perhaps they were man and wife, and whom God had joined the ocean-currents had not put asunder.’ Like the victims of Titanic, some bodies were ‘boxed up and sunk’ at sea; others were buried in the sand. ‘There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice,’ said Thoreau. ‘The Gulf Stream may return some to their native shores, or drop them in some out-of-the-way cave of ocean, where time and the elements will write new riddles with their bones.’ I see that same sea in his eyes, eyes that seem to see the sea forever; what it had found, and what it had lost.
Nearly four thousand ships have been wrecked along the Cape’s outer shore, from Sparrowhawk, which ran aground down at Orleans in 1626 and whose survivors were given refuge by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, to the British ship Somerset, which came to grief off Race Point in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, having fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill, foundering on the sandy bar off the Race. Twenty-one of its sailors and marines drowned, but more than four hundred were taken prisoner and sent to Boston. The Cape Codders escorting them gave up halfway, possibly worn down by their charges asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ Somerset has appeared every century since, in 1886, 1973 and 2010; a spirit ship, a beached Flying Dutchman. One writer in the nineteen-forties claimed that scores of people had seen ‘ghosts in the vicinity, ghosts of the British sailors’. The ship remains a sovereign vessel; perhaps I ought to reclaim it for my queen.
Meanwhile, many other wrecks lie out there like time machines. Thoreau saw the bottom of the sea as ‘strewn with anchors, some deeper and some shallower, and alternately covered and uncovered by the sand, perchance with a small length of iron cable still attached, – of which where is the other end?’
‘So many unconcluded tales to be continued another time,’ he wrote. ‘So, if we had diving-bells adapted to the spiritual deeps, we should see anchors with their cables attached, as thick as eels in vinegar, all wriggling vainly toward their holding-ground. But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find.’
Wreckage and the wrecked: they merge into one, a mangling of man and land, of vessel and sea. I think of Crusoe cast up on the shore waiting for Friday’s footsteps, as the waves washed over a plaintive nineteen-sixties soundtrack; of Ishmael, another orphan, clinging to a coffin carved for Queequeg which provided his lifebuoy; of beached whales and beached humans. And I hear my father singing, ‘My bonny lies over the ocean, my bonny lies over the sea, my bonny lies over the ocean, O, bring back my bonny to me.’ I used to hear ‘body’ for ‘bonny’.
When Thoreau was visiting the Cape, an average of two ships every month would be lost in winter storms, especially on the deceptive bars off the Race at Peaked Hill, where shoulders of sand shadow the ocean’s edge. The roaring breakers catch white on the shifting shelf, luminous at night with the memory of the lives they’ve taken. And all this happened within sight of land.
‘Ship ashore! All hands perishing!’
These tempests were not conjured up by a magician, nor were there any sprites on hand to guide the survivors to safety. Commonly, sailors did not learn to swim – partly through superstition – ‘What the sea wants, the sea will have’ – and partly through practicality, knowing that adrift on the open ocean, their flailing would only prolong their fate. Any attempts to save the shipwrecked were often defeated by the elements. Would-be rescuers could only look on and wait until the storms subsided, by which time it was too late. All that was left to do was to salvage the wreck. In the eccentric museum at the Highland Light, housed in a 1906 hotel standing in the shadow of the lighthouse on the windblown headland, one of the most haunted places I have ever visited, a row of assorted chairs from many different disasters stands as a testimony to lost souls and salvaged domesticity: a sad line of mismatched seating, ranged along a wall at a students’ party. Upstairs, rooms with stable doors lined along a long, narrow and dimly-lit corridor; they still seemed filled with fitful guests, and something in the darkness down the end told me to get out.
Those who did make it ashore could die of exposure in this no-man’s-land, with no hope of reaching dwellings set deep inland, far from the raging sea. In 1797 the Massachusetts Humane Society set up ‘Humane-houses’, a series of huts equipped with straw and matches to provide survivors with warmth and shelter. Their echoes remain in the shacks still scattered through the dunes: rough constructions put together from grey beach-wood and timbers as though assembled by those lost sailors. Even in the town, salvaged ships’ knees propped up houses against the storms that brought the flotsam here, while Thoreau recorded fences woven with whale ribs.
Other dangers lurk in these countervailing waters, seen and unseen. Locals told Thoreau there was ‘no bathing on the Atlantic side, on