A few weeks ago, I shared a story with you about the who risked their lives in stormy seas to rescue sailors from stranded and sinking ships. In the early 1900s, about 50,000 ships rounded Cape Cod in a typical year, averaging about two shipwrecks each month. If only there was a canal for shipping to pass safely from the head of Buzzards Bay up towards Boston.
Native Americans had long known about a shortcut. If we think of Cape Cod as an arm jutting out from the seacoast, curled up flexing its bicep, the flowed north and the Manomet River flowed south to pretty much where the armpit of the Cape would be. Between the two was a three-mile gap with an elevation only 30 feet above sea level.
Original occupants had been over the gap for thousands of years. When the Pilgrims arrived, realized that a canal would be hugely useful. He just had no way to dig one.
In September 1880, 500 mostly Italian workers were hired from New York to dig a canal the old-fashioned way, with shovels and wheelbarrows. After all, some of the great earth-moving projects of antiquity were equally low-tech. But the workers weren't being paid.
They kidnapped the son of the contractor, but larceny wasn't really in them. They released the boy, gave up, and wandered into Sandwich looking for work. The locals treated them hospitably and finally arranged for their return to New York.
Enter an entrepreneur named Lockwood in 1883. He dug 7,000 feet of canal and then the project collapsed. The locals refer to it as.