Shipwrecks of Cape Cod: Stories of Tragedy and Triumph

by Donald Wilding

From the wreck of the Sparrow-Hawk in 1626 to the grounding of the Eldia in 1984, Cape Cod's outer beach--often referred to as the "Graveyard of Ships"--saw the demise of more than three thousand vessels along forty miles of shifting shoals. The October Gale of 1841 claimed the lives of fifty-seven sailors from Truro, a devastating toll for a small seaside community. Survivors from the 1896 wreck of the Monte Tabor in Provincetown were arrested for a suspected mutiny. Aboard the Castagna, which stranded off Wellfleet in 1914, several sailors froze to death in the masts, while the crew's cat survived. Local author Don Wilding revisits these and many other maritime disasters, along with the heroic, and sometimes tragic, rescue efforts of the U.S. Life-Saving Service and Coast Guard.

192 pages, Paperback

Published May 24, 2021

Reviews

[Mary Korpi]

Having just opened an exhibit on shipwrecks off Long Island at our Horton Point lighthouse museum, this book is of particularly interesting to me.
It was nice to hear that in a tragic case at least the cat survivied.

[Karen Jahn]

Enjoyed reading a chapter at a time and then exploring the Cape

[KG]

Although an accurate history of Cape Cod’s most extreme shipwrecks, I found this book quite boring. It was kind of interesting to see that most of the shipwrecks happened not too far off from the shore, while the people from the mainland watched. They all kind of blended into each other as the chapters are short and sweet.