Opinion/Brown: Step into Cape Cod's seafaring past at our maritime museum in Hyannis
Few places in America have a deeper maritime tradition than we have, here on Cape Cod. Long before this place was a tourist destination, Cape Codders made their livings from the sea. Oystermen, lobstermen and fishermen went out year-round, sailing out to sea with no radios, no outboard motors, and no synthetic fabrics to shed the water and keep themselves warm. Whaling ships from Provincetown, Nantucket and nearby New Bedford rounded the globe to bring back whale oil, baleen and ivory for carving while the mariners' wives spent lonely hours looking out to sea from platforms built atop their houses.
Until 2004, Cape Cod had all this history and nowhere to put it. But then the Cape Cod Maritime Museum opened its doors on the Hyannis waterfront. Like many successful modern museums, it doesn't just have things to look at; it has a lot of things to do. This is a museum you could really get involved with.
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Its Young Mariners’ program is a summer camp that offers kids a chance to spend four days studying marine wildlife, seamanship, and sailing the museum’s vintage catboat Sarah in Nantucket Sound. By the time the summer ends, up to 120 youngsters will have made it through the program.
Visit the museum's boat-building shop where a group of kids is building a skiff. The young shipwrights learn how to loft their patterns from blueprints. Then they cut out the patterns in wood and learn how to turn all that into a working small boat.
There was no Cape Cod Canal before 1914. Sailing ships, passengers and crews were lost routinely in the shoals off Cape Cod. Imagine the courage required for volunteers to launch rowing boats through crashing surf in the midst of a nor'easter … to go out and take people off sinking ships in snow squalls and howling winds. Well, the maritime museum has one of those old rescue boats and is rebuilding it now.
The museum also has a collection of small traditional boats that were typically used around here 100 years ago. They have two rowing vessels with opportunities for interested locals to get on board and learn how to row as a team.
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I got involved with the museum last year when I was asked to be a reader for the museum’s essay contest for high school students across the Cape. This is an annual program and a real opportunity for young writers who want to earn a $1,000 prize for the best entry of the year. (The winner’s school gets $500 too.)
The museum has a Fine Arts gallery. At the moment, young artists from across the Cape have submitted paintings and sculptures — all on maritime themes. One painting portrays a naked swimmer drowning inside an enormous plastic bag, itself submerged below the waves. A brilliant ceramic box came in. An octopus guards the lid; a seashell is curled up inside.
Of course, the maritime museum is a traditional museum too. A whaling boat from back in the day is the centerpiece for a whaling exhibit complete with all the accouterments of the trade. It never occurred to anyone back in the 1800s that it was even possible to hunt the world's whales to the edge of extinction. Whaling was a rigorous and dangerous profession, and the whaling fleets were one of the first places where freed slaves could find gainful employment working side-by-side with whites.
Come see one of the best collections of scrimshaw whalebone carvings and marine brassware on the East Coast.
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The museum is graced with some outstanding ship models, most of them expertly built from scratch. Against one wall you'll find a beautiful model of the steamship Portland that went down in a gale with 125 passengers and hands in a November northeaster back in 1898. There were no NOAA weather forecasts back then. Violent storms would arrive as a complete shock. This one tore up the coastline and did frightful damage out in Provincetown, pretty much putting them out of the whaling business for good.
Also important to the museum is a growing archive of original documents and artifacts contributed by Cape Codders who discover these things in their attics and estate sales. If your family has such things in your possession, you should at least allow the museum to catalog the items. Also, there isn't a safer place to put them than in the museum’s displays where the public can appreciate them too. We have a rich history here on Cape Cod. Here’s where you can find a lot of it in one fascinating place.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. E-mail him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Cape Cod Maritime Museum in Hyannis celebrates seafaring past
