In 1927 Henry Beston, who was born in Quincy, moved into a small cabin on a spit of land a few miles south of Nauset Station at what is now Coast Guard Beach in Eastham. What began as a short vacation turned into a full year’s stay. Here he recorded life at the edge of Cape Cod and studied the natural world—the land, the sky, the sea—and the role of man in it.
The house was built by an Eastham carpenter to Beston’s specs (20'x 16') on a dune just 20 feet above high water and 30 feet from the beach. It had two small rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen/living room. Located between the ocean and the marsh, the house had 10 windows to take in views on all sides. Beston called his cabin the “Fo’castle,” like the quarters for a ship’s crew. In his words:
“In my larger room, I had a chest of drawers painted an honest carriage blue, a table, a wall bookcase, a couch, two chairs, and a rocker...Using a knapsack, I carried my supplies on my own shoulders . . .”
And later, referring to appropriation of ships’ cargo:
“Go about the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner...”
That carriage-blue paint color surprises visitors at the sanctuary where the blue chair is mounted in
the exhibits room. This was a survivor of the Outermost House. Beston could have sat upon this chair when first jotting down observations during his year-long stay.
Of all the natural life around him, it was the birds he fancied:
“How singular it is that so little has been written about the birds of Cape Cod!. . .living here, one may see more kinds and varieties of birds than it would seem possible to discover in any one small region…I had land birds and moor birds, even birds of the outer ocean...a glossy ibis in one storm, a frigate bird in another.”
Beston’s observations cover a broad spectrum of wildlife from a doe marooned in the marsh, to skunks, grasshoppers, horseshoe crabs, shellfish, alewives and seals. Poignant descriptions of birds struggling against natural forces follow the seasons. Gulls, scoters, coots, larks, sandpipers, plovers, yellowlegs, sanderlings, terns, auks, ruddy turnstones, geese, arctic sea ducks, widgeons, eiders, oldsquaws, murres, gannets and king eiders are just a few. Their misadventures included encounters with man-made oil spills.
Appreciation of the “elemental drama” of the great outer beach played into the author’s understanding of man and his place in this natural world. He often walked the beach at night and found its voice:
“. . . a sound in fullest harmony with its spirit and mood . . .and that sound the piping of a bird. As I walk the beach in early summer, my solitary coming disturbs it on its nest, and it flies away, troubled, invisible, piping its sweet, plaintive cry. The bird I write of is the piping plover. . . Its note is a whistled syllable, the loveliest musical note, I think, sounded by any North Atlantic bird.”
And of another night prowl he wrote:
“. . . returned at three o’clock from an expedition north, the whole night, in one strange, burning instant, turned into a phantom day…An enormous meteor, the largest I have ever seen, was consuming itself in an effulgence of light west of the zenith. Beach and dune and ocean appeared out of nothing, shadowless and motionless, a landscape whose every tremor and vibration were stilled, a landscape in a dream.”
Within one year of leaving Outermost House, Henry Beston published a 222-page book of the same name. It has inspired many writers, including Rachel Carson, and has become a mainstay of the environmental movement and a classic of 20th century American literature.
Thirty years later, in 1959, Henry Beston gave his cabin and 50 acres in trust to the Massachusetts Audubon Society. For nearly 20 years, members could stay at the unique site for short visits. One visitor, Nan Turner Waldron, wrote Journey to Outermost House about her own visits many years after Beston. The cottage was moved at least three times to protect it from storms and erosion.
On October 11, 1964, at the instigation of Secretary of the Interior Stuart L. Udall, a ceremony
honored the aging Henry Beston and declared the Outermost House a National Literary Landmark. Led by dignitaries of the literary world, the Department of Interior, the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and the Cape Cod National Seashore, nearly 1000 Beston admirers attended.
Governor Endicott Peabody presided. Both Henry Beston and his wife, author Elizabeth Coatsworth, were present. One of the speakers was Mass Audubon Vice President Allen H. Morgan. Afterward, invited guests were driven in beach buggies down the beach to the Outermost House where an interpretive trail exhibit was being planned.
In 1995 Mass Audubon celebrated its 100th anniversary with a concert, presenting “The Outermost House,” composed for orchestra and chorale by Ronald Perera. The words are taken from Beston’s book, and the music resounds with the seasonal changes of the sea and the Outer Beach.
In the powerful winter storm of February, 1978, much of the National Seashore site at Coast Guard Beach was washed away. The Outermost House, too, was torn from its moorings by giant waves and claimed by the sea.
Wallace Bailey, first Director of the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, related the event in an article titled Farewell to Fo’castle: The Outermost House is Gone for the April ’78 Audubon newsletter, accompanied by fine drawings of the house made the previous year by Jane Trumbore. Bailey described the storm:
“. . .The weather bureau calls it the worst in recorded history. Winds of hurricane force (92 mph in Chatham) pummeled a new-moon tide of 11' 6" into an overwhelming surge of water. It tore away the dune face of Nauset Spit, and the little house, deprived of its protective barrier, was as vulnerable to the storm as a ship at anchor. Strongly built and sturdy to the end, it quit its foundation posts and floated into the marsh. . . gable deep but upright in the churning inland sea. As the tide changed, currents carried the Fo’castle to the inlet, and it seems to have been heading seaward when it came to grief on the point of Nauset Heights.”
Old photographs preserved at the sanctuary and that carriage-blue chair are potent reminders of the Outermost House, the Cape Cod experience and legacy of Henry Beston.
Although the Henry Beston Society would like to reproduce the Outermost House on Cape Cod, policy precludes any reconstructions within the Cape Cod National Seashore. Essential value remains in the book itself, widely read in the United States and especially on Cape Cod.
Peg Rasmussen
Note: With thanks to the archives at Cape Cod National Seashore, the Wellfleet Historical Society, and the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary for historic materials.
Comments