Cape May Diaries
26- Off shore gun fire?
Finding the gun emplacement near Cape May Point made me realize that there was a lot more to local history than just Victorian era houses, and that tourist trade here actually dated back before Henry Hudson when Native American Indians paid this place regular visits.
While the latest memory of the Indians was a sad one in the 1850s - reports of them sitting on the beachside selling trinkets - theirs was the first people to recognize the commercial value of Cape May. They came to the shores to fish and collect shells from which they shaped money or wampum.
Although locals sell the idea of Cape May as a Victorian playground -- a world where the wealthy came to spend their summers -- the cape supplied workingmen with a livelihood that persists today. Even inland towns located on the tidal stream constructed boats for service on the ocean and in the bay.
Shipping and the ocean played as an important role in Cape May's history as the Victorian cottages and hotels did. People standing on the beaches Cape May during the Revolutionary War could actually witness ships dueling in the distance. So effective with the American privateers who started out of the local harbors to attack British warships that the frustrated British actually ordered one of the local towns burnt in retribution. Wanders along the beach over the years have reported finding muzzle-loading pistols in the sand dunes, one of the possible artifacts attesting to the presence of pirates in these parts.
Almost as long as people occupied the Cape, the offshore sites have been nearly as intriguing as those found onshore. In 1809, a curious beach roamer might have noticed the passing of an odd looking ship as the steam driver boat design by Hoboken Stevens made its way around Cape May point for ferry duty up the Delaware River. It had been chased off the Hudson River by Fulton's monopoly there.
During the war of 1812, wary residents reported the landing the boats near modern day Lily Lake, and the scurrying of British sailors with buckets, stealing fresh water for the ships that blockaded the New Jersey Coast.
The sea was not without its tragedies. While whalers lost their lives early on, the cape's shoals posed a great risk to ships of every kind, partly because no lighthouse existed initially to ward the ships of the danger. One of the most famous wrecks was that of a ship called the Mortimer Livingstone on the shoals near Sea Isle City. Bearing a cargo of oranges and lemons. The ship's crash caused locals to find the beaches covered with the fruit. French and German survivors of the wreck soon found themselves the guest in local homes, where residents cooked pots of lemon pot pie for them - and according to one source -
this was the origin of that dish on many local restaurant menus.
World War I changed Cape May fundamentally as it did the rest of the state, marking a definite end to the Victorian era -- and injecting into the area a sense of the real world. To help protect shipping along the coast, the Navy constructed the naval training barracks here and its 15,000 recruits helped serve as armed guard for the merchant ships, troop carriers and submarine chasers hiding in the near Cold Spring Harbor.
After the war, the Coast Guard took over some formal naval facilities, and began to enforce the unpopular federal ban on alcohol use. From the shore, visitors to Cape May could often with his encounters on the high seas as dramatic as those seen a century earlier during The War of 1812. Smugglers and Coast Guard vessels played a game of deadly tag, as a new form of blockade sat along New Jersey's coast -- ships laden with illegal shipments of alcohol dotted the horizon the way fishing fleets do today. But they remained just beyond the legal international line where the law could not touch them. The flash and crack of gunfire must have seemed a little like fireworks as smaller boats sought to sneak shipments to shore.
A few short years after Prohibition ended, World War II thrust Cape May back into the international stage of conflict. The Army Corps of Engineers built Cape May Canal to allow naval ships protected passage from the Delaware River to the ocean -- as German submarines hugged the coast hoping to make them targets. As local authorities yanked up old railroad tracks feed the hungry war machine's metal needs, German U-boat captains spied on the community through periscopes.
The relationship between fishermen and the Coast Guard has always been critical, one made clear during the festival when the Coast Guard shows off its vessels. This sometimes include mock rescues. More than once during our yearly walks along the beach, we looked up to see the red nose of the coast guard helicopters making its way long the beach apparently involved in one of the many search and rescue operations they provided for the local fishing community. When two F-16s collided over the Atlantic, the Coast Guard was the first on the scene.
Threats to close the base and training center during the late 1990s had many local fishermen in a panic - each believing that the heavy state and federal investment in the facility would protect the base. U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg eventually interceded on Cape May's behalf and kept the federal government from consolidating the Cape May base with other state Coast Guard facilities.
Anti-terrorism legislation passed after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon further insured the base's survival, as the role of the Coast Guard expanded.
During our trips south, we frequently rant into packs of sailors from the base, usually at the beginning of our stay, young men dressed in pale blue army-style hats, short sleeves shirts and dark blue pants, making their way along the promenade or the ball, poking their noses into this store or that eatery.
On occasion, we caught sight of the Coast Guard ships in action. One year we watched the active officers boarding whale boats and other small vessels along the shore in what appeared to be a flashback to the prohibition era - although we likely witnessed an event little more thrilling than a routine check of boat safety equipment. One time, however, we saw a chase scene that could not be mistaken as anything so trite. The Coast Guard's siren wailed and its lights flash as it rushed after a speeding boat - the echo of their amplified warning to the fleeing boat to stop echoed off the faces of the Victorian houses. What exactly transpired or what the outcome was, we never learned.