ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to Alfred Crocker, Esq., of Centerville, for detailed information about salt-making in the salt works of his father, Loring Crocker, of Barnstable. Mr. Alfred Crocker spent several years in this business and is one of the few persons alive who is qualified to give first-hand information on it. Thanks are due to Mr. Thomas F. Hall, of Omaha, Nebraska, for facts about the Shiverick clipper, Belle of the West, in which he sailed for over four years, part of the time as mate. I wish to thank Mr. Gilbert Coleman, one of the leading oyster dealers of Cotuit, for information about the shellfisheries in that village for the last seventy years; and Mr. Elmer Rich, chairman of the Board of Selectmen of Wellfleet, and Mr. Frank A. Williams, town clerk, for information about the oyster and quahaug industries in their town. Both these men have long been engaged in the business there. Particular thanks are due to Mr. Elmer Mayo, of Chatham, for permission to copy a letter to him from L. M. Shaw, Secretary of the United States Treasury, recounting the facts of Mr. Mayo’s rescue of surfman Ellis off Monomoy. This letter accompanied the medal which the Department presented to Mr. Mayo on that occasion. I am also indebted to Ezra H. Baker, Esq., of Boston, for information about anchor-dragging off the south side of the Cape in the eighties, when he used to watch the boats thus employed. I have especially to thank Mr. John H. Edmonds, State Archivist, for the map showing locations of wrecks and for his perfectly authenticated narrative of the Whidaw episode.

Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Crowell, of East Dennis, have shown me every courtesy and assistance in obtaining the photograph of the Wild Hunter, which is taken from the original painting in the possession of Mr. Crowell’s mother, Mrs. Louisa M. Crowell. I wish also to thank Miss Edith M. White, of Yarmouthport, for her great kindness in lending me pictures of Captains Asa, John, and Oliver Eldridge, reproductions of which appear in this volume. The portrait of James Otis is copyright by A. W. Elson, of Belmont, to whom thanks are due for permission to use it. The same acknowledgment is due Mr. Fred Small, of Buzzards Bay, for his photographs of marsh and beach. The picture of the Dillingham house in Brewster is reproduced with the kind permission of Mr. Isaac Dillingham, of Newton Center, and that of the old Sears house in Dennis with the permission of Mrs. Margaret Richardson, its present owner, to whom I am also indebted for the date of its construction. The present volume would never have been undertaken without the advice and assistance of my father, George L. Kittredge, whose collection of documents pertaining to the Cape has always been at my disposal, whose knowledge of the bibliography of Cape history has saved me months of searching, and whose suggestions for the arrangement of material have been as happy as they were welcome.