Ben Muse

King Island, 1880

A few days ago I posted on a visit to King Island by the U.S. Revenue Cutter Corwin in 1881 (A Visit to King Island, July 12, 1881). 

The Corwin, under Captain Calvin Hooper, also visited in 1880.  Hooper's report was published in 1881: Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue-Steamer Corwin in the Arctic Ocean .

Hooper supplied his own illustrations - here's his picture of King Island from about four miles to the south:

 

Hooper's description:

"Why are Places Located On Cape Cod That Way?"

Here's a neat middle-school/high-school lesson plan on geography/geology from Tom Vaughn: Why Are Places Located On Cape Cod That Way?.  Vaughn tries to get students thinking about the glacial geology of the Cape, and how that's shaped modern settlement patterns.  Some of the students who go through this would learn to see a little better. 

Harvesting salt hay

Eric Williams reports on an old Cape Cod agricultural activity, harvesting hay (Spartina patens) from salt marshes: A missing piece of history (Cape Cod Times, May 22, registration probably necessary after a few days). 

Salt haying took place in marshes along the North American Atlantic coast from very early colonial times (the process is described here: Marshing and Salt Hay - see also the links at the end of this post). 

Thoreau on the economics of religion

Between 1849 and 1857 Thoreau took four walking tours of Cape Cod.  His book, Cape Cod, was based on his experiences during the first three visits; the fourth trip is covered in his journals. 

He combines description of the Cape and the people on it with historical information.  Describing the ecclesiastical history of Eastham, a town on the outer Cape (or forearm - see the map in the web based version of Cape Cod cited above) he notes,

An economic history of the cranberry

This week's Economist has a short economic history of the cranberry: "Red, round and profitable" I grew up on Cape Cod - cranberry central - and never knew any of this stuff:

"...Cranberries really got going, metaphorically and literally, after the revolutionary war, when they became the American navy's equivalent of the British navy's lime. Kept in barrels on board ship, they provided the vitamin C to stave off scurvy on long voyages. Astute traders received up to $50 (about $750 in today's money) a barrel. The snag was that the suppliers had to depend on wild cranberries for their crop. They could not grow them...

...For nearly three decades, Ocean Spray [a growers' cooperative - Ben] grew slowly but steadily. Then, in the autumn of 1959, the American government announced that it had found pesticide residues in cranberry sauce��from berries produced in the Pacific north-west, not ours�, Ocean Spray officials are quick to add, even 50 years later. The scare passed quickly; tainted supplies were withdrawn and new inspections put in place. But sales were wiped out in November and December and, since few people ate cranberry sauce except at Thanksgiving and Christmas, Ocean Spray lost a year's sales.

For that reason, the company decided to create products that would sell all year. Juice was the obvious product to exploit. Ocean Spray wanted juice with a long shelf-life so that it would be easy for consumers to store and, more important, easy for the company to distribute...

The hard part of making fruit juice with a long shelf-life is not preventing spoilage�pasteurisation and packaging can deal with that�but preserving colour and appearance. Most fruit juices go a yucky brown when kept for more than a fortnight, and develop an off-putting sediment..."

You'll just have to read the article to find out whether or not Ocean Spray was able to solve the problem.

Negative externality generating summer rental

Negative externality generating summer rental

The Cape Cod Times (which I used to deliver) reports that: Party houses strain neighborly relations (July 25, 2003). The Times tells the story of a quiet year-round neighborhood in Hyannis with a house rented by college students as a temporary residence while they pursue their summer jobs. The house generates noise and garbage which the neighbors find offensive.

Although there are small numbers of persons involved, and they know each other - and the scenario is repeated each year over several years - a negotiated solution doesn't seem to evolve.

7-26-03: For a negotiated solution to emerge, property rights must be clearly defined. In this case they may not be. While the law requires the students to keep quiet, there doesn't seem to be any way for the home owners to sell their interest in that quiet. So the college students cannot cmpensate the homeowners. Moreover, the article makes it clear that the town of Barnstable is unable to enforce the noise ordinances in this case. I get the impression that the students and the landlord are unable to make binding commitments to be quiet that would allow the homeowners to pay them to be quiet. First, I assume that the college students turnover from year to year - and the article makes it sound like from week-to-week or even day to day. Second, the landlord says he has trouble getting his tenants to comply. Moreover, as noted, the town of Barnstable can't enforce the noise ordinances. This measn that even if the tenants or landlord agreed to be quiet, the municipality couldn't enforce the agreement.