"Even before the Pilgrims landed in 1620, Cape Cod and the Islands promised the possibility of paradise to those lucky enough to find themselves there.".

"Several books in one, The Enduring Shore is the first comprehensive narrative of the Cape and Islands. As natural history it changes our perspective of the magical richness at the edge of the sea, a marginal world created by glaciers only ten thousand years ago and constantly evolving.

Its human history melds the outsized personalities and dramas that characterize the region into a compelling montage of natives and explorers, colonists and beachcombers, religion and revolution, clipper ships and hurricanes, whalers, subdividers, summer people, and poets.

As survival adventure, blustery at times as The Perfect Storm, it tells of people lost at sea, captured by pirates, locked in by ice, and - in the case of the Essex, the ill-fated ship that inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick - of a crew left to navigate the vast Pacific in tiny open boats after an attack by a vengeful sperm whale."--BOOK JACKET.