upper Buzzards Bay. It attracts many thousands of
people during the summer months, who come to spend a few weeks, days,
or the season there. It is a cottage colony supplemented by hotels
and boarding houses that fit the purses of all classes.

At some of these places, either on Cape Cod itself or the islands,
every person can find conditions suited to his or her individual
taste.

WELLFLEET

EDWARD L. SMITH

Cape Cod has many fine distinctions that make it stand out from a
commonplace world and Wellfleet, as a town name, marks the Cape with
a place-name known all over the globe, but in no other locality than
on the coast of Barnstable Bay. It is true that a misguided, homesick,
and ill-advised denizen of the Cape, roaming the arid, inland sand
wastes of Nebraska, foisted the name of "Wellfleet" on his townsite.
But as it has to date remained "unwept, unhonored and unsung," so is
it quite unknown to sailors or to the sea, being about fifteen
hundred miles from salt water and an immeasurable distance from
being appropriately named.

The origin of the name "Wellfleet" has always been a source of
lively interest to those who delight to delve to the roots of things
historical. So many of our early towns in Massachusetts were named
by the Englishmen who settled them for English towns familiar to
them before they came oversea, that England is the natural source
from whence such a Saxon-English name as Wellfleet might come.

After forty years of desultory search by the writer, the problem is
yet unsolved, though a good Yankee guess may not come very far out
of the way.

When that part of old Nawsett now Wellfleet was first settled it was
noted for the abundance of shell fish in the harbor and creeks, or
cricks as then called, and oysters were both especially plentiful
and choice.

In England, on the coast of Essex, and not far from the Thames, was
a stretch of oyster beds noted in the sixteenth century for their
production of oyster different from all other locations and revered
by epicures of those far-away times to be the luscious complement
necessary to their royal as well as more common plebeian feasts. But
we had best let old John Norden, who in 1594 published the results
of his life-long investigations into the history of Essex, tell the
story, which here is given verbatim as it appears in his work,
"SPECTLI BRITTANNIE PARS."

"Some part of the sea shore of Essex yealdeth the beste
oysters i