Appraisal   First, an appraisal of an adjustment in style I’ve been using. I’ve come to assess the readership of this website as involving two overlapping groups, the seasoned traveler and the armchair traveler. Some readers lean more toward one group or the other, but most fall comfortably into the continuum in between. Every once in a while I hear from people about their own travel, to compare notes for present or potential travel, and anyone who likes travel at all can enjoy being an armchair traveler, both for known venues and for venues the armchair traveler is unlikely to visit personally.

Still, it is foolish to preach exclusively to the converted. I’ll never drop a travel term like “open-jaws flight” (2009/17) without explaining what it is, even though a good many might know, or toss in a word such as “duodecimal” (2009/19), outside the linguistic (or mathematics) vocabulary of many, without clarification.

In this vein, in the past year or so I’ve tried to expand beyond the obvious trip descriptions in many directions. I’ve tried to illustrate in advance the planning stages of highly complex itineraries, and also to give more feeling as to what happens on a trip and how it plays out.

For example, I first told that I had a lot of plans for both the South Pacific and Australia, and decided that that was too huge to attempt at once. I explained that I postponed Australia (and, as I thought at the time, New Zealand) and would concentrate on Pacific Islands, especially when the Queen Victoria trip would end in Los Angeles anyway. I explained how the flight paths didn’t work unless I went via Auckland (or Sydney), and thus ended up with the itinerary of the QV+Polynesia-with-NZ trip earlier this year.

I learned from the Antarctica trip in late 2006 that day-to-day descriptions tended to work well and were well received, rather than just jumping around describing highlights here and there, and I’ve continued that format. I know many people haven’t experienced too much ship travel (or perhaps none), and on the Paul Gauguin I tried for the first time to describe the stories, including the joys and sorrows, of different people I met during the cruise. Meeting people on ships, trains, hotels, or anywhere in between is one of the main pleasures of travel.

Another new policy I’d like to try is discussing a destination in advance of the actual trip. One reason is just to clear the decks of so much of the notes I have, but the main reason follows what we just spoke about. It can be an introduction, giving readers the same insights and pre-information before a trip that I am departing with. For that reason, in advance of the Cape Cod trip (and hopefully similarly before future travel), I want to talk first about the historic importance of European arrival to Cape Cod, as well as European arrival along the entire east coast of North America.

I want to use this format: I will cover three things, two in this posting and one in the next. The first two will speak of the donut; the third, the hole. FIRST will be the expansion west and south of the original 13 US colonies along the east coast. This expansion settled the Midwest, the West, and the Gulf Coast. We’ve already talked about much of this, but I will add some points to complete the picture. This expansion started after the Revolutionary War—let’s say in the last two decades of the 1700’s--but the bulk of it ran through the 1800’s and beyond. SECOND we will jump way back in time and will discuss the earliest European settling of the east coast of North America, but only in the north, first Greenland a millennium ago then down to Canada from the very end of the 1400’s very rapidly to the present. THIRD, separately in the next posting, we’ll get to the hole in this donut, the settling of the area to be discussed most in detail, the 13 original colonies on the east coast of the US, including the upcoming destination of Cape Cod.

The purpose in all this is primarily geographic. It is not an in-depth history of any of these areas, and simplifies many complexities for (my) easier comprehension. Essentially it’s a matter of how did old maps change to modern ones? Some people get very confused looking at so many states (or provinces) to the point of their being meaningless. What we do will be similar to how we discussed the Louisiana Purchase or the Oregon Territory eventually subdividing into multiple states (or provinces).

Water, Water, Water   We in the modern world have become amazingly complacent about our ease in getting places. We disregard that we are the Water Planet (the name “Earth” is a misnomer) and make connections in the air, hopping over borders, oceans, rivers, and lakes. If places such as the Americas, Australia, Africa, and others had been settled by air, borders might have been very different. (I am course referring to secondary settlement by Europeans. The First Peoples had already arrived in those places centuries earlier.)

So let’s peel away the layer of air travel. Let’s also peel away the layer of overland connections via railroads and superhighways, or any highways at all, for that matter, to where overland travel was by trail, and was very difficult. We are now back at the point where we see the importance of water, water, water. Most obviously this includes crossing the ocean, but it might be less obvious how important shorelines become, with water travel along them in the form of coastal shipping, plus river travel, to move quickly between places. Every one of the 13 original US colonies had a shoreline.

The Mississippi is the usual division between east and west in the US, but to follow and understand the growth of territories, it’s best to use a tripartite division avoiding the Upper Mississippi. There is a Y formed by the Missouri River coming from the west and the Ohio River coming from the east, which then form the Lower Mississippi. We can then look at the historic East as the area east of both the Ohio and Lower Mississippi Rivers. North of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, in the upper part of the Y, is the area historically called the Midwest. Finally, roughly west of the Missouri and Lower Mississippi is the West.

As the West was delineated on the north by Canada and on the south by Mexico (both with fluctuating borders), so the historic east was delineated on the north by Canada and on the south by Spanish territory, Florida. Thus, for our historic purposes here, Florida is a Gulf Coast state and not an east coast state. Both the Midwest and the West are growth areas emanating from the East, which is the cradle of the United States. Growth also went south from the East to the Gulf Coast, although the Spanish (and French) had settled there first.

The Midwest   This earlier growth area was settled from the East starting after the Revolutionary War, when what is now the Midwest was known as the Northwest Territories, since it lay northwest of the Ohio River. Actually, it lay in the triangle below Canada above both the Ohio and Upper Mississippi. We’ve discussed the region mostly geographically in regard the Great Lakes flowing into Niagara Falls (2005/14), and also in regard to the fur traders coming to Minnesota (2003/2-3-4), eventually leading to settlement. However, the regional powerhouse developed as Chicago.

The West   This second growth area settled largely from the east we’ve talked about most extensively, including the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis & Clark, the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and other Routes West. The original regional powerhouse, which was most definitely San Francisco, stepped back into second place in the 20C in favor of Los Angeles. We discussed how a huge area called Louisiana was whittled away to form many states, so that today what is called Louisiana is a much smaller area. We saw West Coast states, and British Columbia, develop first, due to their location on water, long before the inland states and provinces developed, and how these areas were connected, by water, to the East, either around Cape Horn, or later, via the Panama Canal. We saw Victoria develop first as a seaport and become the capital of British Columbia, then BC insist that it would not join Canada unless a rail route were established, and when that happened, it reached only the end of the mainland, where Vancouver then developed as a major port in its own right. There are two cities there today because of ocean accessibility versus overland accessibility.

We had considerable discussion about Russian Alaska reaching down the coast (water!) toward Fort Ross and elsewhere in California, but it never made it. Our discussion of settlement of Hawaii dwelt primarily on the earlier Polynesian arrival, but our recommendation of Michener’s “Hawaii” should fill in any curiosity about the fascinating later arrival of one ethnic group after another.

The Gulf Coast   We discussed the expanded settlement of Florida (2008/7) by people from further north as being distinct from the earlier Spanish settlement. Our discussion of regional powerhouse New Orleans (2008/2-3-4) brought up two issues: the settlement of the French, and the later settlement of the Americans; Canal Street initially dividing the (American) Garden District from the French Quarter points out this conflict.

What would logically be called the South Coast of the US is not referred to that way. Instead it’s described as the Gulf Coast. The oldest maps will show every bit of this coast as being all Spanish, from Mexico, through Texas (then part of Mexico) and continuing in what was originally a very, very long, and very thin panhandle into Florida, where in the 20C Miami developed as an alternate regional powerhouse to New Orleans. This narrow east-west Spanish coastal area was then bisected by the long, north-south French territory of Louisiana, running along the Mississippi. Louisiana became the first break in this long, narrow Florida panhandle.

From the above quick summary of the history of the area, we should logically have three states along the Gulf Coast, Texas, Louisiana, then the rest of the long Florida panhandle into peninsular Florida. But we do not. We have two other states that peek through from inland, Alabama and Mississippi. I went out of my way on that last visit to New Orleans to visit both Biloxi MI and Mobile AL. These two states are historically east coast states playing peek-a-boo onto the Gulf Coast. How did they break through? I refer back to the fact that Florida, a single colony under the Spanish, was divided into East and West Florida when the British took it over in 1763 (2008/7). The division between the two fell in the panhandle, along the Apalachicola River (2008/6). Eventually, West Florida was divided into four parts. The easternmost part, including Pensacola, joined East Florida to form Florida as we know it today. The westernmost part of West Florida was attached to Louisiana. Do remember that the Louisiana Purchase was WEST of the river; even Louis & Clark had to wait in Illinois until the purchase was complete to cross over the Mississippi River (2008/20). The part of West Florida attached to Louisiana is the entire region north of Lake Ponchartrain, and even includes the state capital of Baton Rouge. The parishes (counties) of Louisiana in this region are still called les paroisses de Floride / the Florida parishes.

Finally, the two center pieces of West Florida in 1812 were added to the “east coast” states of Alabama and Mississippi, in effect reorienting them from “facing” east to “facing” south toward the Gulf. This is the draw of water, water, water. Thus what would have been just three Gulf Coast states became five.

Crossing the Atlantic   Now let’s finally take a look at the settlement of the East by Europeans. Much of what we just reviewed is newer history, generally starting in the 18C after the Revolutionary War (when settlers started moving out of the East and into the Midwest), and covering much of the 19C and a bit into the 20C. But now we get the really tasty stuff and get to go back into the 17C, and earlier.

THE SOUTHERN ROUTE There is more than one way to cross the Atlantic. Columbus, on his voyages, led the Spanish to the southern route. In 1985, when we were in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands (2007/8), we visited the Governor’s Palace, where Columbus stayed as he stopped here on his voyages. Once you’re that far south, off the coast of Morocco, it is indeed a straight shoot west to the Americas. Las Palmas in the Canaries is at 28°N, as is Cape Canaveral in Florida. This is quoted just to indicate a potential east-to-west route, although Columbus of course, never set foot in North America. What he discovered were the Bahamas, and then the Caribbean, where all of his four voyages landed, the third as far south as Trinidad off the coast of South America. His voyages, covering about a decade (1492-1503), were also a century earlier than the dates we’re about to dwell on primarily shortly. The point is, though, the Spanish followed him south, to the Caribbean and the lands surrounding it, eventually including Florida an all the rest of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. This is the firm historical basis for considering Gulf Coast settlement different from the east coast settlement of North America.

THE NORTHERN ROUTE The familiar Transatlantic route we usually discuss, the heavily traveled one, is the northern route, most frequently starting at the English Channel, possibly including traffic coming from Scandinavia and the Baltic. This route does not point west, but perhaps something closer to WSW. Southampton is at about 51°N, while New York is at about 41°N (as is Southampton on Long Island). Furthermore, the east coast of North America is not parallel to the west coast of Europe, as I’m sure some people picture due to looking at Mercator projections. If anything, it’s much closer to being perpendicular. Even people on crossings seem to be merrily oblivious to this fact.

[I just calculated something and got an answer I didn’t expect. Of the voyage total I’ve been listing (correction after a careful review: there is one fewer, and Tahiti, the last one, was # 46), I checked how many of those have been Transatlantic crossings, either one way or the other (and not counting any flights). I find I have sailed across the Atlantic fully 19 times. I also find a dichotomy I didn’t realize existed. I would have said I’d crossed rather regularly over the years, but that turns out not to be the case. Five crossings were early on, and all in all covered only three different years: 1957 eastbound, then westbound on Cunard, on the original Queen Elizabeth; 1961 eastbound on the French Line, on the Liberté; 1971 eastbound on the French Line on the France, then westbound on the Tuhović , a Yugoslavian freighter. There were then three decades of lots of travel involving flying, but no Transatlantic crossings by sea. When we began crossing again in 2000 I hadn’t fully realized how long the drought had been. All the additional 14 crossings have been from 2000 to 2008, all but one on the QE2 and QM2, that one exception being on the Deutschland.]

Now back to the point. Other than our freighter crossing from Genoa to Boston, all my crossings have been directly between the English Channel (Southampton, Cherbourg, Le Havre) and New York. But the Deutschland crossing had earmarks of a cruise before and after the actual crossing of the Atlantic, making stops in Europe beforehand, then stops in North America. In this way it was unique, resembling and older, more historic way of crossing the Atlantic. We left from Cuxhaven in Germany, came down the English Channel, and stopped in Plymouth, England, the only time I’ve been there. How idyllic, to walk along the historic harbor from which the Mayflower sailed in 1620, an event noted in a plaque. (And yes, as the name implies, Plymouth is at the mouth of the River Plym.) We then made a further stop in Waterford, Ireland (52°N), before beginning our actual crossing of the Atlantic. This took only about three days, because the route was roughly westbound, and went to Saint John’s, Newfoundland (about 48°N), a rather short crossing of the open Atlantic. We then made three more stops coming down the Canadian coast, including Halifax, on the way to New York. Now the big liners in modern times don’t cut too close to Newfoundland, and don’t hug the Canadian coast all that closely, but it’s reasonable to imagine early sailing ships, from the Vikings, to the explorers, to the earliest settlers, staying as close to the coast as was safely possible. In this manner, the east coast of North America lined itself up roughly perpendicularly to the west coast of Europe for discovery and eventual settlement.

Settling the Northernmost East Coast   The Norsemen (or Vikings) came first. Icelanders and Norwegians settled the west coast of Greenland in 986 CE (Common Era). The European settlements were not stable, but Greenland has over time nevertheless remained Scandinavian, after 1771 coming under Danish influence. Today the population of about 58,000 is 88% Inuit or Danish-Inuit, while the remaining 12% European, primarily Danish.

Further evidence of visits to this area by Norsemen came to light in 1960, when the site known as l’Anse aux Meadows was discovered at the northernmost point in Newfoundland (note: directly opposite the North American mainland), apparently dating to about 1000 CE. This was just a brief settlement, still, Europeans had progressed westward along major islands off North America and were poised to make their way down its coast.

[If I may digress: I’ve always wondered about the odd combination of French and English in the name of that settlement. I’ve found the solution. It starts with Medusa (Μεδουσα/Medousa) in Greek mythology, she with the hair of venomous snakes. The French version of her name is Médouse, and the name in French has come to also refer to a jellyfish, for obvious reasons, which I think is a great metaphor. Early on, French fishermen off the Newfoundland coast came across a bay full of jellyfish, which they named l’Anse aux médouses, or Jellyfish Bay. English speakers hearing this name interpreted the incomprehensible word médouses as meadows, especially since the landscape of the area is open, with extensive meadows. The result, really quite logical, is the Franco-English hybrid name l’Anse aux Meadows. This is the type of misinterpretation of an unknown word that is called folk etymology (2003/14; 2004/1).]

Settling the Canadian East   Talking about Canada, we cannot just look at the Canadian east coast, where Canada started but didn’t ripen to full fruition, We then have to look more deeply up the Saint Lawrence to the area that sparked the growth of Canada. Looking at a map of all of Canada one gets disoriented and wonders at the remoteness of settlements in the province now called Newfoundland and Labrador, but looking at the map of the north Atlantic, it becomes perfectly obvious that the Labrador coast and Newfoundland face Europe directly, and are logically the first place for explorers to arrive. Newfoundland (first named in the Latinized form Terra Nova), was visited first by John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto, the Italian working for England) in 1497. Labrador, as well as Newfoundland, is also one of the oldest names of European origin in Canada. It’s named after one of a pair of Portuguese explorers, Lavrador and Barcelos, who stopped here the next year, in 1498.

Three images remain in my mind from our first trip to Newfoundland in 1984, where we took the car on an overnight ferry from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Argentia, over on the east side of Newfoundland, toured the island for close to a week, and came back to Sydney on a day ferry from Port-aux-Basques, on the closer west side. When in Saint John’s I remember looking into the harbor—it was the height of summer—and seeing a small, rowboat-size remnant of an iceberg calmly floating by. Then we drove just north of Saint John’s to Cape Spear, the easternmost point of North America (52°37’W). It was a quiet Sunday morning, with no traffic at all, as we pulled our little VW Beetle up to the park in the middle of heavy forest when we stopped because of a HUGE moose standing in the road perpendicular to us, and just staring at us. We waited until it moved on to finish our drive to Cape Spear. [I find out now that Cape Spear had been named by the Portuguese Cabo de Esperança (Cape Hope), a name picked up by the French as Cap d’Espoir. Once again, English speakers (mis)hearing it, changed Espoir to Spear. Folk etymology strikes again.] My final image is of driving around to the northwest side of Newfoundland to where its long northern peninsula stretches up toward Labrador. At the turnoff it said that the road, apparently well paved, was something like 275 km (170 mi) up to L’Anse aux Meadows, and that was just one way, since we’d still have to come back to the main road. Common sense prevailed, since it was surely just a matter of seeing some primitive excavations, but I always remember sitting at that intersection as the closest we ever got to the Viking settlement.

The French also settled in what today remains a piece of France. Just off the south coast of the island of Newfoundland is Saint Pierre and Miquelon, the only remnant of the colonial empire of New France. It remains fully under French control. When we took the two-hour ferry out to Saint Pierre from Newfoundland for an overnight stay, we found the atmosphere to be very Norman French. This entire region being known for its fog, as we approached Saint-Pierre the town rose from the fog of the crossing, and as we walked through town, the fog in the streets gave an extra layer of charm. They used francs then, and euros now, just like in Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean.

And then it remained for the English and French in ensuing centuries to continue beyond Newfoundland, either to its north or south, to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, where they settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The significance of these provinces in Atlantic Canada being on the coast is reflected in their being also referred to as the Maritimes. Also do remember the earlier French settlement of Acadia/Acadie and the Evangeline story [2008/4]. You can still visit, as we did in 1984, Evangeline’s village of Grand Pre in central Nova Scotia. I also have fond remembrances of our visit to Louisbourg Fortress (1744), located at close to the easternmost end of Nova Scotia. The area is quite remote by road, but proves again that original access had been meant to be by water. It’s a Canadian National Historic Site, and starting in 1961, about one-quarter of the very large site of the fortress and town was restored to its original appearance. There are also people about in historic costumes, and when we were there, once again, fog prevailed. At first that concerned me, but then we got into the spirit of the situation, since having buildings behind you disappear in the fog as you walk about, and buildings in front of you appear out of the fog with people in costume lends tremendously to the time-travel atmosphere of the site.

But these settlements in far eastern Canada never became the moving force behind the development of the country. The French proceeded from here up the natural water entrance to Canada, the Saint Lawrence, to found Québec, later called Lower Canada; the British went further upstream to found Ontario, later called Upper Canada; these two provinces became the nucleus of contemporary Canada, with the Maritimes later joining as well. Today, the two powerhouses of Canada are Montréal and Toronto, well inland from the coast, although still on that historic water route that reaches well inland. The coastal area of the Maritimes (big city: Halifax) on the eastern end of Canada still remain remote, although not as remote as British Columbia on the other end (big city: Vancouver). Given this bilateral remoteness from the powerhouse center, when I crossed Canada by rail (2005/6) as part of my round-the-world via rail trip, the only way I could do it was to start in Montréal, go east to Halifax, backtrack to Montréal to connect to Toronto, then go west to Vancouver.

A Starwood Update   The next posting will finally get us to the US east coast, including Cape Cod, but now I want to update quickly something we discussed recently about the value (or sometimes, the lack thereof) of airline, hotel, and rail travel points awarded via credit cards. An article this weekend (Saturday, 22 August 2009) in the New York Times by columnist Ron Lieber discussed the value of credit card point-award systems. It explained that most points earned are at the rate of a penny for each dollar charged. With certain cards that are tied to investments, that can double to two cents per dollar. But then he makes a point that delighted me: My top-of-wallet card continues to be the Starwood Preferred Guest American Express card. The Starwood points are easy to use at its hotels, like the Westin and W chains, and they can easily be worth 3 cents or more. You can also trade points for miles on several airlines, and if you trade enough points at a time, you end up with 1.25 miles for every dollar spent on the card. I’ve never transferred Starpoints for air travel, but what he’s referring to is that transferring 20,000 Starpoints in bulk gets you 25,000 air miles. He does caution that AmEx is not accepted everywhere and that you need a backup card (I have a Visa). But Starwood is getting me five nights in Taipei, four on points and one totally free. It’s great.