USA > New Jersey > Scheyichbi and the strand : or, early days along the Delaware ; with an account of recent events at Sea Grove ; containing sketches of the romantic adventures of the pioneer colonists ; the wonderful origin of American society and civilization > Part 14
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The white cedar, though a very tall, slim tree, sends no roots down into the firm soil underneath the swamp, but spreads them laterally in the shallow, soft, black, peaty, wet earth which is its congenial place of growth. The timber standing in a natural ancient cedar swamp is but a fraction of the quantity which has fallen and become subterranean. The living timber thus buried is apparently indestructible, and has been mined from its place of deposit buoyant and sound, and used for the best quality of lumber, many hundreds and perhaps thousands of years after it had grown. This mining of timber has been carried on as a regular business in the swamps about Dennisville; between nine and ten thousand dollars' worth of shingles, at fifteen dollars a thousand, have been manufactured in a year from logs thus exhumed. The pro- duction of shingles did not consume all the timber taken, as a part of
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CEDAR MINES AT CAPE MAY.
it was large, fine logs, more valuable for boards, into which it was sawn. More than forty thousand dollars' worth of cedar rails and lumber are produced by these cedar swamps every year, and an acre of good swamp, fifty years in growth, is worth from five hundred to a thousand dollars. The cedars are mined not alone in the growing swamps, but in meadows where only stumps and dead roots break the surface, and in places where a smooth turf entirely hides all traces of wood from surface observation, as well in a part of the tide marshes, which were once cedar swamps, but where the growth of timber has been stopped by the encroachments of salt water in consequence of the subsidence of the swamps along the shore. Of course many of the buried trees are unfit for use. Those which grew when the swamp was shallow and the roots of the trees touched the gravel bottom, are so gnarly as to be unfit for splitting. Some of the trees fell only from extreme age, deadness, and partial decay : these are worthless ; some were prostrated and grew long after they fell : these are hard and boxy on one side, hence undesirable. The trees wanted by the miners are those not of the bottom layer, which were broken down by the wind or otherwise, and buried at the perfection of their growth.
The first tool of the miner is an iron sounding-rod; with this he probes the mud of the swamp, finding often that the logs lie so thickly across one another beneath the surface that it is only after repeated efforts that he can pass his rod among them. The miner judges of the value of the log he comes in contact with after examination with his probe, by signs known to an expert only; he feels out the size, shape, and position of it, and judges of the work required to secure it; he cuts down to the log through the peat with a sharp spade, and manages to get a chip from it; by smelling of this chip he can tell whether he is dealing with a windfall or a breakdown, the latter being most likely to be sound lumber. Removing the peat, mud, roots, and rubbish-timber as far as necessary, the miner then saws off the log at the ends, his saw working without injury, the soil being free from grit. The log may be thirty feet long, but is generally shorter. Having sawn the log off, the miner uses levers to loosen it from its place and to throw off superincumbent timber; this being done, the log floats upward with perfect buoyance; the under side being most buoyant, the log, as it floats free, always turns over. The logs for shingles are sawn into bolts or blocks, and rived and shaved into shingles on the ground. The ground is gone over again and again with success by the miners, as the logs, once disturbed, continually work toward the surface.
An inch of vegetable matter is deposited by the fall of foliage, twigs, etc., upon the surface of a cedar swamp in about five years, but as this fresh layer is itself buried it partly decays and diminishes in bulk pro- gressively very much by compression and other causes, so that no clue can be had from it as to the age of these remarkable swamps. Such a
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SCHEYICHBI AND THE STRAND.
clue is found, however, in the buried cedars, which by annular rings tell, like a calendar, their own individual age, and by their relative positions demonstrate the successive generations of growth which must have taken place, before they could have appeared where they were left centuries since, superimposed and grown, one above another, in many layers.
The attempt to estimate the age chronicled by interwoven logs is confusing, but the certainty of thousands of years is evident, and even ten or twelve generations of such trees as Dr. Beesley examined may have grown and died since the oldest swamp began; and yet the age thus recorded is occupied by the most modern layer of a formation which is, in all and at the oldest, but the very latest evolvement of the most extremely short and insignificant of all the geologic periods.
If the record of ten thousand years can be preserved in mud and perishable wood, what is the chronology of the cycle in which obdu- rate gneiss and granite grows and disintegrates, crumbles and is recomposed of the old material, again and again, until the Azoic rocks develop into mineral wealth and fertile alluvium, tower into forests, bloom into flowers, ripen into golden harvests, nourish the beasts and birds, redden the blood of the animal world, and give strength and vigor to the body of man; the fitting tabenacle of the immortal soul ?
§ Outside the Old beach, and immediately next the strand, are found irregular hillocks of shifting sand of various elevations, but all less than forty feet high. They are composed almost exclusively of fine white quartzose sand without clay or metallic admixture ; some few fragments or particles of shell can be found, but the mass of the beach is almost absolutely pure quartz.
Red cedar trees, of which many are dead, are scattered among the hillocks, and are often found buried to the tops where the constantly shifting sands have drifted upon them. These hillocks, downs, or dunes, are denominated the Little or Young Beach; the method by which they originate is obvious.
Shoal shores at ebb of tide are exposed in wide strands, which rapidly dry under the influence of the sun and wind. Where a wide sandy strand is thus left bare, the wind sweeps the fine sand before it upon the beach and beyond the reach of the returning tide, and then deposits it in the forms described as characteristic of the Young Beach. The sea washes up additional sand, which takes the place of that taken off by the wind, and so the process continues which, though counter- acted by various agencies, has built up thousands of acres of Young Beach in the State.
The continuity of the beaches on the sea front is broken by a series of inlets, through which the waters of the ocean flow into a number of bays or sounds which lie behind the beaches or within the marshes, and, communicating with one another by inside channels or thorough-
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PHENOMENA OF THE INLETS.
fares, make an available still-water navigation for a hundred miles north- ward from Cape Island to the head of Barnegat Bay. These bodies of water are from five to six miles across in several places, though not on an average more than one-third as wide, having, according to survey and careful estimate, an area of but one hundred and seventeen thou- sand two hundred and thirty-two acres, excluding the Raritan Bay and adjoining waters.
The most of the inlets themselves are narrow, and, although the tides in the neighborhood of Sea Grove and along shore rise but from a little above four feet in the neap tides to six feet in the spring tides, yet the capacity of the sounds and their adjuncts is so great compara- tively that the sea ebbs and flows through the inlets with considerable force, especially when heavy seas run with the incoming tides. In consequence, the bays and sounds are constantly invaded by silt and sand, which, being caught by the abundant growth of grassy marsh roots along their margins, is retained and consolidated in quantities and to a degree which has much decreased the area and depth of those remarkable waters.
The outgoing tide of the sounds cuts away the banks of the inlet and the adjoining shores, throwing the sand out upon the bars, from whence the shore currents and waves convey it along the strand; in this way shoals are added to the southwest of the beaches which crowd the inlets to the south, against the northeast and highest ends of the beaches ; presently a new inlet forces its way during a storm across the beach to the northwest of the old one, which may be closed up at the same time. The new inlet is then subjected to the same action as the other one, and with like results; in this way the inlet is continually shifted, wearing its way to the southward for a mile or more at an un- certain rate, and then forcing its way as may be back again to its ex- treme position toward the north.
Northeast of Barnegat, the inlets move in an opposite manner to the one described as peculiar to those south of that place. The movement of the sands along the New Jersey ocean shore is immense, and due to causes operating on a vast scale in prolonged time. These causes are not fully understood, nor is the scope of their operation fully deter- mined. The theory of the subsidence itself-which, conceding a de- pression of one-fourth of an inch per annum, would submerge half or more of Cape May County in five hundred and twenty-eight years-has, notwithstanding the facts presumed to demonstrate it, been strenuously disputed by official geologists.
However confident of a conclusion we may feel to be on the basis of facts in our possession, true courage of opinion is not obstinate, and a partial suspense of judgment leaves room for hospitality to the result of enlarged observation, maturer experience, and more deliberate com- parison and reflection. Galileo was certain the world moved, and it is
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equally certain the sands shift. They are carried away from one point or another it may be, but are deposited as well in another place ; shoals are created thus, and currents changed, changes of current bring change of drift, and so the transported sands may be shifted back again. Only long-continued observation can establish the fact of a persistent ten- dency, and still more care must be taken to verify the rate and extent of a movement, the evolution of which is completed only in centuries and ages of time.
§ Beside the quartzose sand composing the beaches along the ocean front of New Jersey, there are an abundance of various kinds of peb- bles washed up from the sea: They are of small size, and every year a great quantity of them are conveyed to Philadelphia, and used in roofing buildings and for other purposes. Quartz is exceedingly abun- dant in South Jersey ; the young beach is pure quartz sand, the old beach has but a very small percentage of clay, and the plains or bar- rens of Burlington and Ocean Counties have from ninety to ninety- eight per cent. of quartz in their soil. Pebbles of pure, transparent quartz abound in the gravel beds and at the shore of Sea Grove and Cape May; being washed clean and bright in the waves, they are often collected by bathing parties and other visitors, under the name of Cape May Diamonds. If the collector's have not gained great wealth in their gems, they have often found the treasure of health in their recreative amusements, and some of the pebbles, when well polished and set in gold, form handsome mementos of pleasant summer excur- sions and peaceful days beside the surf upon the sandy shore, as well as characteristic specimens of a remarkable geologic formation.
Geologic research has, in caves, in mines, in tunnels, and other en- gineering excavations of submarine nature, been conducted under the sea with interesting and important results, but the present study may end properly and appropriately upon the strand of the open ocean, the type of the unfathomable and infinite. Divesting ourselves of fear, of conceit, of prejudice, of pride; alone with the sand, the waves, the wind, and the breeze-the simplicity and grandeur of nature, our eyes become more clear, the reasoning soul sweeping with one flashing and intuitive glance the old levels and horizons, sees over sea and land a light not born of either, yet luminous as heaven, " which lighteth every man that cometh into the world," revealing even in geologic ruins the love and glory of Our Father, and lighting the way to peace, righteous- ness, progress, and eternal happiness !
FINIS.
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