Cape Cod’s Gumshoe Historians in Woods Hole & Boston

While many larger media empires founder in these ever-shifting seas, Cape Cod’s fishermen-turned-filmmakers have turned as quickly as a catboat.

In the midst of production of their Falklands and Cape Horn series this winter, Hit and Run History took their original pilot episode and began to re-edit it for online. Unveiled today, their very first installment is available for all to watch on their channel on Blip and to download on iTunes.

Creator and Host Andrew Buckley research on the first American voyage ’round the world began in 1995, when he stumbled across the story of Captain John Kendrick. Born on the shores of Pleasant Bay (in what was then Harwich, now South Orleans) in 1740, Kendrick would command the ship Columbia Redeviva as it left Boston in the fall of 1787, just a few weeks after the Unites States Constitution was drafted. Bound for the Pacific Northwest Coast and China, the Columbia Expedition was a desperate gamble by an ad hoc syndicate of merchants to jump start the New England economy, mired for years in the post-Revolutionary war recession.

Introduced by Boston rocker Shea Rose, this very first webisode shows Buckley and Assistant director Matthew Griffin as they begin the process of documenting Columbia’s origin and its voyage. Interviewing Mary Malloy of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole and MassHumanities Pleun Bouricius, the HRH crew is off to a rough start. But their passion for story is contagious, and despite the long odds of making a travel show based around a forgotten chapter of history, it looks like they could just pull this off.

Are you ready for the adventure of a lifetime?