connecting and widening the Manomet and Scusset Rivers. The first actual excavation began in 1880, when the Cape Cod Ship Canal Company hired 400 immigrant Italian laborers to begin digging with shovels and wheelbarrows. The effort ran out of money almost immediately, and the laborers were unpaid and forced to beg for food in Sandwich. In 1883, the Cape Cod Ship Canal Company reorganized. Under engineer Frederick Lockwood, the company used a bucket dredge to clear nearly a mile of channel through the Sandwich marshes, before shutting down in 1891. Private construction On June 22, 1909, construction finally began for a working canal under the direction of August Belmont Jr.'s Boston, Cape Cod & New York Canal Company using designs by engineer William Barclay Parsons. The canal engineers encountered many problems, such as huge boulders underwater (much of Cape Cod is a moraine—see geology of Cape Cod). Divers were hired to blow them up, but the effort slowed dredging. Another problem was cold winter storms which forced the engineers to stop dredging altogether and wait for spring. Nevertheless, the canal opened on a limited basis on July 29, 1914, and it was completed in 1916. The privately owned toll canal had a maximum width of and a maximum depth of , and it took a somewhat difficult route from Phinney Harbor at the head of Buzzards Bay. Several accidents occurred due to the narrow channel and navigation difficulty, and these limited traffic and tarnished the canal's reputation. Toll revenues failed to meet investors' expectations as a result, despite shortening the trade route from New York City to Boston by . Public takeover and expansion The German U-boat surfaced off Orleans, Massachusetts on July 21, 1918 and shelled the tugboat Perth Amboy and her string of four barges. The Director General of the United States Railroad Administration took over jurisdiction and operation of the canal four days later under a presidential proclamation. The United States Army Corps of Engineers re-dredged the channel to deep while it remained under government control until 1920. In 1928, the government purchased the canal for $11.4 million as a free public waterway, and $21 million was spent between 1935 and 1940 increasing the canal's width to and its depth to . As a result, it became the widest sea-level canal of its time. The southern entrance to the canal was rebuilt for direct access from Buzzards