Cape Cod: The Arm in the Sea

The arm of land curling into the North Atlantic is a geological accident that became the entry point for one of history's most consequential settlements.

Cape Cod is not old rock. It is sand, gravel, and till deposited by glaciers during the last ice age, roughly seventeen thousand years ago, and has been rearranging itself ever since. The outer beach at the cape's elbow loses several feet to erosion every year. The hooked tip at Provincetown, where the sand has accumulated rather than eroded, is actually getting larger, building outward as longshore currents deposit material from the retreating shores to the south.

The Wampanoag people had been living on this land for thousands of years when the Mayflower arrived on November eleventh, sixteen twenty. The Pilgrims had been aiming for the Colony of Virginia. They struck Cape Cod instead, anchoring in what is now Provincetown Harbor. While still aboard ship, forty-one of the male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. They spent five weeks exploring the cape, including a skirmish with a Nauset hunting party near the elbow, before deciding that the exposed coastline was not where they wanted to stake their colony. They sailed across the bay and landed at Plymouth on December sixteenth.

The cape that the Pilgrims found too difficult became, three centuries later, one of the most densely summered landscapes in America. The fishing villages of the colonial era, Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Eastham, Wellfleet, Provincetown, grew into seasonal destinations. Henry David Thoreau walked the outer beach in the eighteen forties and wrote that a man may stand here and put all of America behind him.

US Route Six runs the length of the cape's spine, cutting from the canal at Sandwich all the way to the Pilgrim Monument at the tip.