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Map of Cape Cod showing Cape Cod Bay. The caption on the back reads: Cape Cod is a narrow, sandy peninsula shaped like a welcoming arm stretching 70 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean. Clean sandy beaches, clear ocean water and cooling ocean breezes make it a vacation paradise. |
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Why is it called Cape Cod?
Laurel Guadazno
BANNER CORRESPONDENT
We’ve all experienced it. It’s a warm summer day, the scent of beach roses is in the air, you are minding your own business sipping a cold drink sitting on one of the benches in front of Town Hall, when a curious visitor casts a sideways glance in your direction and inquires, “Do you live here?”
“Yes,” you reply warily.
“So,” the visitor asks, “why is it called ...?”
The most basic of these questions is, “Why is it called Cape Cod?” Interestingly the Cape almost wasn’t called Cape Cod. If Bartholomew Gosnold had had a bad day fishing we might all be living on Shoal Hope.
In 1602 the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold started out on an expedition from Falmouth, England, on the 26th of March in the ship Concord. The English had begun to think about colonizing North America, and Gosnold was sent to explore the coast from Maine to northern Virginia. He was looking for suitable places to establish settlements. There was a lot of interest in the expedition, and very soon after its completion descriptions of the trip appeared in print. Samuel Purchas published one of the first complete accounts in 1625. In Purchas’s account Gosnold’s log entry for May 15, 1602, reads, “On the fifteenth day we had again sight of the land, which made ahead, being as we thought an island, by reason of a large sound that appeared westward between it and the main, for coming to the west end thereof, we did perceive a large opening, we called it Shoal Hope. Near this cape we came to fathom anchor in fifteen fathoms, where we took great store of codfish, for which we altered the name, and called it Cape Cod.”
Originally the name Cape Cod was limited to the end of the peninsula between Race Point and Wood End where Gosnold made his great catch of cod, but by the end of the 1700s accounts by travelers like Timothy Dwight begin to refer to the whole of Barnstable County as Cape Cod. Simeon Deyo in his 1890 History of Barnstable County defines Cape Cod as “the south and south-east bound of the great bay from which the State of Massachusetts (hence also sometimes called the Bay State) takes its name, is a long, irregular peninsula of sixty-five miles in length (seventy-five on the south shore route), by from five to twenty in breadth, and embraces the entire of the County of Barnstable.”
Occasionally people will ask the location of Cape Cod Bay. Cape Cod Bay is the southern part of Massachusetts Bay. It lies cradled between the arm of Cape Cod and the mainland coast to the north. Indeed if you think of Cape Cod as an arm, as many have, since Thoreau wrote, “Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts; the shoulder is at Buzzard’s Bay, the elbow, or crazy-bone, at Cape Mallebarre, the wrist at Truro, and the sandy fist at Provincetown ...” the terms Upper and Lower Cape become clear. The Upper Cape being like the upper part of your arm, the part closest to the mainland, and the Lower Cape like your lower arm, the narrow part of Cape Cod that bends sharply to the north. Just where the Upper and Lower Cape begin and end depends on whom you ask, but that’s another question.
[Laurel Guadazno is curator of education for the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum.]
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Jul 7th, 2005