Provincetown, MA 9 July 2007

Walked around Provincetown this afternoon. The major tourist attraction was the Provincetown Museum and Tower commemorating the landing of the Pilgrims on Nov 11, 1620 here. Most folks do not realize that Provincetown was their first stop in America prior to moving over to Plymouth across the bay 20 miles. We saw a chart showing the landfall of the Mayflower with notes from the ship's log. What is interesting to note is that this area had been charted a number of years before by Henry Hudson and others and the captain had land marks and even a couple of buoys to go by.

This memorial is for the signing of the Mayflower Compact in November of 1620 when they landed at Provincetown. This document was drawn up to assure there was some form a governance agreed to by the group as they set forth to establish a colony. It was interesting to note that the date of the signing was designated by an old and new date. In the museum they mentioned that around 1589 the Pope designed a revised ca lander but it took until 1752 for the colonies in America to adopt the revised system.

The Pilgrim Landing Monument dedicated in 1910.

From the tower, the harbor, looking west.

Looking south.

We are on our way to Booth Bay Harbor, Maine in the morning. We will be looking for whales while we head to Maine since this is a summer feeding ground for the right and finback whales.