Nantucket’s Role in Mayflower Landing

The treacherous waters swirling between Nantucket’s Great Point and Monomoy, off the present town of Chatham on Cape Cod, dictated where the Pilgrims ultimately settled. After all, they were aiming for the mouth of the Hudson River, about 200 miles away. But 65 days of a stormy crossing had left the Pilgrims debilitated. On Nov. 9, 1620, when the Mayflower’s captain tried to round the elbow of the Cape to sail toward the Hudson, he ran into an area known as the Pollock Rip, between Nantucket and Cape Cod. That spelled trouble, as made clear by the book, “Mayflower: A Story of Community, Courage and War” by Nantucket resident Nathaniel Philbrick.
Pollock Rip is the name for miles of shoals and sandbars that make the depth of water vary from 40 feet to 10 feet or even less, without warning. It’s an area so turbulent and difficult to safely navigate that as many as half the wrecks along the Eastern Seaboard occurred there. The sailors aboard the Mayflower – a ship 100 feet long and 20 feet wide – had no modern charts to guide them. But they knew that they needed more than 12 feet of water to keep from running aground. As the Mayflower skirted Pollock Rip, the wind died and the Mayflower began to drift; the captain, Christopher Jones, knew that if he didn’t get away from the area and the wind began to blow in the wrong direction, the ship would be wrecked within tantalizing sight of land.
Suddenly, slowly, the wind changed direction, toward the north. The tide, too, began to flow in a direction to push the Mayflower away from the Rip. Captain Jones decided not to push his luck, and instead to land the Pilgrims on the sandy shores of what is now Provincetown, Cape Cod. Thus, the waters off Nantucket helped determine the destiny of the new nation.

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