📡 The First Transatlantic Radio Message Was Sent From a Cliff That No Longer Exists

In January 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt sent a greeting in Morse code from a station on these bluffs to King Edward VII in England — the first transatlantic wireless message ever transmitted, tapped out from four 210-foot towers standing where the Marconi Beach overlook is today. Marconi's own engineers knew almost immediately that the site had a problem: by 1906 the sea cliff was eroding roughly three feet a year, and the front towers were already at risk of toppling onto the beach below. The station was dismantled and abandoned by 1920, and the ocean has since taken most of the original site outright — the ground the towers stood on has largely eroded into the Atlantic, leaving only markers on the bluff where a piece of communications history briefly existed.

The Pilgrims never actually landed at Plymouth first. The Mayflower dropped anchor in Provincetown Harbor, at the very tip of the Cape near where Herring Cove Beach sits today, and it was here — not at Plymouth Rock — that 41 passengers signed the Mayflower Compact establishing self-government before anyone had gone ashore to settle. Only after determining the harbor wasn't suitable for a permanent colony did the ship continue on to Plymouth. The famous founding document of the Plymouth Colony was written and signed on Cape Cod.