[1] A stone wall[2] discovered in Provincetown in 1805 is thought to have been built by Viking Thorvald Eiriksson about AD 1007,[3] when according to Norse sagas, the keel of Ericson's ship was repaired in the harbor.

[4] Bartholomew Gosnold explored the harbor in 1602, and his mate Gabriel Archer wrote: "The fifteenth day of May 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.

This Cape is made by the main sea on the one side, and a great bay on the other, in form of a sickle..."[6]Provincetown Harbor was the initial anchoring place of the Pilgrims traveling on the Mayflower in 1620, before they proceeded to Plymouth, Massachusetts.

According to the only known written description of her death[10] from close to when it actually occurred, she fell overboard from the Mayflower in Provincetown Harbor on December 17, 1620 and drowned.

From 1818 until the 1850s a fishing village existed at Long Point, complete with a post office, schoolhouse, 6 windmills for saltworks, and 38 homes for about 200 adults and 60 children.

[19] In 1868 the mouth of the East Harbor was diked, to facilitate the laying of track for the arrival of the railroad; the wooden bridge and sand road were finally replaced by a formal roadway in 1877, as shown in the accompanying map from 1887.

[20] In the ensuing years, the dike became clogged with vegetation, beginning a trend of desalination and oxygen-depletion that resulted in the demise of native wildlife populations, occasionally in the form of fish kills.

In 2004, tidal flow was successfully restored by the National Park Service, working together with other local, state, and federal agencies.

[24] The pier primarily serves tourists and high-speed ferries to Boston and Plymouth that charge their passengers up to $44 per one-way trip.

[29] They Also Faced the Sea is an outdoor art installation of five large portraits of local Portuguese-American women photographed by Norma Holt hanging since 2003 on one side and one end of the old fish-packing plant on Cabral Pier.

[30] In both 1907 and 1910, when the Pilgrim Monument began construction and when it was dedicated, the entire Atlantic fleet of the U.S. Navy was inside the harbor for large ceremonies led by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, respectively.

The harbor serves as the southern boundary of the nationally registered Provincetown historic district, which consists of some 3,000 acres (12 km2), 1127 buildings, three structures, and five objects.

At another theater on that wharf, Tennessee Williams debuted A Streetcar Named Desire with Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski before the play appeared on Broadway.

[32] The current station opened in 1979 and is responsible for safety and law enforcement in over 1,200 square miles (3,100 km2) of Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

East Coast whale watching on Stellwagen Bank originated as a joint effort of the Dolphin Fleet and the Center for Coastal Studies leaving from MacMillan Pier in 1975.