Such a range of temperature in its surrounding waters, combined with numerous estuaries of varying salinity, has produced one of the richest diversities of marine habitats on the East Coast. A National Park Service report states that the difference in flora and fauna “between Cape Cod Bay and Buzzards Bay is greater than that between Cape Cod Bay and the Bay of Fundy, or between Buzzards Bay and the coast of Virginia.” Warm-water species such as whelks, bay scallops, diamondback terrapins, blue crabs, striped bass and tuna inhabit the same waters as do more northerly species such as blue mussels, Jonah crabs, winter flounder, halibut, and, of course, cod. Of all the creatures nourished by the sea, none has been more important to the history of Cape Cod than the Atlantic cod, _Gadus morhua_. In 1602, the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold was so impressed by the schools of codfish surrounding his vessel, the _Concord_, that he named this peninsula after them, a name so apt that, in the words of Truro historian Shebnah Rich, “blow high or low, cold or hot, thick or thin, fish or no fish, it has hung on like a lamper-eel from that day to this.” [Illustration: _A few Pilgrims left Plymouth and returned to the Cape and settled in the Eastham area. So, too, did this windmill. It was built in Plymouth in the 1600s and was moved to Eastham in 1793. The mill was used in producing flour. Some mills were used to pump seawater as a part of saltworks._] The cod has always been what Captain John Smith described in 1616 as “the maine staple” of the New England fishing industry. More than a century before the _Mayflower_ landed, fleets of small ships from Holland, Portugal, and the Basque region of Spain had braved the North Atlantic annually to fish the rich spawning grounds of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, salting their fish ashore and returning with their catch to European ports. It is more than likely that the first European visitors to Provincetown Harbor—originally called Cape Cod Harbor—were Portuguese fishermen who came ashore to cure, or “make,” cod on the long sandy stretches there. Some permanent European settlements may even have existed there in the 1500s.