Optical connections: Mystery of Spectacle Island

When the first European explorers sailed into Boston harbour over 400 years ago, they were confronted with a bay scattered with islands, one of which comprised two small hills connected by a sandbar.

The shape reminded those explorers of a pair of spectacles; there is no record of what its earlier inhabitants had called it, but Spectacle Island it became. Throughout the following centuries its history has been remarkably varied and it even enjoyed a brief moment of fame for the part it played in a notorious murder mystery.

The unusual topography of Spectacle Island as those first explorers saw it resulted from the slow movement of glaciers that covered New England during the last Ice Age, which left behind the two hills known as glacial drumlins that form the ‘lenses’ of the spectacle shape. The island sits in Boston’s inner harbour, the city itself being situated at the end of the long, thin Shawmut peninsula where the Charles and Mystic rivers empty into the bay.