In the 1934 musical comedy “Anything Goes,” there is always a line that stands out among the rest:
“Times have changed / And we’ve often rewound the clock / Since the Puritans got the shock / When they landed on Plymouth Rock.”
Over the years I have heard this lyric many times, mostly because of my staunch love for Cole Porter tunes, and until very recently I had believed it to be factual. I would imagine the Puritans reaching the Americas, their boat making landfall and using the rock as a commemoration to the end of their sea faring journey. Much to my dismay, I was wrong.
Welcome back to another year of This Week in History. Over this past summer, I have missed my quill and ink and am positively ecstatic to write about weekly historical events once more. For our first edition of the Fall Semester, I am going to discuss the Mayflower and the sheer amount of Revolutionary propaganda that has allowed us to believe that Plymouth Rock was the spot where they actually landed.
On Sept. 16, 1620, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England carrying 102 passengers. 35 of which were part of the religious Separatist movement, who were somewhat extremist and sought to leave the jurisdiction of, in their minds, the corrupt Church of England.
According to the article, Mayflower departs England from history.com, the settlers had planned to go to Jamestown, the newly formed colony in Virginia. However, due to rough seas and storms, they were blown off course and wound up in what would become Massachusetts.
Now, I won’t bore you with details of the Mayflower Compact and such, as I’m sure you have heard that detail in every U.S. History Class ever. However, I do want to touch upon the fact that when they made landfall, they didn’t even hit Plymouth. No, the pilgrims aboard the Mayflower first landed in Provincetown.
Now as someone who loves Provincetown and goes whenever I can, imagine my shock as I sit in one of the towns many gay bars and found out that the pilgrims first landed here. Lied to, cheated and frustrated were a few words that came to mind. As a result, I decided to continue pulling the string that would unravel the sweater that was my perception of Massachusetts history, and I began to ask, where did all this Plymouth Rock business come from then?
According to the Pilgrim Hall Museum in their article, The History of Plymouth Rock, there are two primary sources that describe the settlers’ arrival in Plymouth, Mass., both of which contained no mention of a rock. The perception of the rock as we know it today came primarily orally, from a man named Thomas Faunce.
In 1741, over 120 years after the journey of the Mayflower, a 94-year-old Faunce was informed that a wharf was to be constructed over the rock. He expressed a strong desire to see it one last time before construction began as his father had told him that it was the spot their forefathers had first arrived on, pointing out the rock at the base of Cole’s Hill. Faunce was about 6 years old when his father died and was born in 1647, 27 years after the Mayflower first made landfall, sounds like a credible source to me.
Faunce gave a telling of the story on the beach to townspeople after his dramatic journey to the shore. The story was then preserved by Ephraim Spooner, who was also around 6 years old at the time of the event.
The first published account of Plymouth Rock would print in 1832, written by Dr. James Thacher, a lover of history and doctor in Plymouth who based the rock on Spooner and Faunce’s account.
The story of the rock also acquired a patriotic tone during the Revolutionary War, as Faunce’s story spread. In 1774, the town decided to consecrate the rock, enlisting a team of oxen to relocate it to the town’s “liberty pole.” During this maneuver, the rock split in half, which many town folks took as an ominous sign of separation from the British Empire. As a result of the schism, the town decided to leave half the rock on the beach and take the other half to the liberty pole.
As time goes on, the rock is moved around town, broken a bit more during its removal, and so on and so forth. The date 1620 wasn’t even carved into the stone until the late 1800s.
To be entirely honest, the whole story sounds like a load of baloney. I’m glad that I never even made the trip to see the rock because the only formal evidence we have is based on a 94-year-old’s memory from when he was 6 years old. If anything, Provincetown should be the area people visit if they would like to see the spot where the first pilgrims landed. That being said, I am sad to lose the magic that was Plymouth Rock, however I look forward to bringing this up insufferably at parties.
Thanks for reading this week’s issue and hopefully you found this just as bizarre as I did.