19. The Truth About Plymouth Rock
The Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower, and finally reached Massachusetts (their initial destination had been the Virginia Colony, but that is another story) in December, 1620. They landed at Plymouth Rock, and ever since, it has been revered for its association with America’s earliest history. In 1835, French traveler and author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “This Rock is become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic“.
After centuries in which souvenir hunters broke off pieces of that granite stone, what is left today is only about a third of what had originally weighed around 20,000 pounds. But did the Pilgrims even make landfall there? We know of two firsthand accounts of the Pilgrims’ arrival and the foundation of their colony. Neither account mentions what we know today as Plymouth Rock. Indeed, for over a century, the rock was not mentioned in any known records. It was only in 1741, 121 years after the Pilgrims reached Massachusetts, that a 94-year-old descendant of a Pilgrim who arrived in 1623 reported that Plymouth Rock was where the first settlers had landed. It is thus quite possible that the account of the Pilgrims’ landing at the famous rock is just a myth.