Was the Pilgrims’ Landing at Plymouth Rock a Myth?
In December, 1620, the Pilgrims who had crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower finally made it to Massachusetts (their initial destination had been the Virginia Colony, but that’s another story). They landed at Plymouth Rock, and for centuries, it has been an object of reverence associated with the earliest history of the United States. French traveler and author Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835: “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“.
Over the years, souvenir hunters broke off pieces of that granite stone, until all that is left today is about a third of what had originally weighed around 20,000 pounds. But did the Pilgrims even make landfall there? There are two surviving firsthand accounts of the Pilgrims’ arrival and the foundation of their colony. Neither of them mentions what we know today as Plymouth Rock. Indeed, for more than a century, the rock was not mentioned in any known records. It was not until 1741, 121 years after the Pilgrims landed, that a 94-year-old descendant of a Pilgrim who arrived in 1623 reported that the rock was where the original settlers had landed. It is thus quite possible that the narrative of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock is just a myth.