My World Has Been Rocked

I was sort of sad to discover that Plymouth Rock is probably a phony. In Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick, he says:

"...Nowhere in either Of Plimouth Plantation or Mourt's Relation, the book Bradford and Winslow wrote after their first year in America, is there any mention of a Pilgrim stepping on a rock. Like Cape Cod to the southeast, the shore of Plymouth Bay is nondescript and sandy. But at the foot of a high hill, just to the north of a brook, was a rock that must have been impossible to miss. More than twice as big as the mangled chunk of stone that is revered today as Plymouth Rock, this two-hundred-ton granite boulder loomed above the low shoreline like a recumbent elephant. But did the Pilgrims use it as a landing place? At half-tide and above, a small boat could have sailed right up alongside the rock. For these explorers, who were suffering from chills and coughs after several weeks of wading up and down the frigid flats of Cape Cod, the ease of access offered by the rock must have been difficult to resist. But if they did use it as their first stepping-stone onto the banks of Plymouth Harbor, Bradford never made note of the historic event. That would be left to subsequent generations of mythmakers."

So what is the mangled chunk of stone that my husband and I revered in February at the Plymouth shoreline?

Philbrick says: "In 1741, the ninety-five-year-old Thonmas Faunce asked to be carried in a litter to the Plymouth waterfront. Faunce had heard that a pier was about to built over an undistinguished rock at the tide line near Town Brook. With tears in his eyes, Faunce proclaimed that he had been told by his father, who had arrived in Plymouth in 1623, that the boulder was where the Pilgims had first landed. Thus was born the legend of Plymouth Rock."

The irony is that the false relic has been nearly destroyed in our "reverence" for it: According to this book, it was broken in half in the initial extraction (the broken half left behind), then over the years souvenir hunters chiseled pieces of it away and in 1834, during another move, it was dropped and broken again. (This time they did cement the pieces back together.)

If the boulder in Plymouth Bay is indeed the "real" Plymouth Rock, it is probably better kept a secret.