Instead of 1920 it is 1621. It is the 5th of April: the winter of terrifying sicknesses and loss has passed; of the hundred souls which left England the autumn previously more than a half have died. The Mayflower which brought them all over, and which has remained in the harbor all winter, is now, having made repairs and taking advantage of the more clement weather, trimming her sails for the thirty-one days' return voyage to England. They may return with her, if they wish, any or all of the sturdy little band; they may leave the small, smoky log cabins; the scanty fare of corn and fish; the harassing fear of the Indians; they may leave the privations, the cramped quarters, and return to civilized life—to friends and relatives, to blooming English hedgerows and orderly English churches. But no one—no, not a single one returns! They have thrown in their lot with the new country—the new life. Their nearest civilized neighbors are the French of Nova Scotia, five hundred miles to the north, and the English of Virginia five hundred miles to the south. But they are undaunted. And yet—who can doubt that as they gaze out upon the familiar sails—the last banner between themselves and their ancestral home, and as they see them sailing out and out until they sink below the verge of sea and sky, the tears "rise in the heart and gather to the eyes" in "thinking of the days that are no more."
Three hundred years ago! The same harbor now as then, with the highland of Cape Cod dimly outlined in the gray eastern horizon; the bluffs of Manomet nearer on the right; opposite them, on the left, Duxbury Beach comes down, and ends in the promontory which holds the Gurnet Lights. Clarke's Island—already so named—lies as it does to-day, but save for these main topographical outlines the Plymouth at which we are looking in our imagination would be quite unrecognizable to us.
There is a little row of houses—seven of them—that is all. Log cabins, two-roomed, of the crudest build, thatched with wildgrass, the chinks between the logs filled with clay, the floors made of split logs; lighted at night with pieces of pitch pine. Each lot measures three rods long and a rod and a half wide, and they run on either side of the single street (the first laid out in New England, and ever afterward to be known as Leyden Street), which, in its turn, is parallel to the Town Brook. There is no glass in these cabin windows: oiled paper suffices; the household implements are of the fewest. The most primitive modern camping expedition is replete with luxuries of which this colony knows nothing. They have no cattle of any kind, which means no milk or butter; they have no poultry or eggs. Twenty-six acres of cultivated ground—twenty-one of corn, the other five of wheat, rye, and barley—have been quite enough for the twenty-one men and six boys (all who were well enough to work) to handle, but it is not a great deal to feed them all. At one end of the street stands the common house, twenty feet square, where the church services are held; the store-house is near the head of the pier; and at the top of what is now Burial Hill is the timber fort, twenty by twenty, built the January before by Myles Standish. In April, 1621, this is all there is to what is now the prosperous town of Plymouth.
And yet—not entirely. There are a few things left in the Plymouth of to-day which were in the Plymouth of three hundred years ago. If our man and maid should turn into Pilgrim Hall their eyes would fall upon some of the selfsame objects which were familiar sights to them in 1621. Those sturdy oaken chairs of Governor Carver, Elder Brewster, and Edward Winslow; the square, hooded wooden cradle brought over by Dr. Samuel Fuller; and the well-preserved reed one which rocked Peregrine White, and whose quaint stanchness suggests the same Dutch influence which characterizes the spraddling octagonal windmills—they would quickly recognize all of these. Some of the books, too, chiefly religious, some in classic tongues, William Bradford's Geneva Bible printed in 1592, and others bearing the mark of 1615, would be well known to them, although we must not take it for granted that the lady—or the man either—can read. Well-worn the Bibles are, however, and we need not think that lack of learning prevented any of the Pilgrims from imbibing both the letter and spirit of the Book. Those who could write were masters of a fine, flowing script that shames our modern scrawl, as is well testified by the Patent of the Plymouth Colony—the oldest state document in New England—as well as by the final will and various deeds of Peregrine White, and many others. The small, stiff baby shoes which encased the infant feet of Josiah Winslow, the son of Governor Winslow and destined to be Governor himself, are of a pattern familiar to our man and maid, as are the now tarnished swords of Carver, Brewster, and Standish. Probably they have puzzled, as we are still doing, over the Kufic or Arabic inscriptions on the last. The monster kettle and generous pewter plate brought over by the doughty Captain would be too well known to them to attract their attention, as would be the various tankards and goblets, and the beautiful mortar and pestle brought over by Winslow. But the two-tined fork they would regard with curiosity, for forks were not used, even in England, until 1650. The teapots, too, which look antiquated enough to us, would fill them with wonder, for tea was practically unknown in both colony and mother country until 1657. Those fragments of rude agricultural implements which we treasure would not interest our man and maid for whom they are ordinary sights, and neither would they regard with the same historical interest that moves us the bits of stone from the Scrooby Manor in England, the bricks from the old pier at Delft Haven in Holland, or the piece of carved pew-back from the old church at Scrooby. Possibly our Pilgrim maid is one of the few who can write, and if so, her fingers have doubtless fashioned a sampler as exquisite as that of Lora Standish, whose meek docility and patient workmanship are forever preserved in her cross-stitched words.
From all around the walls of Pilgrim Hall look down fine, stern old portraits, real and imaginary, of the early colonists. Modern critics may bicker over the authenticity of the white bull on which Priscilla Alden is taking her wedding trip; they may quarrel over the fidelity of the models and paintings of the Mayflower, and antiquarians may diligently unearth bits of bone to substantiate their pet theories. Our man and maid could tell us all, but, alas, their voices are so far away we cannot hear them. They will never speak the words which will settle any of the oft-disputed points, and, unfortunately, they will leave us forever to argue about the truth of the famous Plymouth Rock.
To present the well-worn story of Plymouth Rock from an angle calculated to rouse even a semblance of fresh interest is comparable to offering a well-fed man a piece of bread, and expecting him to be excited over it as a novelty. Bread is the staff of life, to be sure, but it is also accepted as matter of course in the average diet, and the story of Plymouth Rock is part and parcel of every school-book and guide-book in the country. The distinguished, if somewhat irreverent, visitor, who, after being reduced to partial paralysis by the oft-repeated tale, ejaculated fervently that he wished the rock had landed on the Pilgrims instead of the Pilgrims on the rock, voiced the first original remark about this historic relic which has refreshed our ears for many years. However, as Americans we are thoroughly imbued with the theory on which our advertising is based. Although it would seem that every housekeeper in the land had been kept fully informed for forty years of the advantages incident to the use of a certain soap, the manufacturers still persist in reciting these benefits. And why? Because new housekeepers come into existence with each new day. So, if there be any man who comes to Plymouth who does not know the story of Plymouth Rock, it is here set down for him, as accurately and briefly as possible.
This rock—which is an oval, glacial boulder of about seven tons—was innocently rearing its massive, hoary head from the water one day in December, 1620, as it had done for several thousand years previously in unmolested oblivion. While engaged in this ponderous but harmless occupation it was sighted by a boatful of men and women—the first who had ever chosen to land on this particular part of the coast. The rock presented a moderately dry footing, and they sailed up to it, and a charming young woman, attired, according to our amiable painter, in the cleanest and freshest of aprons and the most demure of caps, set a daintily shod foot upon it and leaped lightly to shore. This was Mary Chilton, and she was promptly followed by an equally trig young man—John Alden. Thus commenced the founding of Plymouth Colony, and thus was sown the seed of innumerable pictures, poems, stories, and sermons.
Now the Pilgrims themselves, in none of their various accounts, ever mention the incident of the landing described above, or the rock. In fact they are so entirely silent about it that historians—besides discrediting the pretty part about Mary Chilton and John Alden, in the brusque fashion characteristic of historians—have pooh-poohed the whole story, arguing that the rock was altogether too far away from the land to be a logical stepping-place, and referring to the only authentic record of that first landing, which merely reads: "They sounded y^e harbor & founde it fitt for shipping, and marched into y^e land & found diverse cornfeilds & little running brooks, a place fitt for situation: at least it was y^e best they could find." The Pilgrims, then, were quite oblivious of the rock, the historians are entirely skeptical concerning it, and the following generation so indifferent to the tradition which was gradually formulating, that in the course of events it was half-covered with a wharf, and used as a doorstep to a warehouse.
This was an ignominious position for a magnificent free boulder which had been a part of the untrammeled sea and land for centuries, but this lowly occupation was infinitely less trying than the fate which was awaiting. At the time the wharf was suggested, the idea that the rock was the actual landing-place of the first colonists had gained such momentum that a party was formed in its defense. An aged man, Thomas Faunce, was produced. He was ninety-five and confined to an armchair. He had not been born until twenty-six years after the landing of the Pilgrims; his father, whom he quoted as declaring this to be the original rock and identical landing-place, had not even come over in the Mayflower, but in the Anne. However, this venerable Canute, carried to the water's edge in his armchair, in the presence of many witnesses, assured them and all posterity that this was the genuine, undeniable landing-place of the Pilgrims. And from that moment the belief was so firmly set in the American mind that no power could possibly dislodge it. In accordance with this suddenly acquired respect, it was decided to move the huge bulk to the more conspicuous location of the Town Square. When it was lifted from its prehistoric bed, it broke, and this was hailed as a propitious omen of the coming separation of the Colonies from the mother country. Only the upper half was dragged up to the Town Square—a process which took twenty yoke of oxen and was accompanied by wild huzzahing. There the poor, broken thing lay in the sun, at the bottom of the Liberty Pole on which was flying, "Liberty or Death." But its career as a public feature had only begun. It remained in the square until 1834, and then on July 4 it was decided to drag it to a still more conspicuous place. So with a formal procession, it was again hoisted and hauled and set down in front of the entrance porch of Pilgrim Hall, where it lay like a captive mammoth animal for curious folk to gaze at. Here it was granted almost half a century of undisturbed if not secluded slumber. But the end was not yet. In 1880 it was once more laid hold of and carted back to its original setting, and welded without ceremony, to the part from which it had been sundered. Now all of this seems quite enough—more than enough—of pitiless publicity, for one old rock whose only offense had been to be lifting its head above the water on a December day in 1620. But no—just as the mind of man takes a singular satisfaction in gazing at mummies preserved in human semblance in the unearthly stillness of the catacombs, so the once massive boulder—now carefully mended—was placed upon the neatest of concrete bases, and over it was reared, from the designs of Hammatt Billings, the ugliest granite canopy imaginable—in which canopy, to complete the grisly atmosphere of the catacombs, were placed certain human bones found in an exploration of Cole's Hill. Bleak and homeless the old rock now lies passively in forlorn state under its atrocious shelter, behind a strong iron grating, and any of a dozen glib street urchins, in syllables flavored with Cork, or Genoese, or Polish accents, will, for a penny, relate the facts substantially as I have stated them.[2]
It is easy to be unsympathetic in regard to any form of fetishism which we do not share. And while the bare fact remains that we are not at all sure that the Pilgrims landed on this rock, and we are entirely sure that its present location and setting possess no romantic allurement, yet bare facts are not the whole truth, and even when correct they are often the superficial and not the fundamental part of the truth. Those hundreds—those thousands—of earnest-eyed men and women who have stood beside this rock with tears in their eyes, and emotions too deep for words in their hearts, "believing where they cannot prove," have not only interpreted the vital significance of the place, but, by their very emotion, have sanctified it.