Our Road Trip to New England (Part II)

After visiting Fort Adam in Newport, RI and sitting on the dock, watching the sail boats race, I got on board the working ship called Oliver Hazard Perry, Rhode Island’s official flagship, a 200 ft. long ship with 20 sails, 7 miles of rigging, which had been commissioned in 2015. The guide told me that the battle against the salty water is a constant companion. Everything looked freshly painted and corrosion free, at least above the water.

There were anglers on the dock, spinning their tall tales, drinking beer, fishing for sport, catching mostly black sea bass, and throwing it back into the ocean.

We were hungry so we went looking for a parking spot for Flo’s Shack. Highly recommended, the seafood was delicious, generous portions for starving patrons, and the windows gave us a lovely view of the mostly deserted Newport, RI public beach. The tropical motif shack had a constant flow of locals coming to pick up their orders. The tourists were slim as the beach was deserted and the water very cold even for die-hard ocean bathers like us.

The history of Flo’s Shack is quite storied, like the fishermen’s tales on the dock. Given the proximity to the ocean, right across the busy road running alongside the beach, the restaurant had been destroyed three different times by hurricanes and rebuilt anew with a beautiful aquarium, three stories, bamboos alongside the exterior ramp, beach related memorabilia, and other interesting knick-knacks like the floating devices from various sunken ships.

Flo's Shack in Newport, RI

Newport Harbor, RI

Finally, the sun came out the next morning and the road took us 87 miles to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The glossy brochures advertising Cape Cod were exaggerating the friendliness of the people and the beauty of the place by many degrees. I found New Englanders oddly unfriendly, but none as snobbish and cold as the people in Massachusetts.

I have a problem when people in general look down and sideways as they speak to me. I do believe that the eyes are windows to one’s soul. In my experience growing up under communism, people did not smile, greet other people kindly, hid their feelings, and made no eye contact with strangers or any interlocutor for fear that they might be arrested for talking to the “wrong people,” or for other trumped-up reasons the government might conjure up.

We woke up early to take the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard along with the many buses of tourists who filled the hotel after we arrived, all excited to see how the wealthy people live, the same affluent locals who recently rejected 50 illegal economic migrants off their island mere hours after their arrival.

Lucky for us, we missed the earlier 35-minute ferry from Cape Cod via Nantucket Sound to Martha’s Vineyard and a later ferry would have trapped us on Martha’s Vineyard all day with nothing to do or see. So, we decided to drive on to Plymouth, MA instead, a mere 45 miles west. There is a lot more history there to learn about our country.

Plymouth, Massachusetts is the place known as “America’s Hometown,’ because of its importance in American history and culture. I found it unusual that it was spelled in brochures and in museum Plimouth even though it was named after the English town, Plymouth. Much of what we know about the Plymouth Colony, including the odd spelling, comes from Governor William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation. Spelling was not standard in the 17^th century, and he used Plimoth a lot in his writings.

The day was sunny and balmy, and we made our way to Patuxent, the Indigenous name of the place where the Mayflower passengers settled their town. In the Wampanoag language Patuxent means “place of running water,” referring to the beautiful Town Brook which we walked along from the village to the location of the rock and Mayflower II in the harbor.

Patuxent homesite

The historic Patuxent homesite offered a fascinating view into the culture and habits of the Indigenous Wampanoag; how to make a wetu (a domed hut) and a canoe fashioned by the burning for 7-10 days of a fresh pine log (mishoon); and how the Wampanoag sunk their canoes in winter to preserve them from drying out and rotting.

A replica of the 17^th century English village, which was originally located on first street downtown, had been built on the summer property of a wealthy local who liked archeology and kept finding evidence of the pilgrims, so he decided to recreate that village as it had been in 1627.

The English colonists were referred to as pilgrims because, when Governor Bradford recorded his community’s departure from Leiden, Holland, to America, he wrote, “they knew they were pilgrims.”

The 1636 grist mill of Plymouth Colony has been reproduced in modern times to demonstrate how the colonists harnessed the power of the Town Brook to grind corn. I bought cornmeal ground here from blue corn (also known as Hopi maize) and I cooked polenta, which turned out a lovely shade of lavender and it was quite delicious.

Blue corn has 20-30% more nutritional value than yellow or white corn, a lower glycemic index, is gluten-free, and has quite a few anti-inflammatory properties via anthocyanins.

Walking along the lovely Town Brook for about a mile, we arrived at Pilgrim Memorial State Park which displays the Mayflower II and the Plymouth Rock.

Tradition says that pilgrims stepped off the boat onto the rock. But neither William Bradford nor Edward Winslow, the main chroniclers of the colonists, refer to a rock in their historical accounts.

Perhaps the Rock was underneath a landing pier of sorts, or the shallop was moored to it. A shallop was a small landing vessel kept dismantled on Mayflower. The passengers were forced to sleep on the dismantled parts during the voyage and, once they reached their destination, it took 17 days to assemble it.

The rock was not identified as a landing place until 1741 by Thomas Faunce, a 95-year-old Elder in the First Church. How good was his memory? It depends on who you ask. As Rose T. Briggs said in Plymouth Rock: History and Significance in 1968, “It is the fact that they landed – and remained – that matters, not where they landed. Yet it is not bad thing for a nation to be founded on a rock.”

The Plymouth Rock was placed beneath a portico built in 1921 in Neo-Classical Revival style, 300 years after the pilgrims’ arrival. The rock, real or imagined, had an interesting history:

-         News in 1741 that the rock might be buried in preparation of the shoreline for the construction of a wharf, prompted citizens to defend it

-         Thomas Faunce, 95-years old, said that it was THE landing rock (he knew it because he knew some of the original pilgrims; how that was possible when it had happened 120 years before)

-         The top half of the rock was moved to Town Square in 1774 with the help of 30 oxen as a monument to liberty

-         July 4, 1834, the top half of the rock was moved again to Pilgrim Hall on Court Street

-         1867 the bottom half was trimmed to fit within the Gothic style granite canopy

-         1921 a new portico was built over Plymouth Rock

-         1970 the Plymouth Rock and the portico were listed in the National Register of Historic Places

-         If the pilgrims truly saw the rock when they landed, the rock would have been three times the size that it is today.

The Plymouth harbor is home to Mayflower II, a full-scale reproduction of the ship that carried the English colonists to the New World shores. Even though it is just a reproduction, it was a sight that took my breath away.

Mayflower II - reconstruction of the original Mayflower

There are no images or plans in existence of the original Mayflower, however, Mayflower II was built by hand, using the same tools from that period, combining information from period shipbuilding manuals and descriptions of Mayflower in primary sources.

The finished Mayflower II crossed the Atlantic in 1957, as a gift from England to the people of the United States. It has to be constantly kept in sailing condition and protected from the corrosion of the ocean.

According to the museum archives, “The original Mayflower left New Plymouth in early April 1621, returned to London a month later and, based on primary source evidence, was likely broken up and sold for scrap around 1624.”

The Mayflower carried its passengers (mostly reformed Christians fleeing the Church of England) and crew in the fall of 1620 on a 66-day harrowing voyage across the stormy and cold Atlantic Ocean. Seeing the cramped interior of the cargo area, I wondered how many souls could survive at sea in such conditions. On November 11, Mayflower dropped anchor in today’s Provincetown Harbor.

The ship was not built for passengers and the pilgrims had to sleep below deck on top of the cargo and on top of the dismantled landing boat. They were not allowed on the main deck except to dump their waste buckets overboard.

According to the museum archives, after weeks of searching for a suitable place to build a colony, the pilgrims arrived in Plymouth Harbor. “This was the site of the Wampanoag community of Patuxent, left uninhabited after a devastating epidemic that swept coastal New England just before Mayflower arrived.”

TO BE CONTINUED