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.
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 17th 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.
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.
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.
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
What a great historic depiction: Civilized Europeans built castles and industries all over, while the "Indians" kept sinking their primitive boats to prevent their rotting and built hats with clay and wood....Let's make it law that schools teach that to all the kids!
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