my English lover wrote this...
Re: Plymouth, pilgrims and the ROCK
Ah the founding fathers et al, I will no doubt be roundly tharshed by my American colleagues but here is my take with more than a nod to Bill Bryson
The one thing the Pilgrims certainly didn't do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock. Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high-water mark in 1620, sensible sailor would try to bring a ship alongside a boulder in a heaving December sea when a sheltered inlet beckoned nearby.
If the Pilgrims even noticed Plymouth Rock, there is no sign of it. No mention of the rock is found among any of the surviving documents and letters of the age, and in*deed it doesn't make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later.'
Wherever they landed, we can assume that the 102 Pilgrims stepped from their storm-tossed little ship with unsteady legs and huge relief. They had just spent nine and a half damp and perilous weeks at sea, crammed together on a creaking vessel small enough to be parked on a modern tennis court. The crew, with the customary graciousness of sailors, referred to them as puke stockings, on account of their apparently boundless ability to spatter the latter with the former, though in fact they had handled the experience reasonably well.' Only one passenger had died en route, and two had been added through births (one of whom ever after reveled in the exuberant name of Oceanus Hopkins).
They called themselves Saints. Those members of the party who were not Saints they called Strangers. Pilgrims in reference to these early voy*agers would not become common for another two hundred years. Even later was Founding Fathers. It isn't found until the twentieth century, in a speech by Warren G. Harding. Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Angli*can Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn't arrive in America for another decade, but when they did they would quickly eclipse, and eventually absorb, this little original colony.
It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers,a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots.
Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower's manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter*--occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.' Their military com*mander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as "Captain Shrimpe"- hardly a figure to inspire awe in the sav*age natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy. Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of hus*bandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.
They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possi*ble way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England,* just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.'
At this remove, it is difficult to imagine just how alone this small, hap*less band of adventurers was. Their nearest kindred neighbors-at Jamestown in Virginia and at a small and now all but forgotten colony at Cupers (now Cupids) Cove in Newfoundland*-were five hundred miles off in opposite directions. At their back stood a hostile ocean, and before them lay an inconceivably vast and unknown continent of "wild and savage hue," in William Bradford's uneasy words. They were about as far from the comforts of civilization as anyone had ever been (certainly as far as anyone had ever been without a fishing line).
But against all the odds and with a little help from the natives, one of whom greeted them in English?? they made it to found the country we now know as the USA.
:cool: