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    Tag: Plymouth

    • Plymouth’s National Monument to the Forefathers

      Plymouth, Massachusetts might not be the oldest European settlement in the United States, but you can safely say it’s where England got its foothold in America. They might have landed in Provincetown first, hit a few places along the Cape Cod coast as they looked for a better place to settle, and maybe they would have been better off if they’d landed in what would become Boston or Providence, but they landed here. And the great floodgates of immigration began, changing this continent forever.

      That narrative of settlement and conquest is… complicated. But you can make a good case that the Mayflower Pilgrims’ pilgrimage was driven by religious freedom and a desire for peaceful coexistence with the Native American population. They happened to settle in a place where the native population had recently been decimated by disease, making for a bit more elbow room to root themselves in the place, but let’s stay on point. That first generation tried to fulfill the mission as best they could.

      To honor those noble intentions, and to put a spotlight on the best virtues that we humans aspire to, the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth conceived of a huge statue that would dominate Plymouth Harbor. The original monument was supposed to be 150 feet tall and right on the water. Reason eventually took over and they moved the monument to the top of a small hill with a commanding view of the harbor, then shortened it to 81 feet.

      The National Monument to the Forefathers is believed to be the tallest granite statue in the world. There is impressive detail in the carvings and a sense of Victorian optimism about what we aspire to be throughout. The cornerstone was laid in 1850 and the monument completed in 1889. That’s a lifetime for someone in the middle of the 19th century. Throw in the Civil War and violent conflict with Native Americans as the country was settled ever westward and those ideals were challenged even as the monument was being built.

      Today the National Monument to the Forefathers stands in dignified silence, 132 years after the dedication ceremony and a year after the 400th anniversary of the settlement of Plymouth by those Mayflower Pilgrims. That big party got cancelled last year with the pandemic, the narrative of living up to the best of virtues is more challenging than ever as we Americans sort out just who we want to be, but the monument stands. Still waiting for us to measure up.

    • The Pilgrims and Pokanoket

      As you walk into the Mayflower Pub in London there’s a poster mounted high on the wall that shows the silhouettes of all the pilgrims and servants who sailed on the Mayflower to settle in America. The poster is divided in two, with the upper half showing the Pilgrims as they sailed from Europe. The lower half has the same image, but depicts those who perished before that first winter was over in gray. There’s a lot of gray… but by all rights it should have been all of them.

      The Pilgrims sailed for America too late in the season, without enough food, and sailed for the wrong place. Their charter had them settling at the mouth of the Hudson River, and instead they found themselves at the fist of Cape Cod. Turning south they almost wrecked on the treacherous shoals that have claimed thousands of ships since then. Turning back northward, the Captain of the Mayflower considered present-day Provincetown but eventually worked their way to the area that would become Plymouth., Massachusetts. Pilgrims were starting to die as freezing temperatures, tough living conditions aboard and malnutrition conspired against them. The Native American tribes were well aware of their presence and had already skirmished with them on Cape Cod at First Encounter Beach. A more sustained attack could easily have wiped them out.

      But the Pilgrims also had some lucky breaks that kept enough of them alive to establish a foothold in the region. They arrived at a place where just a few years earlier thousands of Native Americans lived. Contact with Europeans, most likely fishermen fishing the Gulf of Maine, triggered a plaque that killed thousands of people in the few years right before the Pilgrims arrived. So the native population was decimated and in no position to shove the Pilgrims back into the ocean they’d arrived on. They settled in an area with cleared fields and few adversaries. Truly fortunate to be there instead of landing in a place with a thriving and hostile Native American population.

      The other lucky break the Pilgrims caught was landing at a place where the local Sachem, Massasoit, saw strategic advantage in an alliance with the Pilgrims. The Pokanoket tribe Massasoit was Sachem of had been hit hard by the plaque that hit the tribes along the Gulf of Maine, and he was feeling pressure from the Narraganset tribe. An alliance with the Pilgrims gave him some strength in numbers that proved mutually beneficial for the short term. Ultimately this alliance would give the Pilgrims the momentum to survive and grow, but would destroy the Pokanoket in the next generation. An accident of geography brought the Pilgrims and Pokanoket together, time would drive them apart. But in the winter of 1620-1621, it would prove the difference in keeping more Pilgrims from turning into gray silhouettes on a poster 400 years later.

    • The Rose Standish

      A little piece of historical trivia is the name of the very first ship to travel through the Cape Cod Canal when it opened on July 29, 1914.  Following the Jeopardy answering with a question format, What is the S.S. Rose Standish?  And the ship was the perfect choice to be first.

      Rose Standish was the first wife of Captain Myles Standish.  She was one of many who died in 1620 during the first winter after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  Myles Standish would explore the Manomet and Scusset Rivers three years later considering a canal.  That canal would finally be completed almost three hundred years later with great fanfare, with a future President of the United States, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, in attendance.

      That first ship, the S.S. Rose Standish, was a coastal passenger vessel built just two years earlier in 1912 and operated by the Nantasket Beach Steamboat Company of Boston.  On that July day in 1914, she led a parade of ships through the canal.  The celebratory mood was likely tempered by news breaking about events the previous day, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, marking the beginning of World War One.  Almost exactly four years after the canal opened that war would impact the canal itself when a German U-Boat surfaced off of Orleans and fired on a tug towing barges.  That prompted the United States Army Corps of Engineers to take over the struggling private Cape Cod Canal so ships wouldn’t have to take the more dangerous route around the cape.

      The S.S. Rose Standish would be in service into the 1930’s.  There’s a great picture from 1930 of her docked in Boston Harbor, right about when the Cape Cod Canal was being widened to its current 480 feet.  She likely outlived many of the people who witnessed that first trip up the canal 16 years before.  History is full of related twists and turns, and this story offers a good example with Rose Standish, one of the first pilgrims, a young Franklin D Roosevelt and a German U-Boat all playing a part in the same story.