... is "traditionally" said to be the place at which the Mayflower pilgrims stepped ashore in America, but there is no contemporary evidence that the claim is true.
The story dates back to 1741, when the residents of Plymouth, Massachusetts began plans to build a wharf that would bury the rock. Before construction began, a 94–year–old church elder named Thomas Faunce declared that the boulder had been the pilgrims' landing place, and asked to be brought to the rock to say a farewell.
This was 121 years after the Mayflower landed in Plymouth. It was Faunce's father, who arrived two years later on the Anne, who had "assured" him that this had been the historic landing place of 1620. So Faunce's claim has never been traced back to any eye–witness account.
Wikipedia is sceptical, and quotes Bill Bryson: "The one thing the Pilgrims certainly did not do was step ashore on Plymouth Rock." Wikipedia continues: "Others have pointed out that the Pilgrims landed at Provincetown to explore Cape Cod more than a month before they arrived in Plymouth harbor, which lessens the significance of where they set foot in Plymouth."
On a blog by a Swedish teacher of English and religion, named Kristian Smedjeback, I found a fuller transcript of what Bryson wrote: "Quite apart from the consideration that it may have stood well above the high–water mark in 1620, no prudent mariner 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 indeed it doesn't make its first recorded appearance until 1715, almost a century later."
There is a discrepancy between Bryson's 1715 and Wikipedia's Thomas Faunce in 1741, but I don't think that changes much.
© Haydn Thompson 2023