Mayflower

became unmanageable in the waves. All seemed lost, when the pilot Robert Coppin cried out, “Be of good cheer, I see the harbor!” By now it was blowing a gale, and in the freezing rain, the visibility was terrible. But Coppin saw something—perhaps an inviting darkness between two wave-whitened shoals—that convinced him they were about to enter Thievish Harbor.
    They were running before the wind, with their full mainsail set, bashing through the building seas, when their mast splintered into three pieces. Once they’d gathered up the broken mast and sodden sail and stowed them away, they took up the oars and started to row. The tide, at least, was with them.
    But it quickly became evident that what they had taken to be their salvation was about to be their ruin. Instead of the entrance to a harbor, they were steering for a wave-pummeled beach. Coppin cried out, “Lord be merciful unto us, for my eyes never saw this place before!”
    Just when all seemed lost, the sailor at the steering oar exhorted them to use their oars to round the boat up to windward, and with the waves bursting against the shallop’s side, they attempted to row their way out of danger. “So he bid them be of good cheer,” Bradford wrote, “and row lustily, for there was a fair sound before them, and he doubted not but they should find one place or other where they might ride in safety.”
    The shallop had nearly run into a shallow cove at the end of a thin, sandy peninsula called the Gurnet. The Gurnet terminates with a jog to the southwest known as Saquish Head. It was the beach between the Gurnet and Saquish Head that had almost claimed the Pilgrims. Once they rowed the shallop around the tip of Saquish, they found themselves in the lee of what they later discovered was an island.
    In the deepening darkness of the windy night, they discussed what they should do next. Some insisted that they remain aboard the shallop in case of Indian attack. But most of them were more fearful of freezing to death, so they went ashore and built a large fire. When at midnight the wind shifted to the northwest and the temperature dropped till “it froze hard,” all were glad that they had decided to come ashore.
    The next day, a Saturday, proved to be “a fair, sunshining day.” They now realized that they were on a heavily wooded island and, for the time being, safe from Indian attack. John Clark, one of the Mayflower ’s pilots, had been the first to set foot on the island, and from that day forward it was known as Clark’s Island.
    They were on the western edge of a large, wonderfully sheltered bay that might prove to be exactly the anchorage they needed. Even though they had “so many motives for haste,” they decided to spend the day on the island, “where they might dry their stuff, fix their pieces, and rest themselves.” The shallop needed a mast, and they undoubtedly cut down as straight and sturdy a tree as they could find and fashioned it into a new spar. The following day was a Sunday, and as Bradford recorded, “on the Sabbath day we rested.”
    They spent Monday exploring what was to become their new home. They sounded the harbor and found it suitable for ships the size of the Mayflower. They ventured on land, but nowhere in either Of Plymouth Plantation or Mourt’s Relation, the book Bradford and Winslow wrote after their first year in America, is there any mention of a Pilgrim stepping on a rock. Like Cape Cod to the southeast, the shore of Plymouth Bay is nondescript and sandy. But at the foot of a high hill, just to the north of a brook, was a rock that must have been impossible to miss. More than twice as big as the mangled chunk of stone that is revered today as Plymouth Rock, this two-hundred-ton granite boulder loomed above the low shoreline like a recumbent elephant. But did the Pilgrims use it as a landing place?
    At half tide and above, a small boat could have sailed right up alongside the rock. For these explorers, who were suffering from chills and coughs after several weeks of wading up and down the frigid flats of Cape Cod, the ease of access offered by the rock must have been difficult to resist. But if they did use it as their first stepping-stone onto the banks of Plymouth Harbor, Bradford never made note of the historic event. That would be left to subsequent generations of mythmakers.
    They marched across the shores of Plymouth