Yours Sincerely “So soon as we could, we set ashore some fifteen or sixteen men well armed…The ground or earth sandhills, much like the dunes in Holland but much better…all wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, vines, some ash, walnut. The wood for the most part open and without underwood, fit either to go or ride in.” Mourt’s Relation, London 1622. “Today, Pilgrim Beach on Provincetown Harbor…is plastered with barrackslike bungalows. Shocking? Not really. This is America, land where our fathers died, land where our fathers’ world is dead.” Walter Teller, Cape Cod and the Offshore Islands, 1970. Taking a well-earned break (in our opinion at least), Lisa and I spent a long weekend in Provincetown, right at the tip of Cape Cod. Our main aim was relaxation and hedonism, but I did want to see where the Pilgrims first landed and to trace, as far as possible, their earliest steps on American soil. The relaxation and hedonism went just fine, but retracing those first steps – now that was a different matter entirely. The sandy beach where the Pilgrims first came ashore, called Pilgrim Beach on one of our tourist maps, but unidentified on the other, had no historic marker and was almost impossible to find. The spot where the Mayflower anchored was similarly unrecorded. The only visible sign of the Pilgrims, and it was a very visible one, was the Pilgrim Monument - a huge granite tower, 252 feet, seven inches tall that was modeled after (now, wait for this, and think about it) the Torre Del Mangia in Siena, Italy. Relevance, please…? Apart from the tower, and a modest museum at its foot, the historic first landing had been erased almost as completely as the Pilgrims’ footprints in the sand. We think of history as the factual truth, and of myth as a fanciful fiction. But actually, widely accepted myths can tell truths that run deeper than mere facts. Myths reveal what we want to believe, but they must have some tenuous connection to fact to give us an alibi for believing them. Plymouth offers a much better myth than Provincetown. Even though the Pilgrims did not land on its storied rock, the rock was there, replete with ready-made Biblical symbolism that stands in stark contrast to the sand of Provincetown. Who wouldn’t prefer Page 82 ■ Antiques Journal ■ November 2009 T to believe that their nation began on a rock rather than sand? The rock is a good myth. And then there’s food and the Indians. The myth of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth tells us that the natives brought food and shared it with the settlers. On Cape Cod, the Pilgrims found stores of Indian corn, and plundered them. At first they agonized over the theft, and fully intended to pay for the corn when the opportunity arose. Sadly, it didn’t. Even more sadly, they returned later and stole even more, this time with no hesitation or thought of payment. And, not surprisingly, the “First Encounter” was an Indian attack upon the Pilgrims. Welcomed by the natives or attacked by them; accepting food or stealing it – mythically, Plymouth is so far ahead as to be out of sight. Cape Codders are, after all, Americans, and are presumably as satisfied as the rest of us with the foundational myths of Plymouth. Certainly, they’ve done nothing in Provincetown to challenge them. And that huge Sienese tower? It has no mythic resonance whatsoever, so it cannot possibly threaten to displace Plymouth’s mediocre rock from its centrality in our collective imagination. We Americans do seem to prefer mythtory to history. Oh well… See Online Exclusive for more words of the Pilgrims and pictures of our Provincetown trip.