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Plymouth Rock is the traditional site of disembarkation of William Bradford and the ''Mayflower'' Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620. It is an important symbol in American history. Plymouth Rock is apparently located on a beach in what is today the modern town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA. There are no contemporaneous references to the Pilgrims' landing on a rock at Plymouth, and it is not referred to in Edward Winslow's ''Mourt's Relation'' (1620–21) or in Bradford's journal ''Of Plymouth Plantation'' (1620–47). The first written reference to the rock's existence was recorded in 1715, when it is described in the town boundary records as "a great rock." The first written reference to Pilgrims landing on a rock is found 121 years after they landed. A rock traditionally identified as ''the'' Plymouth Rock has long been memorialized on the shore of Plymouth Harbor in Plymouth, Massachusetts. ==History of Plymouth Rock== The ''Plymouth Rock'' (more specifically, ''Dedham granodiorite'', a glacial erratic), had lain at the foot of Cole's Hill from generation to generation until the century after the Pilgrims' landing in 1620. When plans were afoot to build a wharf at the Pilgrims' landing site in 1741, a 94-year-old elder of the church named Thomas Faunce, then living 3 miles from the spot, declared that he knew the precise boulder on which the Mayflower pilgrims first stepped when disembarking.〔James Thacher, ''History of the Town of Plymouth'' (2nd ed., 1835, Boston) pp. 29–30; John D. Seelye, ''Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock'' (1998, Chapel Hill, Univ. of North Carolina Press) p. 34; S.H. Gay, "When Did the Pilgrim Fathers Land at Plymouth?" ''Atlantic Monthly'', November 1881, pp. 616–617.〕 As recounted in the 1897 book, ''The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers'', the standard story goes: Faunce's father had arrived at the colony aboard the ''Anne'' in 1623, more than 2 years after the Mayflower landing, and Elder Faunce himself had been born in 1647, but Faunce insisted that not only his father but several of the original Mayflower passengers had, when he was a youth, identified the precise rock to him. Faunce was brought in a chair to the shore, in the presence of most of the town, and he reportedly began weeping at what he was sure would be his last sight of the rock, which he identified. Although Faunce identified the rock in 1741, it was not moved from the shore until 1774.〔 There have been doubts hinted about the accuracy of Faunce's identification, in view of his age and the dates of the landing and his birth, but there is no doubt that he grew up in Plymouth at a time when many of the original passengers were still there. The Pilgrims first landed, however, near the site of modern Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod in November 1620 before moving to Plymouth. The rock is located about from where it is generally accepted that the initial settlement was built, on nearby Leyden Street leading up toward Burial Hill.〔John D. Seelye, Memory's nation: the place of Plymouth Rock, (UNC Press, 1998) https://books.google.com/books?id=ByS-oCs6nnAC&source=gbs_navlinks_s〕 Bill Bryson questions the story in ''Made in America'', 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Plymouth Rock」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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