Tiled image of Dighton Rock at the Museu da Marinha in Lisbon. Photo from the museum at ccm.marinha.pt

I jokingly call this post the “Pilgrims vs. Portuguese.” We’ll focus on three monuments in Massachusetts: Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown and Dighton Rock.

We all know the story of Plymouth Rock near where the Pilgrims settled in 1620. Less commonly known is that the Pilgrims first landed at what is now Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. They spent five weeks exploring the Cape and Cape Cod Bay while writing their governing document, the Mayflower Compact, and then deciding to settle at Plymouth.

Provincetown became a fishing town that grew as it attracted Portuguese immigrants from southern Portugal and the Azores. Its population reached a peak of 4,600 in 1890. Around that time Portuguese made up 45% of the town’s population and they controlled the town’s fishing industry. Historians have written that about that time “Yankees,” still monopolizing the town’s political leadership, started planning a monument to commemorate and reinforce their status.

Funds and were raised from cities and towns all over Massachusetts and the Pilgrim Monument was dedicated in 1909. (Coincidentally this 20-year period around the turn of the 20th century was also a time when many of the Jim Crow era Confederate monuments were built in the US.) Metaphorically and literally, the puritanically stern Pilgrim Monument, tallest structure in Provincetown at 250 feet, overlooks the community like a watchful eye; an ever-present reminder to the Portuguese of who was here first and of their place in New England society.

Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown. Photo by the author.

Now fast-forward thirty years or so for an ironic twist. In 1942, Depression-era photographer John Collier took a photograph of the “City Fathers of Provincetown” duly noting in the caption: “Provincetown, Massachusetts. City Fathers of Provincetown, all of Portuguese descent, gathered in council, before a painting representing the signing of the Pilgrim compact in the bay of Provincetown upon the first landing of the Pilgrims on American soil.”

The all-Portuguese American Provincetown council in 1942. Photo by John Collier, Jr., 1942, from the collection US Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information at the Library of Congress.

Since then Provincetown’s fishing industry and population declined. Today its population is only about 2,600 people, and the Portuguese American population has declined to about 15% of residents. The main industry now is tourism and Provincetown is noted for its gay population with one of the highest percentages of same-sex couples in the US. (Highest for female couples and one of the top three for male couples.)

Thirty miles from Plymouth Rock is Dighton Rock in northern Bristol County, the county that is home to New Bedford and Fall River and the largest proportion of Portuguese Americans residents in the United States. “West Portugal” or, as some Azoreans call it, “The Tenth Island.”

Dighton Rock, a rock deposited by the glaciers has evolved as a “Portuguese Rock” conceptually competing with Plymouth Rock. Dighton Rock is an automobile-sized rock with inscrutable inscriptions. It is housed in a small museum building located along the Taunton River in Dighton Massachusetts, about 15 miles north of Fall River. Like Plymouth Rock, the boulder was lifted from its original tidal location to preserve the inscriptions and placed inside the museum in 1973.

Dighton Rock in an 1898 photo. Photo from Wikipedia.

Scholars have advanced several explanations attributing inscriptions on the rock to Portuguese explorers but also to Norse, Native Americans and Phoenicians, among others. But most Portuguese Americans believe that Miguel Corte Real, a Portuguese explorer who sailed along the New England coast in the early 1500’s, inscribed the rock. While all the major theories are explained in the museum, it is clear that the visitor is encouraged to conclude that the predominance of evidence favors the Portuguese theory.

Dighton Rock Museum. Photo by the author.

One panel shows how some of the markings could represent St. John’s crosses and how the markings resemble inscriptions left by Portuguese explorers at other locations they explored in Africa. Two large ship models dominate the interior of the museum. They are models of ships used by Portuguese explorers, donated by the Portuguese government. The sails of the ships are decorated with the Portuguese (St. John’s) crosses we talked about in earlier posts.

Portuguese crosses on a ship model in the Dighton Rock Museum. Photo by the author.

The southern European architectural style of the museum housing the rock, right down to its elaborately detailed door handles in the Portuguese Manuelian architectural style, leaves no doubt that this is a Portuguese cultural shrine. Thus Dighton Rock is, in effect, a statement by Portuguese Americans that “We were here first.”

Manuelian style doorhandles at the Dighton Rock Museum. Photo by the author.

Dighton Rock also illustrates how an ethnic group can “appropriate” a monument. For example, the Alamo is not recognized as a special site of victory by Mexican Americans because it has already been “appropriated” as a Texan American symbol.

Local citizens have raised funds to send a cast of Dighton Rock to the Azores; a fitting exchange of reproductions considering the construction of the replica of the Ponta Delgada gates in Fall River. A maritime museum in Lisbon features the Portuguese inscriptions from Dighton Rock in a display made from azulejos tiles. (Photo at the top of this post.)

I grew up in this area and in the Portuguese American culture. Now I’m a retired geography professor and I’ve outlined these ideas in detail in my book Making History — Creating a Landscape: The Portuguese American Community of Southeastern New England:

The author’s book available on Amazon.com: com https://www.amazon.com/Making-History-Creating-Landscape-Southeastern/dp/1722258462/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title