13 Things You Didn't Know About: Thanksgiving

1 The Pilgrims didn't land on Plymouth Rock.

2 That's because the Rock, the most diminutive landmark in America, is just big enough for two people to stand on at once - if they embrace.

3 The story of the landing originated some 100 years after the fact, with a man named Thomas Fraunce.

4 Fraunce claimed that his father had told him of the Pilgrims' arrival, but the elder Fraunce didn't even arrive in America until 3 years after the Pilgrims.

5 Still, the story was enough to declare the Rock worthy of preservation; it was decided to move the boulder to a museum for safekeeping.

6 But during the move, the Rock broke in half. The bottom was left where it had been.

7 Years after that, the Rock was reunited by cement and a memorial built around it. It was then that 1620 was carved into the stone.

8 All of that for nothing: the Mayflower actually dropped the Pilgrims off at the site of modern-day Provincetown, not Plymouth.

9 The Pilgrims didn't really want to be there either: they'd intended to set up shop near the Hudson River.

10 The crew of the Mayflower, however, got fed up with the constant preaching, so rid themselves of the proselytizing Protestants at the very first opportunity: Provincetown, on the very tip of the Cape Cod peninsula.

11 Nor did the Pilgrims set sail from merry old England; their point of departure was Holland.

12 While it is true that they were English, they'd fled to the Netherlands years before making their way to the New World to escape religious persecution. They eventually left Holland to prevent their children from becoming too tolerant of the ways of others.

13 It wasn't a tribe of friendly natives that helped the Pilgrims through their horrific first year - it was just one, Squanto, last of the Patuxet, who already knew fluent English because he had previously been captured by English slavers. Though he eventually made his way home, a disease brought by Europeans while he was away had wiped out the rest of his tribe.