By the building of street and wharf on a higher level the rock is now at some little distance from high-water mark.[196] At one time the sea had heaped the sand upon it to the depth of twenty feet, but the tradition of the spot had been well kept, and at the dawn of the Revolution the sand was cleared away, and the rock again laid bare. This was in 1774. In the attempt to remove it from its bed it split asunder, the superstitious seeing in this accidental fracture a presage of the division of the British empire in America. The upper half, or shell, of Forefathers' Rock was removed to the middle of the village, and placed at the end of a wall, where, along with vulgar stones, it propped the embankment. In 1834 the fractured half was removed from the town square to its present position in front of Pilgrim Hall, where it is now lying. The honor of having first set foot on this threshold of fame is claimed for John Alden and Mary Chilton. The question of precedence will probably never be settled. It is also claimed for the exploring party who landed from the shallop on Monday, the 21st of December, commonly called Forefathers' Day.[197] For more than two hundred years the 22d of December had been observed as the day of the landing; that is, in effect, to say, it had been so observed by the Pilgrims themselves, by their descendants around their firesides, and had received the sanction of formal commemoration, in 1769, by the Old Colony Club. Men were then living who were within two generations of the first comers, and retained all their traditions unimpaired. After this long period had elapsed, it was assumed that the Pilgrims had designed to signalize the landing of the exploring party of eighteen, rather than that from the _Mayflower_, and upon this theory, by adopting the new style, the landing was fixed for the 21st, a substitution which has been generally acquiesced in by recent writers. Unless it is believed that the landing of the party of discovery possessed greater significance to the Pilgrims, and to those who lived within hearing of the voices of the _Mayflower_, than the disembarkation of the whole body of colonists on the very strand they had finally adopted for their future home, the presumption of error in computing the difference between old and new style has little force. For six weeks these explorations had continued all along the coast-line of Cape Cod, and nothing had been settled until the return of the last party to the ship. The _Mayflower_ then sailed for Plymouth, and cast anchor in the harbor on the 16th; but the explorations continued, nor was there a decision until the 20th as to the best point for fixing the settlement. Moreover, there are no precise reasons for saying that the first exploring party landed anywhere within the limits of the present town of Plymouth, nor any tradition of its making the rock a stepping-stone.