Anna Scott
speaker
160 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Anna Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Of course. So we all have heard of the Mayflower and the second ship was called the Speedwell. And we're going to hear about whether or not it lived up to its name. But you might be able to guess for yourself because obviously it's not one of the ships that anybody's ever heard of. Yeah, absolutely.
So on these two ships are in Southampton and the separatist group, the Pilgrims, the Saints, all of these different names have been used for that group. They are on the Speedwell. That's the ship that they've bought for this voyage. So they've invested by buying themselves a ship Selling their homes in the places that they originally came from.
They've come from Leiden in Holland and originally they lived in England in rural parts of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. So each time they've moved on, they've had to sell everything and take with them what they can carry.
So they're ready to go and they have come to meet the Mayflower, which is the ship that has been hired by the financial backers, the merchant adventurers who are based in London. And on that ship are some people who are seeking out new lives, but not necessarily for the same reasons as the pilgrims. So they've not got the same religious motivations. The pilgrims also have been called separatists.
They wanted to be separate from the Church of England at a time when that was risky to the point of risking death because you were going against the head of the church who was the head of the state, the king at that time, and you would be risking death. Your safety, for sure, and possibly risking your life.
So one of the motivations for the pilgrims in travelling so far away from England was really to be able to get on with worshipping in the way that they wanted to, far away from that gaze of the king. It was further away than when they had been in Holland, but even being in Holland hadn't been far enough for them.
And I think in some ways they were given permission to go over to America because they then would have been a bit out of sight and out of mind. And so I guess it was easier to be able to look the other way for those in England who disagreed with what they wanted to achieve. The merchant adventurers, they were in it for the money, as you've said.
They had paid for the voyage and for the colony to be able to set themselves up. They'd given that investment, but there was a debt that was then owed by all of those who were going to establish the colony. But it wasn't just about them getting that debt paid back. It was really about opening up new avenues for trade because there was a feeling that there would be
raw materials and resources that could be brought back to England, to Europe, to be traded, to make more money. So it was really about establishing those connections where trade could then prosper. I think there's another bit of the story about how successful that was for the Pilgrims after they established the colony, because those things really didn't always go well.
So beezer pelts, for example, were important. in terms of currency for things like trade. And sometimes they had ships, things to be sent back to help pay off the debt. And then that was captured by pirates and all sorts of things went wrong for them. So there was this plan, but it didn't always go to plan. And that's what's about to happen when they're in Southampton.
So both of these ships set sail. It's the summertime, so that's fine. And they go out into the Atlantic. But the speedwell starts to leak.
That's right. So they make their way back, not all the way back to Southampton this time. They pull into the port at Dartmouth. So that's a little bit further along the south coast of England, but not very far when you think about the vast journey that they're about to undertake.
So they decide that they're going to try and fix the speedwell and they sit there for about a week while that's happening. And at this point, the passengers are getting pretty worried.
And the captain, the master of the ship, doesn't even want to let them get off the ship because he thinks that some of them are going to run away because there's a lot of discontent around what's going on and people start to lose their nerves. So they manage to fix the ship and they set sail again, both of the ships, the Mayflower and the Speedwell.
Yeah, so I think squashed is probably the way to describe it. Yeah, there wouldn't have been a lot of space. The fact that they had carried wine on the ship, it has been described as a sweet-smelling ship. I think there could have been worse things that it could have carried. So I guess that was not as unpleasant as it could have been.
I think the other thing to note about the voyage, which is a positive for the pilgrims and perhaps one of the reasons why the story has become so successfully well known, is the fact that not a lot of them died on the way over. So although the conditions would have been harsh and hard and difficult, there wasn't rampant disease on that journey.
It was certainly challenging after they got over to America. But unlike other voyages that had been happening around that time, there wasn't a vast amount of sickness that was happening. So it is worth noting that.
So they set off again into the Atlantic and it turns out that the repairs that they'd made to the speedwell were really not good enough and it continued to leak. One of them wrote about how it was open and leaky as a sieve. So that's not really something that you want to be travelling over all the way across the Atlantic on. So they decided to come back again.
And this time they pull in in Plymouth, which is, again, further along on the south coast of England. And they are there fairly briefly and ultimately decide that the speedwell isn't going to make it. Bear in your mind, this is the ship that they bought for the voyage. The other one was hired, so they'd made an investment in this.
And then you've got the problem of having two groups of people and one ship. So you've got all of the separatists, the pilgrims from Leiden in Holland, and then you've got these other economic migrants, if you like, on the Mayflower. And to put everybody onto one ship, onto the Mayflower, means that it's inevitably going to be much more uncomfortable for those of them that are on there. Yes.
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