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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It was not a good voyage. And I think he was being horrible to them about that. And Bradford used it as an opportunity for a lesson in describing God's providence. He talked about God's providence before, about how God has provided for them and effectively gives them signs and shows the way.
Because in this case, this man who was, he used the word contemning, he was despising the pilgrims, then dies in quite an elaborate and horrible way. Yeah. And all the crew, they all remark upon the fact that it's because he'd been so horrible and that for Bradford, this is God's providence.
So there was obviously tensions, you know, between those who were leading the ship in terms of the crew, those who were leading the pilgrim group. And then as they get towards America, the leading strangers, if you like, the non-pilgrims, who will be thinking about the needs of their own families.
So the other thing that you need to think about in terms of who's on this ship is, it is the nature of these families. And there are children of different ages. You said that there's one passenger who gave birth, another one gave birth a bit later and had a child called Peregrine, which means pilgrim. And it would certainly have been challenging.
And there were the separatist families and the other group were also families as well, a mixed group.
I think it would certainly have been life-changing. Just, you know, the length of the voyage, the... I think the strength of their faith must have been significant in helping them to cope with it. You know, whether or not they did cope with it. The colony governor that died when they got there, his wife died six weeks later and Bradford described that was of a broken heart.
I mean, they must have had such stress that...
That kind of thing was happening. And that was how they described that. But this, you know, the stress they were under on the voyage, no doubt impacted their health and survival rates after they got there.
Well, I think shipped biscuits and things like that would have been important. It would have been hard to get your five-a-day fruit and veg, certainly. And they had to do things like, because of the delays in the voyage I mentioned in the previous episode, I think they had to sell some butter at Southampton.
to help pay some of the debts they were accruing because of the delays that they've had and because of having to fix the ships and things. Something like butter, that's got lots of fats and that would have been good for them to have had. So to have lost that...
To have lost some of your food stores, for there to have been more people on the ship, you know, there were lots of things that would have been challenging.
But actually, this pattern of, you know, almost verging on having that starvation, if you like, that wasn't necessarily the case for that first voyage, but it was something that happened within the colony over the subsequent years because of... the challenges of growing your own food as well. So it was the start of a very difficult period for a lot of them.
Yes, I think it probably helped them have vindication for what they saw that they were doing and what they were wanting to achieve. It must have helped them through. I think what's really interesting about the Pilgrim's story is how it's been picked up and how it's been retold and actually the history of the history is as significant in many ways. William Bradford was on the ship
20 years later, he wrote his diary. So it wasn't, he didn't write it at the time. He was reflecting on it sometime later. And he was then telling the story of his life, basically. His own story got lost for a period, turned up again in the Bishop of Fulham's library in London.
In the 1850s, his diary had got lost around the time of American independence, but it ended up back over here and was repatriated to the States and was picked up again. And then you have the formation later that century, the General Society of Mothar Descendants and... References to the story by politicians.
So John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, refers to the pilgrims in an important speech in 1802, foregrounding the importance of that team building, you've called it, that was enshrined in a document that they had to create to record their agreement to deal with the tensions that there were between the saints and the strangers.
I think the weather had something to do with it. We've talked about it was the wrong time of year and they hit some weather when they started to get near the coast and they ended up around the back side of Cape Cod and where that land sticks out. So you've got Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod and they were the far side of that piece of land.
And so because of the weather being so bad, they came up to the tip, to that top where Provincetown is now, and they moored themselves there. And they decided that they couldn't get down to where they'd been intending to go around Hudson Bay area. And they were just about to hit wintertime. And so they had to make a decision about where they were going to stay.
And that's when these conversations were having to happen. There was the realization that people weren't happy. They weren't happy that they were in the wrong place. And they also knew that the permission they got was then invalid. So what were they going to do? They had to come to some kind of resolution because they knew they needed to work together if they were all going to survive.
Yeah, and I think maybe the most famous words in it is that they described themselves as a civil body politic. So they agreed that they would work together for the mutual benefit of the whole group to establish their colony in the hope that they could then all survive. So they continued in the way that they had planned, but just in a slightly different area.
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