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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They did. And so when you say how many people were there, it's different to the number when you get towards 16, 20, a bit later on, because they're having children. And so, you know, the more of them, it would have grown, that group would have grown. And they were quite young families, a lot of the people at the time escaping from England. So...
When you say as well that it was a simpler life, I think it's useful to think about how different a life it would have been.
They were coming from rural England and they were still in an urban setting. And they were having to do the kinds of jobs that they wouldn't have been used to doing. back in England as well. So a lot of it was to do with the cloth trade, weaving cloth, that kind of thing.
But it wasn't agriculture or husbandry, which would have been familiar to a lot of them if you think about the landscape of England, where they came from.
No, yeah, that's right. That's right. They were still arguing with people, though, and still doing things that potentially put them at risk, including William Brewster, who set up his own printing press. And he was printing pamphlets that were seen to be seditious by the king in England. In the end, actually, he had to go into hiding because of the jeopardy around the attention towards that.
It still wasn't good to be upsetting the king in England, even though they were over in Holland.
That's right. So there were some interesting things happening in Europe. And you're actually seeing at this time, the power effectively shifts from Southern Europe to Northern Europe. Amsterdam was a really key center in terms of trade and expansion. Because this is the period when colonialism begins. The colonies are being established in different places.
And it's those northern cities that start to lead the way in that. And so the power and the wealth that had been centered in the Catholic South is starting to shift. And that's all happening at this time.
Yes, that's right. I think the pilgrims weren't as savvy in terms of the economics of things, perhaps, as some others during that period and in the years that followed. They were duped quite often, you know, in terms of their financial dealings.
And although the finance was there for colonisation and those voyages to explore and establish themselves in other places, the Dutch did invite the pilgrims to do that with them. But at the end of the day, they went to London to finance what they did and they didn't do it in partnership with the Dutch.
Yeah. And as you say, Virginia. So they were interested in a particular area. And as you will know, as we'll find out, that's not exactly where the Pilgrims ended up.
Yeah, so there'd been previous contact, certainly, and exploration of the coast. So Captain John Smith, who you may know from the Pocahontas story, he'd been around there and he'd mapped that coast around 1616. And he'd brought that map back and shown it to the king. And they had named places along that coast.
Some of those places may have been where there had been Native American settlements, for example. But on that map, he named one of the places as New Plymouth. That wasn't a place at that point that had got any English people living there. They just got a map and they were going to put a load of British names on it.
Yeah, so as we head towards 1620, you have to appreciate that it's been 12 years that the pilgrims, the separatists, are in Holland before they leave. But there are a different set of reasons that pushes them towards that decision. And one of those reasons is there has been this truce with Spain. Spain's a Catholic country, and they really did not like the Catholics.
So there's also the irony here, which you can find throughout the story of the pilgrims, who are a group of people seeking religious tolerance to be able to practice religion freely in the way that they chose. but they were extremely intolerant of other sets of beliefs or practices that were different to theirs.
So it carries through the story and that's also something obviously that happens when they get to America and meet the indigenous communities there. So yeah, truce with Spain under threat, what's going to happen if you're at the far end of Protestantism, at the other end of the spectrum, that's a real concern. There are other reasons as well.
So we've talked about the fact they were from a rural area in England and they'd started to have children or they were having more children when they were in Holland. And there was a feeling that they wanted their children to understand what it was to be English. They didn't want their children to be too Dutch almost. So they had also heard about the voyages that had been going across to America.
It amazes me how much they did know and how many letters went backwards and forwards across the ocean in the period, particularly after they'd got there, but also in the period before. There were accounts of voyages and what had happened. But you're absolutely right when you think about how crazy it was, because one of the people on the ship, he was called Robert Cushman,
He didn't actually go on the final voyage, partly because of the stress of it, but he had heard about a terrible account of, I think, 180 people who had gone on a voyage and I think 130 of them had died in a fairly...
horrific way from disease you know as a consequence of it wasn't a healthy place to be a ship going that far for that long and many people didn't make it so you do find yourself asking why on earth would they do it and so one of the recurring themes whenever things go wrong for them or there's something exceptionally challenging is to think about what they've written about their belief in God's providence
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