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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So this idea of providence that God will provide for them, God will save them, God will support them. I think that has got to be at the core of why they were doing what they were doing.
Yes, although there are caveats around that. So when they want to go over to America, they don't go on their own. There are two ships. And the separatists are on one ship, a ship that they purchase called the Speedwell. And spoiler alert, the Speedwell doesn't speed very well. And then there's a second ship, the Mayflower. And on the Mayflower, there are people who...
you could call economic migrants. They're the people that are going in search of a better life, possibly escaping the famine or the plague or the bad harvest or the lack of jobs in England, looking for, as you say, economic opportunities, land for themselves in that, what was called a new world, not a new world to the people that had lived there for decades,
Some millennia, but yeah, new to this part of Europe. So there were opportunities. I think you can look at the history of Plymouth's colony, the establishments they got over there in economic terms, and eventually it was subsumed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, based in Boston, who economically were a lot more effective and a lot more successful than the Pilgrims ever were.
So they bought the Speedwell and that was the ship that was going to carry the separatist congregation from Leiden over to America. And that was the intention. But they needed some people to come and support the development of the colony. Actually, that's what the investors wanted. They didn't want this to just be a religious project. It wasn't a religious project for them.
They wanted people who could work at the colony and to effectively repay the debt, the outlay that they invested to get the ships over there and to set the colony up. So the Mayflower as a ship was hired for this voyage. Originally it was built in Harwich and it was registered in Rotherhithe in London.
And so the ship, both of the ships, made their way to Southampton to rendezvous there to then set sail together. So there had been a lot of negotiation with the adventurers. They were called the merchant adventurers, the financial backers of the voyage. And they had to have a patent, which was permission, like a contract, giving permission for them to be able to land in America to set up a colony.
So there were lots of arrangements around what that deal looked like and how how long they'd have the debt to repay. And it was the seven year debt. And things changed fairly quickly. And the negotiations shifted over the terms of the agreement for how they repaid the debt. So
In the end, it was said that they were going to have to work seven days a week for the next seven years to repay the debt. And it was a pretty harsh agreement. And it came about in that way because of the failings that were about to happen after both of the ships set sail from Southampton. Because as we all know, the Mayflower is a famous ship on a famous voyage.
But who's ever heard of the Speedwell? What happened there?
Yeah, I guess there's the Victorian period image. So it's a Victorian period for us here in England of pilgrims wearing black and white with big tall hats and buckles on them, which was just an invention of the 19th century. That's not necessarily what they look like. And the way that you can tell possibly what they were wearing is from the descriptions in their wills.
So when somebody died or they thought they were imminently going to die... they would write out all of their property and what they wanted to have happen with it. And it included their furniture and also their clothes. And often the pilgrims had a lot of books as well.
So you can tell a lot from the people based on what they listed as their property, what they were reading at the time and that kind of thing. And some of the clothes were different colours. They weren't all black, for example.
Well, did they? Yeah, I mean, that's a bit like Vikings with horns on the helmets. It's one of those myths that gets carried around.
Yeah, that's right. So they've made all of these preparations for the voyage. They've bought the food that they think they need. They know that they've got this debt to pay. They know that they're going to have to work hard. And you've got to remember as well, they don't know where they're going. They don't know what it's going to be like when they get there.
And the first thing that you've got to do is build your own village. I mean, where are they going to live? It's incredibly, the prospect of what they've got to do is incredibly difficult. in a land that they've never been to before. And they must have in mind that they may not make it. They've heard the stories of other people that have done it and it's gone really badly wrong.
It really does. I think there's some interesting things that they've done differently, though. What is it that makes this particular voyage different? There were a lot of voyages that were about to happen around this time. And this becomes the famous one because of William Bradford's diary. He was going to become the colony governor. He wrote the history down.
He knew the value of recording their story to underline what they hoped to achieve and then what happened to them. But the other thing is that you've got to remember it was a mixed group of people on the ship and it was men and it was women. So... If you combine those things together, it's a lot easier to have children, unlike in the early years of Jamestown, where it was just the men.
So they've already got this model for trying to establish a colony with what they hope are the right ingredients. But we learn later on that they really only managed to establish themselves because of the help that they get from others, particularly a couple of really important Native Americans that they meet over there.
Thanks, Don.
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