A cargo hold, just 5 feet tall and divided up with canvas - this is what served as the living quarters for the 102 passengers of the Mayflower on their 66 day crossing to North America.Don is joined by guest Anna Scott, a researcher from the University of Lincoln, to find out what this journey was really like. From the failures of the Speedwell to the tensions between passengers on arrival in the wrong place, how has this group of colonists become so intrinsic to the American story?Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey at https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What challenges did the Mayflower face before departure?
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November 11th, 1620. The Mayflower arrives off the shores of Cape Cod, anchoring in what is today Provincetown Harbor in Massachusetts. For the next five weeks, it will remain anchored here as search parties are dispatched ashore to scout sites for settlement all along the Cape.
They'll finally choose a location about 30 miles across the bay, a place previously mapped by an earlier English expedition, and coincidentally, named for the harbor town these pilgrims had seen before leaving England for the last time, Plymouth. Plymouth Hello, and nice you're here. We're American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. Happy holidays.
This week, in the Thanksgiving spirit, we are covering the voyage of the Pilgrims, from England to the Dutch Netherlands, and finally to the windswept shores of New England, where in 1620, they settled and struggled and somehow made a home.
And according to popular legend, dined festively in the company of Native American friends, everyone celebrating a plentiful harvest of corn and ample poultry, anticipating snuggly times ahead in winter, and yeah, that was the story doled out to us as kids. The truer history of the pilgrim voyage to America is a lot more involved.
In our previous episode, we covered the first half of the story, where in 1608, a persecuted people left England, crossed the English Channel to Amsterdam, settled in Leiden. A decade later, many of those folks opted to uproot and make the greater journey to the promised land of the New World. So now, as we rejoin our pilgrim's progress, picture a scene few today would have the guts to try.
Crossing an ocean in a vessel only 100 feet in length, designed to carry cargo, not passengers, and there are more than 120 of you on board, including the crew. Rough passage, no matter what the weather. We are in Plymouth, England, as we begin the story, leaving the harbour, the wind filling the sails.
And here to helm this historical voyage is once more Anna Scott, researcher from the University of Lincoln in England. She has written extensively on the Pilgrims and features prominently in a history hit project, the TV documentary Mayflower 400, the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage. Anna, welcome back. Part two, are you ready? Absolutely.
So where we are right now is we've arrived in Southampton. It's the summer of 1620, around July. And this group of pilgrims is going to become part of an economic enterprise, which is run by a group called the Merchant Adventurers, which is an English firm. And they are basically hiring this group of religious sojourners to become laborers in this company that will land in the New World.
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Chapter 2: How did the Speedwell fail the Pilgrims?
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.
Right. This is a critical part of the story to understand. The timing of this was professionally planned by seamen who knew what they were doing to leave in the summer so that they would arrive in plenty of warm weather to get settled. They depart in plenty of time, August 15th. But the speedwell does not match its name. So they have to come back. And this is going to happen several times.
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.
I think this is a good moment to talk about the physical experience of this journey. The Mayflower, as I mentioned in the opening, is about 100 feet long. It's a cargo ship that was actually designed for transporting wine and cloth, I believe. It's not made for passengers. Can you explain the sort of physical parameters of what they're about to go through?
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.
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Chapter 3: What were the living conditions like on the Mayflower?
Yeah, I mean, I think when you say they were religious and they weren't religious, everybody had to be religious to some degree because it was the law. You know, you had to go to church and you had to follow the rules of the church. The king was the head of the church. The king was the head of state. It was pretty strict.
This period of time was when people started to question some of those rights that we now take for granted, you know, around religious tolerance and people being able to worship God or actually not worship God. Those arguments were being made by people who were associated with these people at that time.
They were leaders at that time in England, in Holland, and some of them were obviously traveling over to America as well, partly to escape England.
I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter we should be looking at, send us an email at ahh at historyhit.com. We'd love to hear from you.
So you've got on the ship the people that we've referred to as the saints. So the pilgrims saw themselves as the saints. They believed in predestination, that there was a place in heaven for them because they'd been selected by God. And the other people who were outside of that group were referred to sometimes as the strangers. So they were the less religious people, if you like.
They were the people who were possibly leaving because of the lack of jobs in England, because of the risks around poor harvests or wanting newer opportunities, plague being around. You know, there were lots of reasons why they possibly wanted to leave England. There was one little group of children, four children, who were sent on the voyage
with no parents because the man they had thought was their father had divorced their mother and sent them away believing that they were the product of adultery. So there's less different backstories for all of these characters, if you like, on the Mayflower. And some of them are quite sad.
So you have got these two different groups, the saints and the strangers, and that becomes a challenge, particularly as things progress and it becomes clear. that they're not heading to the place that they intended to go to.
Who are they led by?
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Chapter 4: Who were the key figures aboard the Mayflower?
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.
So they create what is famously now known as the Mayflower Compact. Can you explain this? What is basically a contract, right?
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.
They didn't stay off the tip of Provincetown. a harbour, a natural harbour where they could moor the ship while they worked out where they were actually going to live and so they spent some time scouting that area looking for that place.
Well, it's a long strip of land. They arrive at Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, November 11th. They're not going to land until later in December, the 21st of December, 1620. So that whole more than a month is about finding out where they're going to land. You had mentioned the settlement there was already on the map. Would they have known that?
Yeah, so on the map they had, it was called Plymouth, we talked about. The two Plymouths and that was there, but it was Betuxet. And it was directly across, if you like, from where they had been moored, where Provincetown now is. And there was an area where it was easier to park the ship effectively.
Exactly. No wonder they didn't want to leave. I mean, they were in basically the Cape Cod Sound in the bay there. And it would have been so much calmer than all these months before as they were going on the ocean. You can just it comes down to just human discomfort, really. Let's stay put. And this becomes the fateful choice to stay put.
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Chapter 5: What was the relationship between the Pilgrims and the crew?
And I want to understand what's especially significant about the Mayflower Compact, because that's often overlooked by people as we go screaming towards the big Thanksgiving dinner, which was apocryphal. The Mayflower Compact is important for what reason?
Okay, well, I talked about John Quincy Adams a little bit and his speech that he made in 1802. And it was at this point that the Pilgrim's story which had been a story of religious significance. It was about faith and the foundation of churches where people were free to worship for themselves up to that point.
And this is when the religious story becomes used in a more political way and it becomes a civic story. And this is when America, the United States of America, is creating its own origin narratives based on the stories of the people who came there first, who were European. This obviously overlooks the significance and importance of the indigenous people who were there already.
So John Quincy Adams, his own father, John Adams, had been one of the founding fathers of that United States of America. And so he talks about the compact in this political way by linking it to the recently drafted Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This is what he says in his speech. He gives this speech at Plymouth Ravcon for Father's Day.
One remarkable incident is the execution of that instrument of government by which they formed themselves into a body politic the day after their arrival upon the coast. This is perhaps the only instance in human history of that positive original social compact which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government.
Here was a unanimous and personal assent by all the individuals of the community to the association by which they became a nation. So they're using this story to represent the origins of the new nation.
Okay.
And it becomes significant even more following the Civil War because Thanksgiving is adopted nationally as a holiday. Okay.
Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, it's taking this essential event, this struggle and this creation of this settlement as the building block of a great mythology, a very useful mythology. True in many regards, but definitely inflated to create the story of a nation built by God, by people worshiping God, but ultimately creating something together that is of an economic nature, you know.
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Chapter 6: How did the Pilgrims cope with the hardships at sea?
But Anna Scott is a researcher at the University of Lincoln, England, who has written extensively on the Pilgrims and knows a lot about them. As we have found out in these two episodes, I invite you, please, to listen to them together.
This episode and also the previous one cover what is usually ignored, how these people even got on boats and came across the ocean, let alone what they did afterwards. Thank you so much, Anna. Nice to meet you. Happy Thanksgiving.
Thanks so much, Don.
Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode.
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