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.
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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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