Mayflower

The name was so common that twenty-six vessels called Mayflower appear in the English port books during the reign of James I. Christopher Jones's ship is identified from her home port, her master's name and her tonnage, estimated at 180 to 200. When and where she was built is unknown. The port books of 1609 to 1611 call her "of Harwich" in Essex — coincidentally Jones's own birthplace, about 1570 — while later records designate her "of London".

Jones was master and part owner by August 1609, when she was chartered from London to Trondheim and back. She lost an anchor in bad weather on the return and delivered short on a cargo of herring, and the litigation that followed was still unresolved in 1612. She was on the Thames twice in 1613, and again in 1616 carrying wine, which puts her recently back from France, Spain, Portugal or the Canaries.

Her regular trade was cloth out and wine home: English woollens across the Channel to France, French wine back to London, with hats, hemp, Spanish salt, hops and vinegar run up to Norway. She may have gone whaling off Spitsbergen. William Bradford put her capacity at 180 tons and surviving records say she could stow 180 casks. By 1620 Jones owned her with Christopher Nichols, Robert Child and Thomas Short, and Thomas Weston of the Merchant Adventurers chartered her from Child and Short that summer.

The passengers came from a congregation of roughly 400 English Protestants living in exile at Leiden since 1608, separatists who were illegal radicals at home. Holland had worn them down: menial work cleaning wool that ruined their health, theological quarrels spilling into civil unrest, and the fear that Spain would besiege the country again. James I's alliance with Holland carried a condition outlawing independent English congregations there, which removed their last shelter.

They bought two ships. The small Speedwell would bring them from Leiden; the larger Mayflower would carry most of the passengers and the supplies across the Atlantic. Mayflower left London in mid-July 1620 with about sixty-five aboard and anchored at Southampton to await the rendezvous of 22 July. The Leiden party saw her there for the first time, being loaded with provisions. A leak in Speedwell was found before they could sail.

The pair put out around 5 August, turned back to Dartmouth when Speedwell leaked again, restarted, and sprang a third leak more than 200 miles beyond Land's End. It was now early September and the money was going. Speedwell was given up at Plymouth; twenty of her passengers crowded aboard an already crowded Mayflower and the rest went back to Holland. Bradford, who thought Speedwell perfectly seaworthy, later suspected her master of using "cunning and deceit" to break the voyage out of fear of starving in America.

She sailed alone from Plymouth on 16 September 1620 with 102 passengers and 25 to 30 officers and men, about 130 souls in a ship built for the Bordeaux wine run. Her thirty-foot aft-castle made her poor at lying close to the wind, and the wind she now had to beat against was the North Atlantic westerlies in autumn. Provisions had been low at Southampton and a month of delays had eaten further into them. Below, the passengers had a space with a five-foot ceiling and less floor each than a modern single bed.

The first half of the crossing was calm and clear. Then came weeks of northeasterly storms and seas breaking over the topside deck, with water soaking everything above and below. William Butten, indentured servant to the physician Samuel Fuller, died and was buried at sea, the only fatality of the passage; a child was born and christened Oceanus Hopkins. John Howland was washed overboard in a gale, sank about twelve feet, and was hauled back by a rope thrown from the rail. In mid-ocean the main beam cracked so badly the sailors despaired, and a colonist's iron jackscrew, bought in Holland to build houses with, was used to secure it.

Cape Cod was sighted on 19 November 1620. They spent several days trying to work south to the Colony of Virginia, where the Merchant Adventurers had obtained them permission to settle, but the winter sea drove them back to the hook of the cape and, with supplies short, they anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor on 21 November. Before the anchor went down the men, Separatists and the hired "strangers" alike, wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact, and Myles Standish was chosen to see that its rules were obeyed.

On 7 December an exploring party of twenty-four passengers and ten sailors went out under Jones in an open boat to find a settlement site. They were caught ashore overnight, ill-clad, in weather far colder than anything they knew in England, their wet shoes and stockings freezing on them. Bradford wrote afterwards: "Some of our people that are dead took the original of their death here."

The ground was frozen by mid-November, so nothing could be planted; they had no snowshoes for country that became impassable in snow, and in their haste to leave England they had brought no fishing rods. Corn and beans dug from native stores gave them about ten bushels and saved their seed for spring. Meanwhile the passengers went on living aboard the ship through an outbreak described as a mixture of scurvy, pneumonia and tuberculosis. When it subsided, 53 of the 102 passengers were left, and roughly half the crew had died too.

Jones had intended to sail as soon as a site was chosen, but stayed until his surviving men could work. Mayflower left New Plymouth for England on 15 April 1621, short of her boatswain, her gunner, three quartermasters, the cook and more than a dozen sailors, and reached London on 16 May — in less than half the time the westward passage had taken, with the same winds now behind her. Four of her guns stayed behind to fortify the colony.

Christopher Jones died in 1622. On 4 May 1624 three of the ship's owners, including his widow Josian Jones, applied to the admiralty court to have her appraised, most likely to settle his estate. Four mariners and shipwrights of Rotherhithe — Jones's home and burial place, where she lay in the Thames — put her value at £128 8s 4d. Their inventory of her gear, muskets and arms survives, and suggests she had been kept in port and let go without repair since her master's death.

After that, nothing. The English historian Charles Edward Banks held that she was disassembled. In 1624 Thomas Russell of Jordans, in Buckinghamshire, built a barn out of timbers bought from a shipbreaker's yard at Rotherhithe, and the Mayflower Barn at Old Jordans is widely believed to be made from her. It drew visitors from around the world before passing into private ownership and closing to the public.

What she carried outlived her by a wide margin. In 1920 the Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge said of the compact signed in her stern that its signers "drew up a form of government which has been designated as the first real constitution of modern times". The harvest feast the survivors held in 1621 with ninety Wampanoag was later declared the first American Thanksgiving. The US Mint put the ship on the reverse of the Pilgrim Tercentenary half dollar, and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants counts thirty-five million descendants of her passengers.

The tercentenary in 1920 and early 1921 brought delegations from England, Holland and Canada together in New York, where mayor John Francis Hylan called the compact a precursor of the Declaration of Independence; a world's fair planned for the anniversary had been cancelled after the First World War. For the 400th in 2020 an unmanned Mayflower Autonomous Ship, navigated by an AI captain designed by IBM, crossed the Atlantic, and a full-scale replica was burned at Great Torrington in Devon on 28 August 2021 for charity.