Mayflower

wrote. As they watched the water spout through the gaps in the planking, he and his compatriots from Leiden were reminded of the earthen dikes in Holland, claiming that “the water came in as at a mole hole.” Several days after clearing the Isle of Wight off England’s southern coast, it was decided they must put in for repairs, and both vessels sailed for Dartmouth, a port only seventy-five miles to the west of Southampton.
    It was now August 17. The repairs were quickly completed, but this time the wind refused to cooperate. They were stuck in Dartmouth, a rock-rimmed harbor surrounded by high, sheltering hills, waiting for a fair breeze. People were beginning to panic—and with good reason. “Our victuals will be half eaten up, I think, before we go from the coast of England,” Cushman wrote. Many of the passengers decided it was time to abandon the voyage. Even though they’d lose everything they had so far invested, which for some of them amounted to everything they possessed, they wanted out. But Martin refused to let them off the Mayflower. “[H]e will not hear them, nor suffer them to go ashore,” Cushman wrote from Dartmouth, “lest they should run away.”
    The months of unremitting tension had caught up with Cushman. For the last two weeks he had felt a searing pain in his chest—“a bundle of lead as it were, crushing my heart.” He was sure this would be his last good-bye: “[A]lthough I do the actions of a living man yet I am but as dead…. I pray you prepare for evil tidings of us every day…. I see not in reason how we shall escape even the passing of hunger-starved persons; but God can do much, and His will be done.”
    They departed from Dartmouth and were more than two hundred miles beyond the southwestern tip of England at Land’s End when the Speedwell sprang another leak. It was now early September, and they had no choice but to give up on the Speedwell. It was a devastating turn of events. Not only had the vessel cost them a considerable amount of money, but she had been considered vital to the future success of the settlement.
    They put in at Plymouth, about fifty miles to the west of Dartmouth. If they were to continue, they must crowd as many passengers as would fit into the Mayflower and sail on alone. To no one’s surprise, Cushman elected to give up his place to someone else. And despite his fear of imminent death, he lived another five years.
    It was later learned that the Speedwell ’s master, Mr. Reynolds, had been secretly working against them. In Holland, the vessel had been fitted with new and larger masts—a fatal mistake that was probably done with Reynolds’s approval, if not at his suggestion. As any mariner knew, a mast crowded with sail not only moved a ship through the water, it acted as a lever that applied torque to the hull. When a ship’s masts were too tall, the excess strain opened up the seams between the planks, causing the hull to leak. By overmasting the Speedwell, Reynolds had provided himself with an easy way to deceive this fanatical group of landlubbers. He might shrug his shoulders and scratch his head when the vessel began to take on water, but all he had to do was reduce sail and the Speedwell would cease to leak. Soon after the Mayflower set out across the Atlantic, the Speedwell was sold, refitted, and, according to Bradford, “made many voyages…to the great profit of her owners.”
    Bradford later assumed that Reynolds’s “cunning and deceit” had been motivated by a fear of starving to death in America. But the Pilgrims appear to have been the unknowing victims of a far more complex and sinister plot. Several decades later, Bradford’s stepson Nathaniel Morton received information from Manhattan that indicated that the Dutch had worked to prevent the Pilgrims from settling in the Hudson River region “by [creating] delays, while they were in England.” Morton claimed it was the Mayflower ’s master, Christopher Jones, who was responsible for the deception, but there is no evidence that Jones was anything but a loyal and steadfast friend to the Pilgrims. It was Reynolds, not Jones, who had kept them from sailing.
    In early September, westerly gales begin to howl across the North Atlantic. The provisions, already low when they first set out from Southampton, had been eroded even further by more than a month of delays. The