Mayflower

Land Ho!, p. 28. Although Nickerson’s experience at sea during the late nineteenth century prompted him to speculate that many, if not most, of the passengers were put up in bunks built in the aft cabins of the ship, MR places the Billingtons’ cabin in the ’tween decks, p. 31. Also, Edward Winslow advises future voyagers to America to “build your cabins as open as you can,” suggesting that they were temporary structures built in the ’tween decks, MR, p. 86. On the dimensions of the ’tween decks, see William Baker’s The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels, p. 37. On the importance of beer in seventeenth-century England and America, see James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz’s The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony, p. 8.
    There has been much speculation as to the nature of the “great iron screw” used to repair the Mayflower. In his introduction to The Pilgrim Press, edited by R. Breugelman, J. Rendel Harris maintained that it was part of a printing press the Pilgrims were bringing over to the New World, pp. 4–5, but as Jeremy Bangs convincingly demonstrates in Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First International Diplomat, it was undoubtedly a device “to draw heavy timber to a considerable height”—from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises of the Doctrine of Handy-Works, first published in 1678–80, and cited by Bangs, pp. 9–10.
    Bradford discusses the Pilgrims’ motives for leaving Holland in OPP, pp. 23–27. See also Jeremy Bangs’s Pilgrim Life in Leiden, pp. 41–45. The statistics concerning the mortality rate in early Virginia are from Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s “Apathy and Death in Early Jamestown,” Journal of American History, June 1979, p. 24. The passage about the brutality of Native Americans is in OPP, p. 26. On the Pilgrims’ belief in England’s leadership role in the coming millennium, see Peter Gay’s A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America, pp. 5–7; William Haller’s The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, pp. 68–69; and Francis Bremer’s The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards, p. 42. On the English disdain for Spain’s treatment of the Indians in America and Richard Hakluyt’s insistence that it was England’s destiny to colonize the New World, see Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, pp. 15–24. On the comet of 1618, see Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 354. Interestingly, Phineas Pratt’s A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People That First Inhabited New England refers to the comet as a prelude to the Pilgrims’ settlement in Plymouth: “in the year 1618 there appeared a blazing star over Germany that made the wise men of Europe astonished there,” p. 477. John Navin’s dissertation “Plymouth Plantation: The Search for Community on the New England Frontier” provides an excellent analysis of social, cultural, and interpersonal dynamics at work among the Pilgrims during their time in Holland, pp. 141–83. The comments about the Pilgrims’ strong spiritual bonds are in a December 15, 1617, letter by John Robinson and William Brewster in OPP, pp. 32–34. The full passage in which Bradford uses the term “pilgrim” is as follows: “So they left that goodly and pleasant city [Leiden] which had been their resting place near twelve years; but they knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much on those things, but lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits,” OPP, p. 47. This passage bears many similarities to the words Robert Cushman had used in “Reasons and considerations touching the lawfulness of removing out of England into the parts of America,” which appears at the end of MR: “But now we are all in all places strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners, most properly, having no dwelling but in this earthen tabernacle; our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding but as a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere, but in the heavens,” pp. 89–90.
    Almost all the information we have about Bradford’s childhood in Austerfield, short of baptismal records, comes from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi