Mayflower

Magazine, vol. 62, 1954, provides an excellent account of the procedure by which a patent was procured from the Virginia Company, pp. 149–50. See also Peggy Baker’s “The Plymouth Colony Patent” in Pilgrim Society News, fall 2005, pp. 7–8. In England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620. David Beers Quinn writes of the Blackwell voyage in the context of the English Separatist scene in Holland, pp. 362–63. Bradford’s account of their troubled preparations to leave for America, which include letters from Robert Cushman and others, are in OPP, pp. 356–67. The passage about how Bradford interpreted his financial setbacks in spiritual terms is from Mather’s Magnalia, p. 204. For an account of the Merchant Adventurers and how the deal with the Pilgrims was organized, see Ruth McIntyre’s Debts Hopeful and Desperate, pp. 17–20. Bradford writes of their moving farewell at Delfshaven in OPP, pp. 47–48. In Hypocrisie Unmasked, written in 1646, Edward Winslow looks back to that same scene, pp. 88–91; he also mentions the “large offers” of the Dutch concerning a possible settlement in America.
    For information about the Mayflower, I’ve relied on Nickerson’s Land Ho!— 1620. pp. 14–37, and William Baker’s The Mayflower and Other Colonial Vessels, pp. 1–64. Much of the original historical sleuthing regarding the Mayflower and her master and crew is to be found in the following articles: R. G. Marsden’s “The Mayflower ” in English Historical Review, October 1904; J. W. Horrocks’s “The Mayflower ” in several volumes of the Mariner’s Mirror, 1922; and R. C. Anderson’s “A Mayflower Model,” in the 1926 Mariner’s Mirror. Mary Boast’s The Mayflower and the Pilgrim Story: Chapters from Rotherhithe and Southwark provides a good overview of the maritime scene from which the ship and her master came. Charles Banks’s “The Officers and Crew of the Mayflower, 1620–21,” MHS Proceedings, vol. 60, pp. 210–21, is a useful summary. Concerning Master Christopher Jones and his officers, I’ve also relied on the information compiled by Carolyn Freeman Travers in 1997 in “The Mayflower ’s Crew,” an unpublished research manuscript at Plimoth Plantation. Important information regarding one of the ship’s pilots is contained in Irene Wright’s “John Clark of the Mayflower ” in MHS Proceedings, vol. 54, November 1920. For a more general discussion of the maritime culture of the seventeenth century, see David Beers Quinn’s England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620. pp. 197–226.
    When it comes to the origins of the Mayflower ’s passengers, there is an incredible wealth of genealogical research on which to draw. Upon its publication in 1986, Eugene Stratton’s Plymouth Colony: Its History and People, 1620–1691. with biographical sketches written with the research help of Robert Wakefield, became the single source for information about the Pilgrims. Since then, the publication of Robert Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, 1620–1633 has set a new standard—recently surpassed by the updated biographies contained in Anderson’s The Pilgrim Migration, which incorporates important new research, such as Caleb Johnson’s “The True History of Stephen Hopkins of the Mayflower ” in the American Genealogist, which established, almost for a certainty, that Hopkins was the same Stephen Hopkins who had previously been shipwrecked on Bermuda during a passage to Virginia in 1609. Working in the archives in Leiden, Holland, Jeremy Bangs has done much to broaden our understanding of the Dutch origins of the Pilgrims in articles such as “ Mayflower Passengers Documented in Leiden: A List” in the Mayflower Quarterly, May 1985, pp. 57–60, and “The Pilgrims and Other English in Leiden Records: Some New Pilgrim Documents” in the NEHGR, July 1989, plus a series of articles in New England Ancestors, a publication of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, from 2000 to 2005. See also B. N. Leverland’s “Geographic Origins of the Pilgrims” in The Pilgrims in Netherlands—Recent Research, edited by Jeremy Bangs, pp. 9–17. Bradford describes the Billingtons as “one of the profanest families amongst them” in OPP, p. 234. For an