Mayflower

intriguing account of the three More children aboard the Mayflower, see David Lindsay’s Mayflower Bastard, which draws largely on Donald Harris’s “The More Children of the Mayflower: Their Shropshire Origins and the Reasons Why They Were Sent Away,” Mayflower Descendant, vols. 43 and 44.
    In Saints and Strangers, published in 1945, George Willison set forth a new interpretation of the Pilgrim experience based on the claim that more than half the passengers on the Mayflower were not part of the original congregation from Leiden. In Willison’s view, the Mayflower Compact was an instrument of repression by which the Separatists from Holland were able to assert control over the non-Separatist majority. In the decades since, research by Jeremy Bangs and others has revealed that there were more Leideners aboard the Mayflower than was originally thought and that many of those from London and other parts of England had close connections with the congregation. Although the precise number of Saints aboard the Mayflower is impossible to determine, Bangs has established that there were at least fifty-two (personal communication), putting the Leideners in the majority. The fact remains, however, that a significant number of the passengers aboard the Mayflower were not aligned with the Separatists and that, as Bradford so graphically illustrates, internal conflicts were a problem before, during, and after the voyage to America. As John Navin has shown, the nightmarish preparations for the voyage caused many Leideners to elect to stay in Holland; as a result, “[o]nly a fraction of Robinson’s followers remained in the vanguard headed for New England, perhaps less than one-sixth of the whole,” Plymouth Plantation, p. 264.
    Cushman’s colorful letter concerning the tyrannical Christopher Martin and the leaking Speedwell was written to Cushman’s good friend Edward Southworth in London on August 17, 1620; after her husband’s death, Southworth’s wife, Alice, would marry William Bradford in 1623, and it is presumably through Alice that the Cushman letter came into Bradford’s possession. Bradford writes of Reynolds’s duplicity in OPP, p. 54. Concerning the Speedwell, Edward Arber writes in The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, “Imagine for a moment, what might have occurred had not the trim of the Speedwell been so unfortunately altered…. Most certainly the overmasting of the Speedwell …is one of the Turning Points of modern history,” p. 346. Nathaniel Morton’s claims concerning Christopher Jones’s complicity in the subterfuge of the Dutch are in his New England Memorial: “For [the Pilgrims’] intention…was to Hudson’s river: but some of the Dutch, having notice of their intentions; and having thoughts, about the same time of erecting a Plantation there likewise, they fraudulently hired the said Jones (by delays while they were in England; and now under the pretence of danger of the shoals, &c.) to disappoint them in their going thither,” p. 22. As commentators from Edward Arber to Sears Nickerson have argued, all the evidence points to Jones being a friend to the Pilgrims; it was Reynolds, not Jones, who worked secretly against them. John Robinson’s letter to the Pilgrims is in OPP, pp. 368–71. Edward Winslow speaks of Robinson’s moderating Separatism in Hypocrisie Umasked, pp. 92–93. Jeremy Bangs discusses Edward Winslow’s account of Robinson’s beliefs in Pilgrim Edward Winslow, pp. 414–18. Bradford’s account of the Mayflower ’s voyage is in OPP, pp. 58–60. David Cressy in Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century makes an excellent case for a kind of “bonding” between passengers during a typical transatlantic voyage. Given the discord that erupted between the Leideners and Strangers when the Mayflower reached Cape Cod, it’s doubtful whether much positive interaction occurred between the two groups during the two-month-long voyage. Both Cressy and I use the phrase “in the same boat,” p. 151. Alan Villiers’s description of the Mayflower II lying ahull is in his “How We Sailed the New Mayflower to America” in National Geographic Magazine, November 1957, p. 667. Sears Nickerson speaks of the effects of the Gulf Stream on the Mayflower, as well as her average speed during the