Mayflower

voyage and Jones’s use of a cross-staff in Land Ho!— 1620. pp. 28–33.
    CHAPTER TWO- Dangerous Shoals and Roaring Breakers
    Anyone writing about the Mayflower ’s first few days on the American coast is indebted to Sears Nickerson’s Land-Ho!— 1620. first published in 1931 and recently reissued by the Michigan State University Press and edited by Delores Bird Carpenter. Nickerson brought a lifetime of sailing the waters of Cape Cod to his analysis of the existing evidence. By determining the phases of the moon and tides on November 9–11, 1620, he was able to reconstruct, as only a veteran sailor could, the conditions experienced by Master Jones and the rest of his crew. Even Samuel Eliot Morison in his own extremely useful “Plymouth Colony Beachhead,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, December 1954, deferred to Nickerson, calling him the “ancient mariner of the Cape who has full knowledge of the winds and currents of those waters,” p. 1348. I have relied on Nickerson throughout this chapter.
    Bradford describes them as “not a little joyful” to see land in OPP, p. 59–60; the description of the land being “wooded to the brink of the sea” is in MR, p. 15. John Smith’s map of New England appears in volume 1 of The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, edited by Philip Barbour, pp. 320–21. My description of how Jones conned the Mayflower along the back side of the cape is based on Nickerson, pp. 32–33, 79, as well as Alan Villiers’s account of sailing the replica Mayflower II across the Atlantic in 1957 in “How We Sailed Mayflower II to America,” in the National Geographic, November 1957, pp. 627–72. Nickerson refers to Pollack Rip as “one of the meanest stretches of shoal water” in Land Ho!, p. 66. Barbara Chamberlain speaks of the dangers of the back side of the cape in These Fragile Outposts: “The timbers of more than 3000 vessels lie buried in the offshore sands on the Cape…. The shores of Chatham alone—afew miles of sandy beach—are said to have received half the wrecks of the whole Atlantic and Gulf coastline of the United States,” p. 249. See also John Stilgoe’s “A New England Coastal Wilderness,” in which he cites John Smith’s famous dismissal of the accuracy of existing charts as “so much waste paper, though they cost me more,” p. 90. Nickerson describes Champlain’s 1606 attempt to penetrate the rip, pp. 43–44. Bradford speaks of the “roaring breakers” in OPP, p. 60, in which he also tells of the “discontented and mutinous speeches,” p. 75. William Strachey writes of the “outcries and miseries” of the passengers aboard the Sea Venture in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609, edited by Louis Wright, p. 6. John Navin in Plymouth Plantation writes of the non-Separatists’ lack of cohesiveness and the likelihood that Christopher Martin played a role in standing against the threatened rebellion, pp. 287, 292, as well as the Separatists’ dependence on Robinson’s leadership while in Leiden, where the congregation had “customarily deferred to the authority of their pastor and church elders in virtually all matters of discipline and controversy, both inside and outside the church,” p. 289. For a discussion of how the Mayflower was rigged, see William Baker’s The Mayflower, pp. 44–54.
    Edmund Morgan discusses the various views of the relations between church and state that were possible within the Puritan tradition in Roger Williams: The Church and State, pp. 28–85. The Pilgrims stood somewhere between the extremes of the theocracy that came to be established in Massachusetts and the total repudiation of this by Roger Williams. Jeremy Bangs makes a strong case for the importance of Dutch influences on the crafting of the Mayflower Compact in “Strangers on the Mayflower —Part 1” in New England Ancestors, vol. 1, 2000, no. 1, pp. 60–63, and in Part 2, New England Ancestors, vol. 1, 2000, no. 2, pp. 25–27. John Robinson insists on the need for the Pilgrims to become “a body politic” in his farewell letter in OPP, p. 369. In Hidden History, Daniel Boorstin calls the Mayflower Compact “the primeval document of American self-government” and adds, “The transatlantic distance had given to these transplanted Englishmen their opportunity and