The Mayflower's dimensions, with a displacement of only 180 tons, did not allow passengers to be accommodated comfortably. On November 11 (21), 1620, having rounded Cape Cod, the ship anchored off the coast of Plymouth and the pilgrims moored to Plymouth Rock (now a national monument). On the ship, the Mayflower Agreement was signed by the pilgrim leaders William Brewster and William Bradford, which became the governing body of the newly founded Plymouth Colony.
Used as a merchant ship on flights between England, France, Spain and Norway. From 1609 to 1622 Christopher Jones was the captain. The fate of the ship after its death in 1623 is hazy. The English historian Charles Banks believes the Mayflower was taken apart for timber.
Mayflower II
Mayflower II
A full-size replica of the Mayflower ship, created as part of the Plimoth Plantation project, known as the Mayflower II, has been moored in Plymouth Bay since 1957 as a museum piece. Mayflower II is visited by many tens of thousands of tourists every year.
Mayflower III
In 2020, in honor of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower galleon's voyage, another ship will cross the Atlantic, which will also be called the Mayflower. However, the Mayflower Autonomous Research Ship (MARS) is a robotic vessel that will move fully automatically using only energy.
Today in the United States it is more honorable to be a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers - the colonists who sailed in 1620 on the Mayflower - than to come from aristocrats. But there is a nuance: the history of the first settlers began with deception
The colonists of 1620 were not the first British settlers in the New World - the British had tried to settle on the shores of North America since 1585. Nor did they become the first community to gain a foothold in an inhospitable foreign land - in the Virginia region, the charter for the settlement of which King James I granted to the London company of shareholders, there was the city of Jamestown, founded in 1607, and several villages around it. Not the rich, not the aristocrats, not the sailors-adventurers, they were what are called "little people", but it is they who are revered to this day as the legendary patriarchs of the American nation, and millions are proud to be the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers. These millions include many celebrities: movie stars Clint Eastwood and Richard Gere, writer Thomas Pynchon, magazine publisher Playboy Hugh Hefner, Presidents Bush ...
Leiden, London
Moving loan
Nearly half of the Mayflower's passengers were a close-knit community of Puritan Brownists. The Brownists - they are also separatists, they are also Congregationalists, they are also “saints” - differed from other Puritans by their special love of freedom, not recognizing the central church authority over themselves. Their ideal was small, self-governing early Christian communities that chose their own leaders. Like all Puritans, the Brownists advocated strictness in everyday life and ritual, rejected the magnificent divine services and the church hierarchy of the Anglicans. The head of the Anglican Church was the British monarch, and he, of course, found such views dangerous. "No bishop - no king" - Jacob I used to say. The authorities persecuted heretics: the houses of worship of the Puritans all over England were closed, their leaders were arrested.
A community of Brownists from Scruby, Nottinghamshire, in 1608 moved to Holland and spent many years in Leiden, but did not take root in a foreign land: it seemed to immigrants that a foreign language environment and local customs had a bad influence on their children. In addition, the truce between the Dutch and the Spanish, Catholics, the worst enemies of the Puritans, was about to expire. The British authorities, meanwhile, set the Leiden congregation under surveillance: they were looking for the head of the steward, publisher William Brewster for his pamphlets against James I and the hierarchs of the Church of England, in order to judge and hang.
There was no rest in Europe from kings and bishops, so the idea of \u200b\u200bsettling New World, further away from them, seemed to the Brownists from Leiden more and more alluring. The decision to sail overseas was not easy: they had heard about hunger, backbreaking work on the barren virgin soil, bloodthirsty natives and other hardships of the life of the colonists. They almost chose Guiana, but they got scared of tropical fever and decided to go to North America. Puritans from the Leyden community remembered the wanderings of the biblical prophets and the search for the Promised Land. The coming journey seemed to them like a divine destiny, to follow which is the basic rule of Protestant ethics.
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Predecessors At the end of the 16th century, the idea of \u200b\u200bcolonizing North America haunted Sir Walter Raleigh, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth of England. He himself did not sail there, but sent expeditions. Raleigh's first squad of 160 settlers landed on Roanoke Island in Virginia in the summer of 1585. The British lived there for about a year and almost died out from hunger and constant clashes with the Indians. In 1586, at their request, the colonists were taken back to England by the famous sailor Francis Drake who sailed by. In 1587, Raleigh made a second attempt. More than a hundred colonists were taken by sailors to the same island. The settlers soon began to need food, then their leader - an artist, a veteran of the previous attempt at colonization, John White - sailed away to the metropolis for food and help. The outbreak of war between England and Spain delayed his return, and when White nevertheless reached Roanoke in 1590, there was not a soul in the settlement he had left. Someone scrawled the word on the fence post cro - perhaps they meant the neighboring Indian tribe of Croatons. The colonists did not leave the agreed mark in the form of the Maltese cross, which would mean that they hastily left the settlement due to danger. Subsequently, none of the inhabitants of the missing colony was ever found. |
For almost three years, representatives of the community in London sought permission from King James I to move overseas. The British Empire owned vast lands in North America along the Atlantic coast, but at that time the British had only one viable colony in Virginia. On these lands, which belonged to the London Company, the Leyden Brownists were finally allowed to settle down. They were to send the fruits of their labor to creditors and submit to the governor of the colony, who was appointed by the board of the company from the metropolis. However, the community did not have enough own funds even for the road, and the London company was on the verge of ruin. They needed a loan to hire ships and stock up on food - it was provided by an association of London merchants.
Plymouth, New World
May flower
While the Puritans were bickering with creditors about the terms of labor, they recruited fifty more volunteers in the capital - unemployed, impoverished artisans and merchants. The people whom the Leiden emigrants called "outsiders" were mostly Anglicans, and in the end there were more of them, but it was the close-knit community of Puritan separatists that became, as they say now, the initiative group of the future colony. Subsequently, the chronicler of the colony and one of the leaders of the Puritans, William Bradford, called fellow believers pilgrims - pious pilgrims by the will of heaven. "They knew that they were pilgrims - and raised their eyes to heaven, their dearest fatherland, and calmed their souls", - he wrote about how in alarm the future colonists left Leiden for the sake of the unknown. Under the name of the Pilgrim Fathers, they will go down in history.
It was assumed that the settlers would get to the New World on two ships - "Mayflower" ("May Flower") and "Speedwell" ("Veronica"), but the second ship, as it turned out, was fragile and was abandoned. Because of this, several volunteers had to stay. Among those who returned to the shore was Leyden Brownist Thomas Blossom - the ancestor of the current American President Barack Obama on the maternal side. Blossom and his family managed to reach the New World only nine years later.
September 16, 1620 (hereinafter the dates are given according to the new style. - Approx. "Around the world") The Mayflower finally sailed from the English port of Plymouth and headed for the shores of America. There were 102 passengers on board: men, women - even pregnant women, children. Autumn is not best time for long voyages: when the storms began, the crew and passengers were afraid that the ship was about to fall apart, and they almost turned back. But the Mayflower held out.
On November 21, 1620, agitated settlers poured onto the deck, peering into the horizon: the earth appeared in the distance. Joy quickly gave way to anxiety. As Bradford writes: "All they could see was wild thickets full of wild animals and the same wild people, and no one knew how many there are!"
New england
Intentional error
It soon became clear that the shore to which the Mayflower sailed was hundreds of miles north of the Hudson estuary, where it was supposed to arrive by agreement, and indeed far beyond the possessions of the London Company. The colonists' surprise seemed genuine, but was it an unexpected mistake? On the one hand, due to the imperfection of navigation instruments of that time, it was easy to get off course. On the other hand, they eventually moored south of Cape Cod in New England, the territory of which was controlled by the Plymouth Company, just in November 1620, transformed into the Council of New England. There were no settlers or local administration here. There is no one to obey. A very tempting situation for a community seeking self-government. This option seems very suitable for the Puritans, who were tired of royal supervision 12 years ago. At the same time, the leaders of the Puritans were well aware of the region where they found themselves: they met in London with the famous explorer of those places, Captain John Smith, and bought a map of the coast drawn by him and his book about New England.
Cape Cod
First elections
When all the passengers of the Mayflower realized their position, the spirit of freedom began to circle the most violent heads. There were "disaffected and rebellious", as Bradford put it, talk that from now on the settlers owed nothing to anyone. A riot and the collapse of the colonial community was brewing. Puritan leaders decided to take matters into their own hands. They drew up the text of the agreement and presented it at a meeting of all adult (that is, at least 21 years old) men on the ship. It was the famous Mayflower Agreement - a short document that affirms the unification of immigrants into a self-governing "civil political organism", which obliges itself in the future to live according to the laws that it will establish itself. The name of the king and the original intention to establish a colony in Virginia are mentioned in the text, but nothing more. The Mayflower Agreement was signed by everyone: both the Puritans and the "outsiders". As the American historian Alexander Samoilo put it, "the Pilgrim Fathers" occupied the territory of Plymouth without any legal rights to it, by way of capture, thus becoming the first squatters of America. " In fact, they deceived the London Company and the king by escaping the supervision of his functionaries. Only the colonists could not afford to deceive the food suppliers - the bickering over the debt obligations would drag on for years. But political self-government is what has become the most valuable and most desirable acquisition of immigrants. One can imagine how they felt when, in 1624, the king liquidated the London Company and placed its lands under his direct control.
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Document “In the name of the Lord God, amen. We, the undersigned, loyal subjects of our great sovereign - King James, by God's grace of the sovereign of Great Britain, France and Ireland, defender of the faith, etc. Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and in the name of spreading the Christian faith, and in honor of our king and country, a journey with the aim of establishing the first colony in the northern regions of Virginia, hereby solemnly and by mutual agreement before God and each other, we undertake to unite into a civil political organism to establish us in the best order, and safety, and the implementation of the above objectives; and on the basis of this, draw up, establish and formulate, as necessary, such laws, ordinances, acts, decrees and offices, just and equal for all, which will be deemed most suitable and in accordance with the common good of the colony, to which we undertake to obey and fully observe them. In confirmation of which we have put our signatures here at Cape Cod on November 11 (21 according to the present - Approx. "Around the world") 18 years of the reign of our sovereign King James England, France and Ireland and 24th - Scotland, Anno domini1620 ". |
Subsequently, the Mayflower Agreement will be considered the prototype of the Declaration of Independence, which approved the freedom of the North American states from the power of the metropolis.
On the same day, the settlers elected governor John Carver, a community deacon (one of three elected church leadership positions in the congregation), wealthy and respected. "Rather, approved"- says Bradford, since Carver was already one of the leaders of the Leiden part of the Mayflower passengers. He is considered the first in the history of colonization by the British of America, the head of the settlement, the chosen people.
New Plymouth
Cold house
A detachment of colonists on a boat that they brought with them surveyed the surroundings in search of a suitable place for settlement. In the bay north of Cape Cod they found a convenient hill where a stream with drinking water flowed, and on December 26, the Mayflower delivered all the passengers there. Previously, John Smith called these places New Plymouth; it turned out that travelers from Plymouth English eventually sailed to Plymouth American; that is how their colony began to be called.
HolidayThanksgiving Day
The epidemic and civil strife cost the New England Indians too dear to fight against white outsiders, so the natives did not attack the Plymouth colonists, and in the spring of 1621 they sent negotiators to them. The Plymouths concluded a peace treaty with the Indians, which lasted 40 years. They taught the colonists a lot: plant corn, set snares, get sugar from maple sap. In the autumn of that year, the Plymouthians reaped their first harvest and held a celebration on this occasion, to which they invited 90 Indian allies, led by the great leader. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday to commemorate a feast for the surviving colonists. It began to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. It is one of the two most "American" holidays in the US calendar along with Independence Day.
The newcomers were lucky: a few years ago there was an Indian village in this place, but in 1617 its entire population was mowed down by an infection brought by European fishermen who sailed to these parts. Once cultivated fields have only recently fallen into disrepair, and it was easier to cultivate them than virgin lands. And although in the first winter, cold, hunger and disease took the lives of half of the settlers (legend says that the Plymouths buried their dead secretly at night in unmarked graves so that the Indians did not know how quickly the ranks of white people were melting), the colony lasted a year and was going to develop further ...
Since 1621 all more ships began to arrive on the shores of New England. Inspired by the example of the Plymouthians, the British founded other colonies - Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts ... The pioneers from the Mayflower set a valuable precedent: the principle of self-government and local elections, by which they lived, was adopted as a matter of course by colonists throughout the territory New England. The Revolutionary War was still a long way off, but future Americans acquired something important - tradition. And the United States owes it to dozens of people who crossed the ocean in search of not gold, not the romance of the pioneers, but freedom.
Photo: Getty Images / Fotobank.com, Architect of the Capitol, Getty Images / Fotobank.com, Getty Images / Fotobank.com (x2), Shutterstock (x2)
In the fall of 1620 the merchant ship Mayflower, with 102 passengers and crew on board, left the English port of Plymouth and headed for the shores of the New World to establish a colony there. These were the first settlers, the "Pilgrim Fathers" as they were later called. The history of modern America and the birth of traditions began with them (including the celebration of Thanksgiving, which is celebrated every fourth Thursday in November). The ship on which the settlers crossed the Atlantic has not survived, but in the middle of the last century, a copy was recreated and named Mayflower II, now it is a museum on water, which is located in the American city of Plymouth, Massachusetts.
At the beginning of the 17th century. in England, a religious group that called itself "Saints" did not want to be associated with the Church of England anymore and went to the more liberal Holland for a new life and freedom of religion. But also in new country they did not find what they wanted, the locals did not like them very much and allowed the "Saints" to work only in low-paid and dirty jobs. Quite quickly, the migrants got tired of this situation and they decided to move again, this time to a distant New world... To do this, they received permission from The Virginia Company to establish a settlement on east coast modern America between 38 and 41 degrees north latitude, and the English king allowed them to officially secede from the Church of England. The Saints, of which there were not so many, decided to unite with another group of people called the Strangers and in August 1620 set off to conquer a new continent on two ships, the Mayflower and Speedwell. Literally from the first days "Speedwell" began to leak and it became clear that it would not last long and both ships returned back to the port. People were already determined to take a long journey, so they united, trying to fit on one ship twice as many people as it should have been.
On the morning of September 6, 1620, a ship left the British city of Plymouth with 102 passengers and 26 (+/-) crew members on board, led by Captain Christopher Johnson. Among the passengers were 51 men, 20 women, 21 boys and 10 girls and with all this friendly team they hoped to cross the Atlantic Ocean and found a new English colony on the American continent. The average age of passengers on the Mayflower was 32, with the oldest being 64 and the youngest being a newborn. While sailing, a baby named Oceanus was born on the ship.
The Mayflower was not really intended to carry people at all. The ship consisted of three decks: upper (where the crew was mainly at work), cargo and middle (where the settlers lived during the voyage). The passenger compartment was 80 feet (24.38 m) long, 5.5 feet (1.68 m) high and 25 feet (7.62 m) wide. Not the most comfortable conditions for hundreds of people.
Due to the fact that the ship left the port with a delay of almost a month, it got into the season of storms, adding to the trouble for travelers. Stormy weather also greatly influenced the fact that the ship went astray. In fact, the end point of his route was to be in the area of \u200b\u200bmodern New York, instead the Mayflower anchored much further north in the area of \u200b\u200bmodern Massachusetts, namely Cape Cod. This happened on November 11, 1620, 66 days after leaving the English port. During this time, the ship covered a distance of 2,750 miles.
Since the ship's crew missed the point of arrival and the ship docked at 42 degrees north latitude, an area that did not belong to The Virginia Company, the passengers decided to sign a special document known as the Mayflower compact before disembarking. People believed that the contract with the company that issued the permission to establish the colony on the east coast was not valid in this situation, since in fact the ship had arrived elsewhere. 41 male heads of families on the ship sign an agreement, according to which they approve the foundation of their own colony, with their own laws that will work for the benefit of the settlement and its inhabitants.
The first winter, while houses were being built on land, the settlers spent on a ship. There was hunger and cold, there were practically no supplies, as a result, about half of the former passengers of the Mayflower died. In fact, everyone could have perished if the aborigines had not helped them. An English-speaking Indian named Samoset brought the arriving English to the Indian peoplewampanoagi, who taught Europeans to hunt local animals and grow crops on a land unfamiliar to them. The following fall, the Mayflower's surviving passengers shared their first successful harvest with the local Indians by hosting a three-day dinner, which later grew into a Thanksgiving tradition.
In April 1621 the Mayflower returned to England and, according to one of the most popular versions, was dismantled into logs 2 years later. The exact drawings of the ship on which the settlers arrived in America do not exist, approximately it looked like this:
In 1957, the Mayflower II (a copy of the 17th century ship) left English Devon, crossed the Atlantic and dropped anchor in the city of Plymouth, USA, where it still stands and works as a museum.
P.S. The last figure was found on the Internet.
