‘SPEEDWELL’ duly reached Southampton on July 22nd, but there she was unexpectedly declared unseaworthy. Many passengers cancelled their trip, but eleven determined souls crammed themselves onto ‘Mayflower’ alongside the farm-hands, servants and merchants already booked on her, taking the total to 102 passengers and 30 crew. The protesting vessel set sail from Plymouth on September 6th.
‘Mayflower’ never reached Virginia. Winds blew captain Christopher Jones’s ship to the north, and on November 11th he accepted defeat and landed at Cape Cod. No civilised colony, no inns or firesides waited there to welcome them. The party spent the icy winter huddled in their ship, prey to infectious disease, fighting off starvation with corn from a deserted Native American village.* By the time they cautiously disembarked on March 21st, 1621, barely half the passengers and crew remained alive.*
Captain Jones returned to England two weeks later, leaving Brewster, Bradford and their fellow Mayflower emigrés to conjure up civilisation in the emptiness. They named it, Plymouth Colony.
William Bradford (?1590-1657), who soon emerged as the group’s leader, made a point of recording that the punctilious Puritans repaid the Native Americans after their own first harvest.
The voyage of ‘Mayflower’ was far from the first adventure into North America. As well as the Virginia Colony founded in 1606, Sir Walter Raleigh had started a short-lived colony at Roanoke in the 1580s. Sir Francis Drake had visited California and claimed it for the Queen in 1580 during The Voyage of the ‘Golden Hinde’. In 1497, John Cabot had discovered North America by reaching Newfoundland, though in fact he only re-discovered it: Leif Ericson of Greenland had already established a small trading colony there, Vinland, back in the eleventh century. Christopher Columbus never visited North America.