Sailing for more than two months through 3,000 miles of high seas, the 102 passengers of the Mayflower – including three pregnant women and more than a dozen children – were stranded under decks in crowded, cold and humid conditions, suffering from paralyzing episodes of seasickness, and surviving on meager rations of hard biscuits, cured meat and beer.
“The boat would have rolled like a pig,” says Conrad Humphreys, professional sailor and skipper for a recreated sea voyage of Captain William Bligh. “The smell and stench of sickness and sickness downstairs, and the freezing cold on the deck in the elements, that would have been pretty miserable.”
The Mayflower, like other 17th century merchant ships, was a cargo ship designed to carry timber, fish, and barrels of French wine, not passengers. The 41 pilgrims and 61 “strangers” (non-separatists brought in as skilled craftsmen and indentured servants) who boarded the Mayflower in 1620 headed for an unusual cargo, and their destination was no less foreign. The ship’s square rig and castle-shaped tall compartments were suitable for short jumps along the European coast, but the Mayflower’s bulky design was a handicap for sailing against the strong westerly winds of the North Atlantic.
“The journey would have been painfully slow with many days gone backwards rather than ahead,” says Humphreys.
READ MORE: Why Did Pilgrims Come to America?
Incredibly, however, all but one of the Mayflower’s passengers survived the grueling 66-day ordeal, and the Pilgrims even welcomed the arrival of a newborn baby halfway through the journey, a boy aptly named Oceanus. The joy and relief of the pilgrims on sighting Cape Cod on the morning of November 9, 1620 was recorded by their leader William Bradford in From the Plymouth plantation.
“Having thus arrived in a good harbor and brought back safe and sound to land, they fell on their knees and blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries of it. ci, ”writes Bradford.
READ MORE: What’s the Difference Between Pilgrims and Puritans?
From two ships to one
Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower for their journey to America.
Ann Ronan Pictures / Print Collector / Getty Images
The pilgrim’s arduous journey to the New World technically began on July 22, 1620, when a large group of settlers boarded a ship called Speedwell in the Dutch port town of Delfshaven. From there they sailed to Southampton, UK, where they met the rest of the passengers as well as a second ship, the Mayflower. The two ships disembarked from Southampton on August 6 in hopes of a speedy crossing to northern Virginia.
But within hours of the voyage’s start, the Speedwell began to leak severely and both ships were forced to stop at Dartmouth. The Speedwell was finally ready to set off again on August 24, but this time only covered 300 miles before causing another leak. The frustrated and exhausted Pilgrims docked in Plymouth and made the difficult decision to abandon the Speedwell. Some of the pilgrims also called him to Plymouth, but the rest of the passengers and cargo from the Speedwell were transferred to the already overcrowded Mayflower.
The traditional account of Mayflower’s voyage begins on September 6, 1620, the day he left Plymouth, but it should be noted that by this time the Pilgrims had already been living on ships for almost a month and a half.
READ MORE: First Thanksgiving settlers were mostly men because women had perished
Life on the Bridge of Arms
Mayflower
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
The Mayflower was about 100 feet long from stem to stern and barely 24 feet wide. In addition to its 102 passengers, the Mayflower carried a crew of 37 men – sailors, cooks, carpenters, surgeons and officers. The crew were housed in small cabins above the main deck, while the pilgrims were sent to the “gun deck” or “between the decks”, a suffocating, windowless space between the main deck and the cargo hold below. .
“These lower decks were very cramped, cold and wet, with low ceilings no more than five feet high,” Humphreys explains. “And all around you people are seasick. It’s really not a very pleasant place.
The passengers shared the cannon deck with a 30-foot sailboat called a “rowboat” which was stored below decks until they arrived in the New World. Between the masts, storage rooms and the small basin, the total living space available for 102 people was only 58 feet by 24 feet. Passengers practically slept on top of each other, with families erecting small wooden partitions and hanging curtains for a semblance of privacy.
“The crew sometimes let some passengers get on the deck to get some fresh air, but overall pilgrims were treated like cargo,” says Humphreys. “The crew feared that people would be swept overboard. The trip was quite difficult for seasoned sailors, not to mention novices like pilgrims.
READ MORE: How the Mayflower Compact laid the foundation for American democracy
Cookies and beer
Mealtime on the Mayflower brought little to celebrate. The cooks reportedly ran out of fresh food just days after the trip began and instead relied on salt pork, dried fish and other canned meats. Since ordinary bread spoiled too quickly, they served hard cookies, brittle bricks made from flour, water and salt.
“The drink of choice for many of those old trips was beer,” says Humphreys, explaining that freshwater barrels tended to “go out” during long storage. “Even young children were given beer to drink.”
Undergoing small rations of salted meats and beer, the pilgrims were said to have been malnourished, dehydrated, weak and susceptible to scurvy. When Humphreys recreated Bligh’s 60-day South Pacific crossing, he and his crew ate only 18th century rations – around 400 calories per person per day – and each man lost 25% of his weight. bodily.
Stormy weather and the “ big iron screw ”
Brief description of Bradford in From the Plymouth plantation of life aboard the Mayflower is the only surviving account of the crossing, but it includes enough heartbreaking detail to understand just how close to disaster the voyage was.
After a month of relatively calm seas and smooth sailing, the Mayflower encountered the first in a relentless series of North Atlantic storms that rocked and battered the ship for weeks. The crew were repeatedly forced to lower the sails and let the Mayflower wind helplessly in the towering waves.
“They were encountered on several occasions with cross winds and encountered many severe storms that the ship rocked with, and her upper works were very elusive,” Bradford wrote, “and one of the middle beams of the ship was bent and cracked, causing them to fear that the ship could not make the trip.
It’s unclear whether Bradford was talking about a cracked mast or some other type of wooden beam, but the damage was severe enough that the Pilgrims called a meeting with the captain to discuss the rollback. But then something remarkable happened.
“… There was a large iron screw that the passengers took out of Holland, which would lift the beam up in its place,” Bradford wrote, describing an object that was either the screw on a printing press or a large one. jack for lifting the roof of a house. Either way, it worked and the pilgrims “committed themselves to the will of God and resolved to proceed”.
An unexpected swim
During one of these brutal storms, when the Mayflower was forced to draw her sails and “hull for days of diving”, one of the passengers apparently became desperate for a breath of fresh air. Bradford wrote that a “vigorous young man” named John Howland had walked around the main deck and “with a seele [or pitch] of the ship [was] thrown into the sea. ”
Miraculously, Howland was able to grab the halyards hanging overboard and hang on for life, “despite being several fathoms underwater,” Bradford wrote. Working quickly, the crew pulled Howland close enough to the ship to grab him with a hook and bring the reckless young man back to the deck. Bradford proudly reported that after a short illness Howland not only recovered, but “lived for many years afterward and became a profitable member in both the Church and the Commonwealth.
The death of William Butten, the first of many
Pilgrims arrive in Plymouth, Massachusetts aboard the Mayflower, November 1620.
Harold M. Lambert / Kean Collection / Stock Photos / Getty Images
Bradford makes only a passing mention of the one death on the Mayflower. A young boy named William Butten, an indentured servant of one of the pilgrims, fell ill during the journey and died just days before reaching the New World.
Considering the dangers of the trip and the harsh conditions aboard the Mayflower, it was a miracle that only one in 102 people died during the 66-day trip. Sadly, the pilgrims’ fortunes worsened once they landed on Cape Cod in early November. Passengers and crew continued to live on the Mayflower for months as permanent accommodations were built on the shore.
With each passing week, more and more pilgrims and their “foreign” companions succumbed to cold and disease. By the spring of 1621, about half of the Mayflower’s original passengers had died in their new home. Among them was little Oceanus. In good news, another baby named Peregrine, the first baby pilgrim born in the Plymouth settlement, not only survived the harsh winter, but survived for over 80 years.
