The Mayflower Pilgrims’ Progress

After two false starts, an unremarkable merchant ship called the Mayflower departed the English port of Plymouth on 6 September 1620, bound for the wilds of America. On board, apart from the 30 or so crew, were 102 passengers – 37 of whom would go on to be immortalised as the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’, who settled in New England and gave rise to one of the most enduring and controversial origin myths in US history. This small body of extreme non-conformist Puritans, sometimes called Separatists, drawn largely from the English Midlands, had been searching since the late 16th century for a country that would allow them to worship freely. After a decade in Leiden, they decided that the Netherlands did not suit their tastes, either: too much freedom could be equally corrosive to morality. The congregation thus decided to travel thousands of miles across the ocean and trust that God would help them find freedom in a ‘New World’.

Licence from the king

Their intended destination was the Colony of Virginia, for which they gained a licence for settlement from James I. They were joined by 65 colonists who did not share the religious enthusiasms of the ‘Pilgrims’ – the name given to the Separatists by the man who would become their governor, William Bradford. These settlers were keen to try their luck in the burgeoning markets of North America. After 66 days at sea, the crew sighted land. As luck or providence would have it, the Mayflower had drifted further north than expected and was forced to drop anchor off a forested coastland near what is today Cape Cod, Massachusetts. There, some of the settlers disembarked and established a fortified town which they called Plymouth, after their final port of departure. Many other colonists spent these early months in the shelter of the Mayflower, huddling against the biting cold and deep snows of their first Massachusetts winter; half of them would not live to see the spring.

The surviving settlers came ashore in March 1621 and in October of that year a harvest festival – known by generations of Americans as the first Thanksgiving – was held by the remaining 53 settlers and around 80 of the Wampanoag people, on whose land (despite the confident assertions of James I) the colony actually sat.

In 1691 the Plymouth Colony was merged into the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which in turn became one of the 13 original states of the United States in 1776.

Living history

But nothing lives on like history. Starting in 1769, descendants of the Pilgrims gathered every year in late December to celebrate ‘Forefathers’ Day’, the anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower. The end of the First World War (and the tercentenary of the Mayflower voyage just two years later) marked an expansion of this commemorative culture beyond the confines of Plymouth and its Pilgrims and beyond the ritual yearly celebration. Historical and commemorative culture – that is, the ways of celebrating (and as a consequence defining) key historical events for a wide audience – continued to take on new forms during the 20th century. 1947 saw the opening of the flamboyantly realistic ‘Plimouth Plantation’, a living history museum and village in Massachusetts, populated by trained professionals in authentic colonial costume. These actors live out the daily existence of the first New Englanders for a paying public. And, while more recent years have seen growing controversy surrounding the exploitation and violence perpetrated against the Native Americans by settler populations during the pre-Revolutionary years, for the majority of Americans the Mayflower story retains a tenacious purchase in the national imagination. The romantic myth of a hardy band of Pilgrims stirred by God and yearning for freedom still appeals to a nation that readily mythologises pioneers, outsiders and even outlaws.

None of this surprises: the Pilgrim story is, after all, an American one. But is that all it is?

September 2020 will mark the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ journey to the New World, and communities around northern Europe, including Britain, are in the final stages of preparation for what will be one of the biggest events in the commemorative calendar this century. Towns and cities will use this event as an opportunity to assert their claim to historic and future greatness, while national bodies and religious and cultural institutions will treat this as a moment to remind themselves and the public of the role their predecessors played in a world-defining story.

Yet one of the untold stories in the afterlife of the Mayflower voyage is the extent to which audiences in Britain have responded to it since it passed from living memory into the realm of history and myth – in fact, from nearly the moment the Pilgrims landed at ‘New Plimouth’. The Mayflower story has resonated with audiences in Britain since 1620 and through their commemorations, as well as poetry, drama, fiction and antiquarianism, we can see the ways that British audiences have imagined and reimagined the past that they share with their erstwhile brethren, the Americans.

Early responses

The Atlantic world in the 17th century was surprisingly well connected. Although voyages could take weeks or months, countless ships plied the seas to and fro, laden with people, goods and, most importantly, news and information. This helped to give rise to a distinctive Atlantic British culture – one that was powerfully Protestant, mercantile and often pugnacious, both towards outsiders and towards competitor communities.

Because of this interconnectedness, Bradford’s ‘Pilgrims’ were able to present themselves to the outside world as Englishmen who had successfully colonised the Garden of Eden in the name of king and country – if not the Church.

The earliest mass communication sent from ‘New Plimouth’ to Old England was A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England, which went on sale in London in 1622. Written by the separatist leaders Edward Winslow and William Bradford, it described the colony as a ‘harbor wherein a thousand sail of ships may safely ride’, whose waters were filled with ‘the greatest store of fowl that ever we saw’. These early accounts were akin to commercial brochures, advertisements for the peace and plenty that awaited the brave souls willing to move their families – and their wealth – to the New World. Naturally, they shied away from revealing the stark death toll of that first winter and subsequently.

Many readers responded with scepticism, even derision. The explorer John Smith, in his Advertisement for the unexperienced planters of New England or any where... (1631), implied that the Pilgrims were ill-prepared, irresponsible and naive: ‘Wanting most necessaries for fishing and fowling, it is a wonder how they subsist, fortifie themselves, resist their enemies, and plant their plants.’ Thomas Morton, who had tried to form a competitor colony, wrote of the Pilgrims’ intolerance and their unchristian behaviour towards fellow colonists and native people. Morton had every reason to be resentful: in 1628, the Separatists had stormed his town, torn down its ‘heathen’ maypole and banished him from New England. 

Even to the end of the century, surprisingly little emphasis was placed on religious persecution as a factor in the Pilgrims’ decision to leave England. The later 18th century, and especially the American Revolution, brought a shift in the Mayflower narrative, with one side emphasising the persecution of the Pilgrims by the English authorities, setting them up as precursors to the rebellious Bostonians, while the other side, exemplified by the historian and author John Wynne, took the opportunity to highlight the bad behaviour of the New England settlers. While celebrating the strides made in ‘civilising’ the native populations, Wynne related that many Native Americans were suspicious of the humanity of the would-be civilisers. He told of one young native man who, growing impatient at being harassed by an English preacher, bade him ‘go and make the English good first’. Such hypocrisy was compounded by the Puritans’ fanatical persecution of other Protestant groups, making them no better than the regime they had fled.

A shared past?

For much of its early history, the Pilgrim story had an ambiguous and relatively obscure position in the British historical imagination. But this would change with the Romantic Age, a period that saw the growth of national sentiment throughout Europe and the Atlantic world. By 1769, New Englanders had begun celebrating a yearly ‘Forefathers’ Day’, but this gained pace after the Revolutionary Wars, when the Pilgrims were lionised as rebels and pioneers whose heroic actions had made possible an independent United States.

The bicentenary in 1820 of the landing of the Mayflower saw the Pilgrims’ story emerge in a more national, American frame, beyond Plymouth and New England. But the bicentenary also marked the moment when Britain and the United States, two nations which had been at war as recently as 1812, began to negotiate and celebrate their shared past – like two branches of the same dysfunctional family squabbling over antique furniture.

Fear of an unknown shore

In 1824 the Liverpool merchant Adam Hodgson published a volume of letters about his travels in North America, including an account of the 1820 celebration. One of Hodgson’s readers was the British poet and literary celebrity Felicia Hemans, who was inspired to write her most enduringly popular poem, The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England (1825). Hemans’ poem conveyed the fearful approach of the Pilgrims to an unknown shore.

The breaking waves dash’d high
On a stern and rock-bound coast
And the woods against a stormy sky
Their giant branches toss’d ...

The well-worn romantic trope of the sublimity of rugged nature, along with the poem’s historical content and pious sentiment, struck a chord on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, it marked the first truly ‘popular’ historical retelling of the Mayflower narrative. In the 1830s Hemans’ poem was set to music by her sister, the composer Harriet Browne, and became a popular parlour song, reprinted until at least the 1930s. The poem was endlessly reprinted in newspapers and periodicals, as well as in lavishly illustrated editions.

There were also examples of pure entertainment in the form of historical fiction during this period. The key example here is Henry Longfellow’s epic poem The Courtship of Miles Standish, which found enthusiastic audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. An astonishing 10,000 copies were sold on the first day of its publication in London in 1858. This suggests that not only was the story already well-known, it was also a draw for audiences. Longfellow’s poem told the story of the Captain Miles Standish and his amorous intentions towards the young Patricia Mullins, one of the few eligible young women to survive the journey to the New World. Standish’s younger attendant, John Alden, also pines for Patricia, but of course accedes to the hierarchical claim of his boss. The real hero of the story is the young female protagonist, Patricia, who is decisive and forthright in her preference for Alden. Victorian audiences were only the beginning; Longfellow’s fictionalised romance would become a staple part of dramatic retellings of the story in the 20th century and even made its way onto the silver screen in 1923.

But stories of the Pilgrims were not all stern piety and national anxiety; there was always a serious side to the Mayflower myth. For many British commentators throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Pilgrims represented disputed historical terrain, as well as a means of resolving that dispute.

Instinct for liberty

In 1842 Ebenezer Elliott, the radical poet and Chartist, penned a poem in which he cast the Pilgrim Fathers as both American revolutionaries and as representatives of the instinct for liberty that animated the martyrs of the British Civil Wars. Thus Elliott drafted a plea to modern Britons from their American brethren:

What saith the voice which boometh
Athwart the upbraiding waves? —
‘Tho’ slaves are ye, our sons are free —
Then why will you be slaves?
The children of your fathers
Were Hampden, Sidney, Vane!’
Land of the sires of Washington,
Bring forth such men again!

Here we can see a key distinction between the US version of the Pilgrim story and the British one. For Americans, the Pilgrim Fathers were the first in a line of rebels and revolutionaries who sought to shed the yoke of the Old World and its corruptions: monarchy, aristocracy and established religion. This created a problem for English commentators after American independence. They wanted to ‘own’ the plucky Pilgrims, but were in danger of losing them to a parochial American mythology of independence. Thus writers like Ebenezer Elliot represent a common strategy of reclaiming the Pilgrims as English and the Americans as, at least culturally, part of an extended Anglo-Saxon family.

A high water mark in the Anglo-American commemorative terrain was reached in 1920. The First World War’s end in 1918 and the Mayflower tercentenary just two years later saw unprecedented attempts by the British to share in commemorations of the Mayflower. As James Rendel Harris, one of the prime movers behind the tercentenary events in Britain put it in a speech in March 1918, the late entry of the Americans into the war had marked ‘the return of the Mayflower’. This return, he argued, should be heralded by great celebrations throughout the tercentenary year.

However, it is important to point out the differences between the commemorative culture of the early 20th century and that of the present. The first major difference is the role of religion, particularly that of non-conformist communities, in encouraging and organising commemorative activity. James Rendel Harris was a Quaker and, in the same speech of 1918, he argued that the privilege of carrying through the celebrations should belong to the Free Churches, those Protestant communities outside the Anglican (Episcopal in the US)establishment. The Free Churches had inherited the Pilgrims’ religious tradition: ‘They are ours because they are ourselves.’

Anglo-Saxon inheritance

Religion came to the fore in the 1920s in a way it is unlikely to do in today’s more secular world. However, and more controversially, commemorative activity in 1920 also emphasised ethnic Anglo-Saxon identity and history as a shared inheritance in America and Britain. This was a hangover from the 19th century, the height of what has been called ‘Teutonism’, or the belief that the modern English were descendants of the ancient Anglo-Saxon tribes of Europe.

This often translated into the assertion of a colonising destiny, of which the Mayflower Pilgrims were a significant manifestation. We can see this as early as the 1840s, in the language of the radical politician Sir William Molesworth, who exhorted an audience of New Zealanders: ‘Become the founders of a mighty empire in a new world of your own creation. Thus accomplish the destiny of your race. It is true, you are few in number, but not more numerous were those who first landed in this kingdom with Hengist and Horsa, and still fewer were the Pilgrim Fathers of the thirteen millions of America.’ The pagan kings of ancient Germany made strange bedfellows with the Puritan Pilgrims, but the emphasis here was on blood, not on religion.

The all-encompassing narratives of religious and ethnic inheritance were taken up with enthusiasm in cities, towns and villages across England. In Southampton, Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw, Professor of History at University College Southampton, traced a lineage between the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Hamton and ‘the other great Anglo-Saxon Federation, the United States’ back to ‘the Pilgrim Fathers who left Southampton’.

And while Southampton and Plymouth were predictably the epicentres of the tercentenary, this was a truly national event. Towns all along the south coast and in the Midlands celebrated a link to the Mayflower to make a claim for contemporary importance in a national – and indeed international – frame.

Inspired by the message of James Rendel Harris, in 1920 events were staged by religious communities in towns and villages across Britain. In Driffield, Yorkshire, there was a ‘Mayflower Bazaar’ in the Congregational School and a pageant by the Driffield Wesleyan Christian Association. In Yarmouth, a play entitled The Ship of Adventure was performed by the Free Churches of Yarmouth and Gorleston. There was also a mass at Dene Side Wesleyan Church at which members of the Anglican Church were welcomed. In Cambridge, the Baptist, Congregational Churches and Free Church Council united in a series of meetings in the Emmanuel Congregational Church. Events like these promoted even the humblest members of the international community of belief.

Lessons for the future

In 2020, parts of Britain may again commemorate the Mayflower voyage, depending on the Covid-19 pandemic. A large ‘Mayflower400’ network has been formed, drawing together a range of interest groups from across the private, public and voluntary sectors. Clearly there is a wealth of familiar rhetoric about what the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower voyage symbolise in Britain – values of adventure and stoical spirit, religious hope and tolerance and the founding of American democracy from English ideals. The history of the British historical culture surrounding the Mayflower has frequently been predicated on an idealised myth of dispossessed Pilgrims finding freedom in the North American wilderness, but now, having caught up with postcolonial critiques of the Pilgrim Fathers in the US, early pushback has encouraged a more nuanced commemoration – one that tries to balance British adventuring with the realities of colonialism.

Uncomfortable questions

Certainly, the organisers of the current commemorations will not be reaching for the language of Anglo-Saxonism, while religious narratives of international communities of belief will be evident only on the margins. The 2020 commemorations will be required to ask uncomfortable questions about the nature of collective memorialisation and about the potential exclusivity and marginalisation of history. Such questions will not be easy to answer. But it is worth bearing in mind that historical commemorations need not be moments of unthinking celebration or of solemn piety. In a mature and confidently diverse society, historical anniversaries can be opportunities for serious discussion, for articulate protest and for debate. No historical narrative should, or indeed can, ever be settled. The 2020 commemorations may be the current generation’s opportunity to add its own voices to a conversation that has been going on for four centuries.

Martha Vandrei is Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter and co-investigator with Tom Hulme and Ed Downey on the AHRC-funded ‘Voyaging through history: the Mayflower in Britain, 1620-2020’.