THE MAYFLOWER

Article courtesy of the Inland Empire Colony
of the
California Society of Mayflower Descendants

The photo above is of a replica of the vessel that brought the Pilgrims to America - but is it? Shipbuilders of the late 16th century and early 17th century were master craftsman who plied their trade with secrets handed down from generations before them, and most were illiterate, so they couldn't have read plans or engineering specifications even if such things had existed for their benefit.

So how was someone able to create the replica shown above? That is a story almost as fascinating as the tale of the brave Pilgrims itself.

Governor William Bradford, in his history Of Plimouth Plantation written ten years after the landing, never referred to the Mayflower by name but merely as "the Ship."

No one today is certain what happened to that Mayflower.

In 1588, a ship named Mayflower of 200 tons, commanded by one Edward Banks, took part in chasing the Spanish Armada up the Channel. She was commissioned and financed on that occasion by the City of London. One of her owners, John Vassall, of Stepney, moved in 1591 to Leigh-on-Sea, near Southend at the mouth of the Thames. A Mayflower of Leigh appears in the London port books of 1606, taking on a cargo of cloth for Middelburg in Holland; her master was Robert Bonner of Leigh. A year later, Robert Bonner was listed as master of the Mayflower of London, unloading a cargo of wine from Bordeaux. In 1608 Bonner was listed as master of the Josian, whose master in 1606 and 1607 was Christopher Jones. In 1609 Jones appeared as master and quarter owner of the Mayflower of London.

From then on, this Mayflower sailed fairly regularly to the French ports of La Rochelle and Bordeaux, carrying cloth, hose, and rabbit skins, and bringing back wine and brandy. In 1609 she brought furs from Norway, and twice in 1614 she fetched home silks from Hamburg. On Tuesday, May 23, 1620, she docked in the Port of London from La Rochelle, the second voyage to France that year. Something more than two weeks later, Weston chartered her for the crossing to New England.

The ship on which Weston and Cushman had taken an option over the weekend of June 10-12, 1620, was considerably smaller.

Available records indicate that by 1624 the Mayflower of Pilgrim fame had three joint owners, Robert Child, John Moore, and Mrs. Josian Jones, widow of the captain. These three applied in that year to the Admiralty for an appraisal. It was carried out by four mariners and shipwrights of Rotherhithe, who valued the vessel at the unpretentious total of one hundred and twenty-eight pounds, eight shillings, and fourpence. One eminent historical researcher, Dr. Rendel Harris was so dissatisfied with that figure that he declared in 1920 that it must have represented only the widow's share.

Some suggest the Mayflower was broken up after the 1624 appraisal.

But historical records give us the will of one Robert Sheffield of Stepney, dated September 10, 1625, in which his share of a ship named Mayflower was bequeathed to his wife Joan or Josian. Some think the legatee was the widow of Captain Jones. If it was, she had married three times and went on to make it four, for Robert Sheffield's widow married Simon Jefferson of Blackfriars in 1630, and thereafter Sheffield's other heirs commenced a lawsuit against Jefferson in 1636 concerning "the Mayflower and other property."

Further confusion comes from the fact that in 1621 Captain Richard Swan sailed in the Hart to the Arabian coast, a voyage listed in the marine records of the East India Company. Swan joined a fleet which set out from the port of Surat in the Punjab on April 6. The fleet, heading for the Persian Gulf, captured on May 1 a two-hundred-ton Portuguese vessel, the San Antonio, bound for Goa with a cargo of rice. This prize was renamed Mayflower. She sailed so badly (Swan called her "that leeward cart") that she delayed the fleet, but on June 7 four ships, London, Andrews, Primrose, and Mayflower, anchored beyond Ras-al-Hadd, referred to by the English as Cape Rosalgate. Here they enjoyed "all sorts of refreshments" until a guerrilla force of "certain Portingals" arrived to defend the port and drive the English out. The English riposted briskly, defeated the Portuguese, and "for their dishonesty burned the town and spoiled many of their date trees." Then the fleet went on to the Persian Gulf where the newly named Mayflower, which had been leaking badly, was broken up for firewood. The account of the whole affair was written by Richard Jefferies on October 5, 1621.

Today, it is clear that the ill-fated San Antonio had not the remotest connection with the Mayflower of Plymouth fame. But what has really muddled historians is the Mayflower of 1629 and 1630. Thomas Prence wrote in his journal in August 1629: "Thirty-five of our friends with their families arrived at Plymouth. They shipped at London in May, with the ships that came to Salem, which brings over many pious persons to begin the churches there. So that their being long kept back is now accomplished by Heaven with a double blessing.... The charge is reckoned on the several families, some fifty pounds, some forty, some thirty, as their numbers and expenses were, which our undertakers pay for gratis, besides giving them houses, preparing them grounds to plant on, and maintain them with corn, etc., above thirteen or fourteen months, before they have a harvest of their own production."

James Sherley sent a letter with the new arrivals, dated March 25, 1629, which said in part: "Here are now many of yours and our friends from Leyden, coming over who though for the most part be but a weak company, yet herein is a good part of that end ordained, which was aimed at, and which hath been so strongly opposed, by some of our former Adventurers. But God hath His working in these things, which man cannot frustrate. With them we have also sent some servants in the ship called the Talbot that went hence lately; but these come in the Mayflower."

And Captain John Smith wrote under the date 1629: "In this year a great company of people of good rank, zeal, means, and quality, have made a great stock, and with six good ships in the months of April and May they set sail from Thames for the Bay of Massachusetts, otherwise called Charles River; viz. the George Bonaventure of twenty pieces of ordnance, the Talbot nineteen, the Lions Whelp eight, the Mayflower fourteen, the Four Sisters fourteen, the Pilgrim four, with three hundred and fifty men, women and children."

The master of the Mayflower was William Peirce. Roger Harman commanded the Four Sisters and William Wobridge the Pilgrim. (note the use of "Pilgrim" as a ship's name)

In 1630 the Mayflower sailed from Southampton with the Whale. She was listed as "Mayflower of Yarmouth." William Peirce was by then master of the Lion.

A Mayflower of Yarmouth, tonnage between 240 and 250, owner Thomas Howarth, is registered as sailing under letters of marque to the fishing grounds off Greenland on July 23, 1626, October 3, 1627, and June 29, 1631.

Then there is the Mayflower commanded by Thomas Webber of Boston, the ship that brought an order of canvas to America from England in 1654 for one John Eliot. This Mayflower is described as being about two hundred tons , and when she was riding at anchor in Boston Harbor on October 6, 1652, Webber sold one sixteenth of her "for good and valuable considerations" to one John Pinchon of Springfield, Massachusetts. Next day he sold another sixteenth to Theodore Atkinson, a Boston felt maker, "as well as of said ship as of all and singular her masts, sails, sailyards, etc."

A British scholar, Sir Edwin Arnold, speaking in 1889 at Harvard on the subject of Sanskrit studies, told his audience about a Mayflower that had been sunk off the coast of Coromandel in 1659. He mentioned Masulipatam and Malabar. This Mayflower, he said, was 240 tons burden, carried twenty-four guns and a crew of fifty-five, and had sailed to Coromandel with the Eagle and the Endymion in 1655. The three ships had arranged to rendezvous at St. Helena on the way home if they happened to get separated at sea. This Mayflower had arrived at Plymouth, Devon, on August 26, 1657, and had set out for Coromandel again on February 22, 1658, with a cargo of bullion worth £7500. She had sunk the following year, apparently in shallow water, for the wreck passed into the hands of an Indian broker in Surat on February 16, 1660, and he managed to repair the vessel sufficiently to use her afterward for local trading, though she was never again capable of making a full voyage in the open sea.

Dr. Rendel Harris patiently worked out the comings and goings of every Mayflower recorded in the English port books for the first two thirds of the seventeenth century. What he found out includes specific information about Christopher Jones's Mayflower.

On January 28, 1620, Jones brought the Mayflower in to London and landed a cargo of 113 1/4 tons of French wine in eight lots, the biggest 30 1/4 tons, the smallest 8 tons. During the next three days Jones unloaded a further 37 3/4 tons in four consignments. On May 15, 1620, the Mayflower brought in another wine cargo, 50 1/4 tons of ordinary wine and 19 of "conyacks wine" (cognac).

Then the ship made the little side trip that changed the world.

Back in London, on March 20, 1621 Jones unloaded 197 hundredweight of tallow and 17 1/2 tons of beef, and a further 64 1/2 hundredweight of tallow on March 23. On April 9 and 10 four tons of English beef. On July 17 "two maunds and half unbound books" and 200 bolts of "Lyons thread." In August the Mayflower came from Madeira with an cargo unloaded on the twenty-first as follows:

• 99 hundredweight whites

• 74 hundredweight musk con rosel

• 2 3/4 hundredweight penner sugar

• 635 hundredweight woad

• 32 hundredweight 90 pounds green ginger

• On September 21 she arrived from Ireland with this shipment:

• 3 1/2 packs Irish yarn

• 100 ells Irish linen

• 1700 pounds candles

• 40 raw Irish hides

• 39 raw Irish calfskins

• 1 barrel and 1 hogshead Irish salmon

• 11 hundredweight Irish tallow

• 75 hundredweight pipe stands

• 20 hundredweight headings for pipes

• 20 hundredweight stands

• 23 hundredweight 80 pounds Scottish yarn

• 7 hundredweight feathers

• 13 dozen goat skins

• 1400 "permyscitty in the oyle" (probably spermaceti, or whale oil)

• 1 3/4 pecks Irish yarn

• 2 hundredweight Irish wool

• 2 3/4 hundredweight tallow

• 44 3/4 hundredweight Scottish proynes

• 100 tons oaken timber

This cargo was unloaded between September 21 and 28. On October 19 she brought in "60 way bay salt" and on October 31 sailed for La Rochelle with "42 way and l/2 bay salt."

On November 21 she was back with 21 1/2 hundredweight of currants, 7 1/2 of it "in 31 butts and 4 cartells"; and on November 29 Jones offloaded a load of cotton wool, goats hair, cotton yarn, gum arabic, and currants.

Unloading over the first half of December included:

• December 1: 14 1/2 hundredweight currants

• December 5: 4 packages "in all Reisons"

• December 13: 30 hundredweight hops

• December 16: 58 1/2 hundredweight currants

• December 18: 1930 pounds cotton yarn

• "yards of Turkey grograine"

• 12 hundredweight currants

This is the last mention in the historical record of what we can positively identify as Captain Jones's Mayflower, presumably also the Mayflower of the Pilgrim fathers, barring acquisition of another one by Jones after the fateful voyage.

On September 13, 1626, the Mayflower of Yarmouth, Robert Jary, master, carried coals from Newcastle. Records exist of a Mayflower built at Aldeburgh by two of the former Mayflower owners, Child and Moore: Aldeburgh is close to Yarmouth as ships go and it is at least logical to suppose that this was the one commanded by Jary.

On January 22, 1631, the Mayflower of Yarmouth, William Tracey, master, discharged 206 tons of Bordeaux wine at Hull.

Another ship named Mayflower appears in 1637 in the Thames: 346 or 350 tons, 24 guns, 140 or 145 men, 28 barrels of gunpowder, master William Baddilow on His Majesty's Service, first noted on March 18 but by May 3 in company with four other ships: Unicorn, Pleiades, Industry and the Richard & Mary. On September 22 Sir John Pennington wrote from the Downs that he had discharged Mayflower and Pleiades.

Then there is another Mayflower belonging to Thomas Webber. On May 28, 1651, the Council of State gave Webber permission to trade with Virginia; on June 20 Mayflower arrived at the Downs en route to New England; in October she anchored in Boston. On August 27, 1653, Webber petitioned the Council of State for protection for twenty seamen against impress, and for the grant of letters of marque; on September 12 the order went out to send to Virginia the Mayflower (160 tons, 18 guns), the Bonaventure (100 tons, 14 guns), and the Hope (120 tons, 8 guns).

One other Mayflower can be traced. Samuel Vassall of London gave the name to his ship Christopher & Mary in 1634. Her master was Peter Andrews. The ship was supposed to carry emigrants to the Carolinas but went instead to the James River. She took supplies to Virginia in 1641, anchoring on October 20; in 1642 she was put at the disposal of the parliamentary forces and spent three years patrolling home waters, and in 1645 she headed the list of merchant ships taken into the Navy. Vassall claimed unpaid compensation as late as 1654. This Mayflower was 400 tons.

Researchers have been hard put to prove or disprove which of the many Mayflowers were the ship of legend. Dr. Harris, for example, tried hard to make all these Mayflowers mentioned above total two, or at most three vessels.

Other historians have followed the dismantling in 1624 trail, and have struggled to identify the location of salvaged timbers of the Pilgrim ship.

One researcher investigated a claim that the pillars in the old schoolroom at Abingdon in Berkshire were either the masts of the Mayflower or those of William III's ship of 1688, the Brielle, and, after much painstaking measuring, concluded that whatever they were they could not be from the Mayflower. He added the salutary remark that it was unlikely that the Mayflower as such would create much interest in seventeenth-century England.

Many people sincerely believe that Mayflower timbers were used to build the celebrated barn in the Buckinghamshire village of Jordans, a pretty, tranquil village, scattered among trees a mile or two on the London side of Beaconsfield. Dr. Harris commented (rather uncharacteristically for a scholar) in support of this theory that the Greeks have preserved pieces of wood that are part of the Argo. Ship's timbers were certainly incorporated into the barn: if someone stands on their head, they can see the roof beams have the shape of a ship's keel; and one of the beams bears a faint outline of the letter M.

Much meticulous scholarship has gone into building up an accurate picture of the Atlantic Mayflower, and into the model of the ship which is displayed in the Pilgrim Hall at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The first research in depth, by Dr. J. W. Horrocks in 1922, led Dr. R. C. Anderson of the Society for Nautical Research in 1926 to design the model. On the basis of this, Mr. William A. Baker, the naval architect who designed Mayflower II, began his work. Mr. Baker, curator of the Francis Russell Hart Nautical Museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, referred also to the notebooks of the late-sixteenth-century master ship wright, Matthew Baker.

The original starting point of all this study was Bradford's comment that the ship's tonnage was "nine score." The trouble is that precise tonnage figures are so difficult to determine. The most convenient measurement for years was the Spanish tonelada, equaling two pipes of wine in cask. That is between forty and forty-five cubic feet of liquid, approximately 2000 English pounds. The English ton, derived from the wine tonneau of Bordeaux, was one tenth larger (what mariners still call today a "long ton"). One English ton equaled four large barrels, or hogsheads. On January 28, 1620, the Mayflower of London unloaded a cargo listed as 153 tons of French wines plus 4 tons of red wine and 16 hogsheads of unspecified wine. This totals 161 tons. According to Matthew Baker's reckoning, the length of keel and the breadth and depth of any vessel, multiplied together and divided by 100, gives the ship's burden. The Ascension of London, burden 160 tons, was about 54 feet long in the keel, 24 feet broad, and 12 feet deep. The Adventure of Ipswich, by Matthew Baker's measurements of 1627, was 63 1/2 feet long, just over 26 feet broad, and 11 feet deep; and her tonnage was 182. Dr. Anderson, calculating from this, worked out his Mayflower model on a scale of 64 by 26 by 11, giving a figure of 90 feet exactly as the length from stem post to stern post. The beautiful replica, Mayflower II, designed for Warwick Charlton by William Baker and built in 1957 by Stuart Upham of Brixham in Devon, is as close to the original as it is possible for scholarly research to make it.

Ship proportions, listed by William Borough, comptroller of the Navy in the fifteen-nineties, are: length of keel twice to three times the breadth, depth half, eleven twenty-fourths, or two fifths of breadth. The Crane, built in 1590 and identical with an example in Matthew Baker's notebooks, gives a ratio of 2.31 to 1 for length- breadth, and prompted Mr. Charlton to suggest for Mayflower II a keel 58 feet long, breadth of 25 feet, and depth of 12 1/2, giving, by the 1582 tonnage rules, 181 tons.

Ship designs of the period, drawn with a compass and a straight edge and nothing else, emphasized Baker's principle that a ship should have "a cod's head and a mackerel's tail", meaning a full bow and a fined-down stern. The widest point came just above the waterline so that the ship would not heel over too far under full sail, and just forward of midships to comply with Baker's principle of balance. In drawing a design, profiles and cross sections were shown. First came the keel, stem and stern, showing the degree of rake for both stem post and stern post: the drawing looked as though the vessel had been cut in half lengthways. The front and back rakes added together gave the breadth, with the forward rake always the greater of the two. Next the maximum cross section was drawn. Matthew Baker wrote: "First ther most be made with the breath and depth of the ship a paralillogram whose half shall souffyes for this works."

It was necessary to decide the width of the ship's floor, that is, according to an early-seventeenth- century definition, what width the ship rested on when grounded on a beach. Normally this would be one third of the full breadth. The difference in width between bow and stern, known as the trim of the ship, worked out by Matthew Baker's "well of proportion" at about two feet in the structure of Mayflower.

Shipbuilding tools included axes and adzes for cutting, augurs and "gimblets" for boring, wood ramps, timber-girth measures and gauges, hammerlike mauls for driving in the long wooden bolts, or treenails, nearly two feet long and properly seasoned to prevent shrinking, that fastened the planking to the frame. The masts were approximately 58 (fore), 80 (main), and 42 (mizzen) feet tall, and the long bowsprit measured some 57 feet. These spars were all, of course, tapered, ranging in diameter from almost two feet thick at the base of the mainmast to less than eight inches at its top. The crow's nest, a wide shallow bowl, was about nine feet across. All the ropes (over 400 of them altogether) weighed eight tons, the biggest being the mainstay (the principal rope of the mainmast), over three inches thick, and the main towrope, more than 100 fathoms long. The sails were made of heavy flax canvas in three different weights, so finely woven that they were reputed to be as strong as chain armor. They were hand-sewn with flax twine, and the holes through which their ropes were slotted were bound with leather to prevent fraying. The-ship carried the typical sails of the time: on the mainmast the great mainsail and main topsail, on the foremast the foresail and foretop, and on the mizzen mast the sprit sail and lateen mizzen.

Up to twelve guns were mounted by the gun ports, or openings in the sides, seeming, to the modern eye, dangerously near the water: four medium-sized guns and eight smaller ones. The ship carried three boats: the master's skiff, which held five or six people, and the longboat, holding twenty; these were tied in place on deck, and, according to custom, used on the voyage to keep rabbits and poultry in. The third boat was the shallop.

Shallops, in comparison with the vessel herself, were fairly big-thirty feet long, one third the length of Mayflower-and usually had a single mast with one or two sails as well as sets of oars. The Pilgrim shallop was large enough to hold thirty-two people, as it did on one occasion, or, on another, eighteen men with food, weapons, and supplies for several days. To be stored, as it was, below decks for the crossing, it was cut down and partially dismantled, leaving enough room for people to sleep in it and keep some of their belongings, but both the cutting down and the daily wear and tear made its eventual restoration a two-week job for the carpenter once they reached the other side.

Most of the sleeping and living space for the passengers was in the low-ceilinged great cabin, 25 feet by 15 at its largest, and on the main deck, 75 by 20 at most. Below decks anybody five feet tall could never stand fully upright. What this measurement means is that the maximum space for each person would have been slightly less than the size of a standard single bed. In an area that size, similar to the size of a grave, each person had to sleep, eat, store his personal belongings, change such clothes as he could or did, keep as clean as possible, brush hair, trim beards and nails, mind the children, prepare the food, and survive for eight months - the time it took to get ready, make the crossing, and establish the settlement on the shores of the New World.

Whatever else history may tell us one thing we know for sure is that the Mayflower, by virtue of a relatively short voyage in a long career that none took note of in her lifetime of service, became immortal, joining the company of such legendary transports as the Santa Maria, the Half Moon, the Beagle and Apollo Eleven.

© 2007 Alden Kindred of America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Revised: 01/02/2008