The Pilgrims' Miserable Journey Aboard the Mayflower

_Elsa_

Tiffi’s phone rings and it’s Yeti calling.

“Hi Yeti, what’s up?” asks Tiffi. “I’m online googling for information for Elsa’s next story.”

Yeti cannot keep up with Tiffi’s energy. He won’t even try. He suggests that perhaps they should get together one more time before the summer is over. Tiffi tells him that she’ll check with everyone to find out who might be interested and promises to get back to him. Now she goes back to her googling.

‘Sailing for more than two months across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the 102 passengers of the Mayflower—including three pregnant women and more than a dozen children—were squeezed below decks in crowded, cold and damp conditions, suffering crippling bouts of seasickness, and surviving on meager rations of hardtack biscuits, dried meat and beer.

“The boat would have been rolling like a pig,” says Conrad Humphreys, a professional sailor and skipper for a recreated sea journey of Captain William Bligh. “The smell and stench of illness and sickness down below, and the freezing cold on deck in the elements, it would have been pretty miserable.”

The Mayflower, like other 17th-century merchant ships, was a cargo vessel designed to haul lumber, fish and casks of French wine—not passengers. The 41 Pilgrims and 61 “strangers” (non-Separatists brought along as skilled craftsmen and indentured servants) who boarded the Mayflower in 1620 made for unusual cargo, and their destination was no less foreign. The ship’s square rigging and high, castle-like compartments were suited for short hops along the European coastline, 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 of being blown backward rather than forward,” says Humphreys.

Incredibly, though, 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 Pilgrims’ joy and relief on catching sight of Cape Cod on the morning of November 9, 1620 was recorded by their leader William Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation.

“Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon 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 thereof," wrote Bradford. ‘ (Source)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHPObLCLPDQ

Great video!

Let’s continue - The Pilgrims and the Mayflower Facts

Start at the beginning – Tiffi co-authors the Mayflower Story