Mayflower (May-Floure) Was Not
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ACTUALLY, THE MAYFLOWER (MAY-FLOURE) WAS NOT A “NEGRERO” SLAVE VESSEL “It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.” — Samuel Butler, EREWHON REVISITED HDT WHAT? INDEX THE MAYFLOWER THE MAYFLOWER There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia in a very singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned slaves upon the Southern soil, — a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistible impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one, — and two such portents never sprang from an identical source before. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE MAYFLOWER THE MAYFLOWER In the course of the Civil War, the racist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who detested American of color and desired for the secessionist states to win, adverted that after bringing over the white people in 1620 the Mayflower had been re-purposed as a negrero. That seems quite unlikely to have been the case. Either Hawthorne had some indication now entirely lost to us — or, more than likely, he was merely making up Fake News like this as he went along (deliberately confounding a 17th-Century vessel with a 19th-Century vessel, and deliberately confounding a voyage east to deliver freed American blacks back to Liberia with a voyage west to deliver chained African blacks into American servitude), in malice aforethought in line with his agenda, and with the agendas of the racist politicians he supported such as the genocidal Andrew Jackson and the drunken Franklin Pierce — to muddying the waters while ridding America of its black Americans or retaining them in perpetual servitude. There is an historical circumstance, known to few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia in a very singular way. They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned slaves upon the Southern soil, — a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistible impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this revelation; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one, — and two such portents never sprang from an identical source before. We may note at this point that this author had changed his name from Hawthorn to Hawthorne, and that the English haw-thorne was identical with the may-flower. On a following screen is an image of the May flower of this hawthorne tree, with its autumn fruit. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE MAYFLOWER THE MAYFLOWER 1609 The Mayflower is recorded as of this date as being a merchant ship travelling to Baltic ports, notably Norway, employed in the transportation of tar, lumber, and fish.1 Possibly it was used in addition for whaling near Greenland.2 Between voyages the humdrum vessel was maintained in Harwich harbor. Its owners were Christopher Nichols, Richard Child, Thomas Short, and Christopher Jones.3 There would not have been contemporary pictures, paintings, or measurements of such a workhorse as the Mayflower but its burthen is known to have been 180 tons4 and, from that hard fact, experts in 17th-Century merchant vessel construction establish its length as about 113 feet from the tip of its bowsprit beak to the back rail. Its keel would have been about 64 feet and its board width would have been something like 25 feet. Later in its career on the high seas, it would come to be employed in the Mediterranean, in the wine and spice trade, before being torn apart for construction materials in about 1624.5 1. Depositions of Thomas Haddon, John Cowbridge, and Thomas Thompson; Deposition of Thomas Haddon, January 27, 1609/ 10. Public Records Office, HIGH COURT OF ADMIRALTY EXAMINATIONS. 2. Edward Winslow et al. MOURT’S RELATION: A JOURNAL OF THE PILGRIMS AT PLYMOUTH. London 1622. 3. Deposition of John Cowbridge and Thomas Thompson, May 4 and 7, 1612. Public Records Office, HIGH COURT OF ADMIRALTY EXAMINATIONS. 4. William Bradford, OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION, written 1630-1654, original at Massachusetts State Library, Boston. 5. “The ‘Mayflower,’ Her Identity and Tonnage.” The New England Historic and Genealogical Register, October 1916, pages 337-342. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE MAYFLOWER THE MAYFLOWER THE VESSEL IN QUESTION It has been surprisingly difficult to obtain information about the vessel in which the Brownists came to their “Plimoth” in the New World, for Governor William Bradford’s history of Plimoth Plantation simply does not name this vessel. All that Bradford considered worthy of record was that this vessel had been “hired at London, of burthen about nine scoure....” (When he tells how John Howland fell overboard and was saved, he recounts that the man managed to catch hold of a topsail halyard, and this detail confirms to us that the vessel would have been one with topsails.) The name of the vessel does not appear in any other early accounts that are still of record, although one of them informs us that the name of the ship’s master was Jones,6 but fortunately we do have an 1623 document the purpose of which had been to record the manner in which an acre of land had been assigned to each individual colonist. Whoever prepared that document just happened to enumerate these people in accordance with the various ship manifests, with the first group being registered under the heading, “The Falles of their grounds which came first over in May-Floure, according as their lotes were cast .1623.” From that incidental mention we were able to establish the approximate name of the vessel: “May-Floure.” (The 6. The transport Elizabeth had a name change when it was hired by the American Colonization Society, and became the Mayflower of Liberia in order to transport a load of freed blacks back to Africa — but the May- flower of Liberia was in 1820 whereas this Mayflower was in 1620. Refer online to R.G. Marsden’s “The ‘Mayflower’” in The English Historical Review, Volume 19, Number 76 (October 1904), pages 669-680, for an extensive examination of various ships of the 17th-Century period that had names similar to this, or had masters named Jones: http://www.jstor.org/view/00138266/ap020076/02a00040/0?frame=frame&userID=80947b1e@brown.edu/ 01cc99332300501afa730&dpi=3&config=jstor In that article no suggestion is made that this other shipmaster Jones ever was in command of a vessel that transported slaves! The conclusion I draw from the detail of this is that, when in 1862 at a critical juncture of our Civil War –the point at which our Civil War was coming to be also about freeing the slaves rather than only about restoring the federal union– Nathaniel Hawthorne suggested the identification of the Mayflower of the Brownists in 1620 under a Master Jones with some Mayflower of Liberia under a Master Jones that had supposedly some- time carried former slaves back to Africa two full centuries later, Hawthorne was behaving in a manner that at the very least must be described as reckless of the truth. Why a racist supporter of the Southern secession such as Hawthorne would have conducted himself in such a manner at such a critical juncture is a matter open to conjecture, but we do know that before the war his sympathies had always been with the white slavemasters and against the black slaves. He was a Democrat in an era in which the Democratic party was the party of the slavemasters. In his youth he had cheered President Andrew Jackson, a slavemaster, and in his adulthood he was the intimate chum of President Franklin Pierce, who had attained the presidency with the support of the South and has been generally recognized (at least until our “Wubya”) as having been the very worst of our presidents. Hawthorne had almost as much contempt for people of color as he had for “scribbling women” such as Margaret Fuller. I cannot see his publication of such an identification at such a point as the result of some innocent now-forgotten mistake. To the contrary, this was “Fake News” intended to muddy the water and sow disruption. This was not only unnecessary, it was malicious. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE MAYFLOWER THE MAYFLOWER English mayflower is also known as the hawthorne or Crataegus. It is a deciduous tree that is a member of the apple family and therefore of the rose family. Its buds are interspersed with the newly opened leaves and look like tiny white balls. The buds open into a flower five snow-white petals around slender stamens with bright pink heads. The back of each flower has five green star-like sepals and below these the stalk is slightly swollen, containing the seed, which grows into a small green berry that ripens to shiny red.) The English High Court of Admiralty Records list six candidate vessels named something like “May-Floure” that could have sailed from London between July 1620 and May 1621.