![]() Subsisting on small rations of salted meats and beer, the Pilgrims would have been malnourished, dehydrated, weak and susceptible to scurvy. “Even young children were given beer to drink.” “The beverage of choice for many of these old voyages was beer,” says Humphreys, explaining that casks of fresh water tended to go “off” during long storage. Since regular bread would spoil too quickly, they served hardtack biscuits, jaw-breaking bricks made from flour, water and salt. The cooks would have run out of fresh food just days into the journey and instead relied on salted pork, dried fish and other preserved meats. Mealtime on the Mayflower brought little to celebrate. The journey was difficult enough for seasoned sailors, nevermind novices like the Pilgrims.” Biscuits and Beer “The crew were worried about people being swept overboard. “The crew would occasionally let some of the passengers up on deck to get some fresh air, but on the whole, the Pilgrims were treated like cargo,” says Humphreys. The passengers practically slept on top of each other, with families erecting small wooden dividers and hanging curtains for a semblance of privacy. Between the masts, storage rooms and the shallop, the total available living space for 102 people measured only 58 feet by 24 feet. The passengers shared the gun deck with a 30-foot sailboat called a “shallop” that was stored below decks until their arrival in the New World. It’s really not a very nice place to be.” “And all around you, people are getting seasick. “These lower decks were very cramped, cold and wet, with low ceilings no more than five feet tall,” says Humphreys. The crew was housed in small cabins above the main deck, while the Pilgrims were consigned to the “gun deck” or “between decks,” a suffocating, windowless space between the main deck and the cargo hold below. In addition to its 102 passengers, the Mayflower carried a crew of 37 men-sailors, cooks, carpenters, surgeons and officers. The Mayflower was about 100 feet long from stem to stern and just 24 feet wide. The traditional account of the Mayflower journey begins on September 6, 1620, the day it sailed from Plymouth, but it’s worth noting that by that point the Pilgrims had already been living aboard ships for nearly a month and a half. Some of the Pilgrims also called it quits in Plymouth, but the rest of the passengers and cargo from the Speedwell were transferred to the already overcrowded Mayflower. The frustrated and exhausted Pilgrims docked at Plymouth and made the difficult decision to ditch the Speedwell. The Speedwell was finally ready to sail again on August 24, but this time only made it 300 miles before springing another leak. The two ships disembarked from Southampton on August 6 with hopes of speedy crossing to northern Virginia.īut just hours into the journey, the Speedwell began to leak badly, and the two ships were forced to pull in at Dartmouth. From there, they sailed to Southampton, UK, where they met the rest of the passengers as well as a second ship, the Mayflower. The Pilgrim’s arduous journey to the New World technically began on July 22, 1620, when a large group of colonists boarded a ship called the Speedwell in the Dutch port city of Delfshaven. Pilgrims boarding the Mayflower for their voyage to America. “The journey would have been painfully slow with many days of being blown backward rather than forward,” says Humphreys. 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 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 Mayflower, like other 17th-century merchant ships, was a cargo vessel designed to haul lumber, fish and casks of French wine-not passengers. “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 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. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |