I play a trivia game, and the answer to the question today kind of surprised me. It had to do with the 1620 voyage of the Mayflower and why it was diverted to Massachusetts from its original destination. I answered correctly that it was originally headed to Virginia, but in providing the answer, it said that it was diverted there because the pilgrims learned during the trip that they wouldn’t be welcome in Virginia. I had always thought they ended up in Massachusetts because of severe storms that blew them off course.
So, which is it, and how could they have been “informed” during the voyage that they wouldn’t be welcome in Virginia? Who would have told them in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, long after they had left England?
It was errors in navigation and bad weather from what I’ve read. But they weren’t that far off. Their intended destination was the mouth of the Hutson River which was considered Northern Virginia in 1620.
I’ve heard two stories, neither of which I can verify. One was that they stopped early because they were running low on supplies. Another was that the ship’s captain and crew didn’t want to risk encountering Spaniards so they dropped their passengers off farther north than they had planned for.
The main reason Mayflower abondoned the voyage south after sighting Cape Cod is that those waters were full of uncharted shoals and the weather was still horrible. They knew the English settlements were to the south between them and the Spanish.
It’s hard to imagine there were enough ships going back and forth between the old and new world in 1620 for such an encounter to occur, let alone the idea that two ships would stop and communicate with each other in the middle of the ocean. AIUI, the North Atlantic is famous for bad weather and high seas. Possible, yes, but not likely.
Certainly, someone on the ship was literate enough to write down what happened during the voyage, but they would have had to have had a reason to do so. I can’t find a document that claims to be a real-time report of what happened on the voyage and why they ended up where they did.
And that written document, or reliable written references to it, would have had to survive, bucket-brigade style, for the 400 years up to today.
IMO that’s generally a tall order once we’re talking about documentation about any particular event, as opposed to events generally from any given time and place. Even across as short a timespan as 400 years in a generally peaceful part of the world for most of those years.
They already knew before leaving that the existing settlements in Virginia weren’t going to welcome them. They weren’t going to join a settlement, they were going to start a new one. That’s why the charter was for the yet to be (English) settled Hudson Valley
The short answer, according to Cecil: “Their patent from the Virginia Company of London authorized them to establish a plantation between 38 and 41 degrees north latitude; the tip of Cape Cod was just north of 42 degrees. The group dutifully attempted to sail south, but shoals and contrary winds kiboshed that idea.”
If that’s the case, then they never intended to go to Virginia, which makes more sense than figuring that out halfway across the Atlantic. But how do we know they knew they wouldn’t be welcomed before they left? Was that presumably common knowledge at the time?
The pilgrims were religious extremists who sought to separate themselves from the Church of England. The existing settlements were largely made up of the same kind of mainstream CoE congregants whose persecution the pilgrims were trying to escape from.
I wonder what they were doing so far north to begin with. Winds at the temperate latitudes, like Massachusetts, tend to blow from west to east. Did the Mayflower go far enough north to get different prevailing winds, south to the tropics for a westbound wind, did they tack across the ocean, or something else?
The storms they encountered (unknown to them, it was hurricane season) were so fierce they spent a lot of the voyage with their sails lowered and letting the swells and currents direct them where they may.
