Ship Modelers Association

The Mayflower galleon has a lot of things said about her, but there is little recorded as to what this ship actually looked like. When she left England, she carried a complement of 101 passengers and 20-30 crew by best estimates. Although the little ship that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth Rock in 1620 is one of the most celebrated events and ships in U.S. history, facts concerning both her origin and subsequent life after Plymouth Rock are obscure. There is a record of one MAYFLOWER of London, Christopher Jones master and part owner. According to the records, this ship plied the seas between England and the French Biscay ports of La Rochelle and Bordeaux. Going to France she carried such things as cloth and rabbit skins. She then returned with items such as wine and brandy. There are also indications that she transported furs from Norway and silks from Hamburg.

Due to religious differences between Anglicanism and Puritanism, MAYFLOWER’S charger was arranged through the Merchant Adventurers, which included representatives of the Virginia Company, the London Company, and the Plymouth Company, all of which could make land grants in the America’s. The dissenters worked most closely with Thomas Weston and John Pierce, who had secured a patent from the Virginia Company to settle within its domains, in “the neighborhood of Hudsons River in the northern part of Virginia.”

The Puritans sailed from Leyden in SPEEDWELL for a rendezvous with MAYFLOWER at Southampton towards the end of July 1620, and the two ships sailed in company on August 5, with ninety Pilgrims aboard MAYFLOWER and thirty more in SPEEDWELL. It was soon discovered that the SPEEDWELL was in no condition to make the crossing of the Atlantic. The SPEEDWELL’S leeks forced the two ships first into Dartmouth and then Plymouth. It was then decided by the crew and passengers that the MAYFLOWER was the only ship that could make the crossing. Overcrowding was to become a problem, but it helped that about eighteen or twenty of the passengers decided to stay in England. The MAYFLOWER finally sailed from Plymouth on September 6 with 50 men, 20 women and 34 children, about half of them Pilgrims and the other half members of the Church of England.

The first half of the passage was rough, but the rest of the passage was blessed with fine weather, and on November 9, 1620 they saw land at Truro, Cape Cod, 200 miles north of the Virginia Company’s domains, which extended about as far north as New York. They tried to sail south, but contrary winds forced the ship back around the tip of Cape Cod, and on November 11, 1620, they anchored at Provincetown Harbor. The trip took sixty-seven days to complete. One individual in the group had died, and one child, named Oceanus Hopkins, was born while at sea.

On November 15, Miles Standish led a small group of Pilgrims on their first foray along the neck of Cape Cod. At the end of the month, they made a second expedition, by shallop (assembled after MAYFLOWER’S arrival), to the Pamet River near Truro, and a third expedition took them across Massachusetts Bay. Here was a good place for wintering, and on December 16 MAYFLOWER arrived at “the harbour……which is apparently, by Captain John Smith’s chart of 1614, no other than the place he calls ‘Plimouth’ thereon.”

The first winter was hard, but they survived with the help of an English speaking Indian, Squanto. By April of 1621 half of the crew of the MAYFLOWER had died, but she sailed back to England and arrived in the Thames estuary after a run of only thirty-one days. What happened to MAYFLOWER after that is unknown. She is last mentioned in conjunction with Jones’s name on December 18, 1621, unloading at London the last of a cargo from La Rochelle that included 1,930 pounds of cotton yarn, “yards of Turkey gro-graine,” and twelve hundredweight of currants. In 1624, a vessel of the same name, in which Josian Jones, the captains widow, was a part owner, was surveyed at Rotherhithe and valued at 128 pounds, 8 shillings, 4d. What became of her after that is unknown.

In 1956, naval architect William A. Baker designed a replica of the MAYFLOWER based on scholarly interpretation of the few facts known about the Pilgrims MAYFLOWER and the design of other contemporary ships. She was named MAYFLOWER II. In 1957 a crew of thirty-three men and a cat sailed from Plymouth, England under Captain Alan Villiers to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in fifty-three days. This ship is still on exhibit at Plymouth Plantation.

There are many model kits of MAYFLOWER available, most of which are pure conjecture on the part of the model designer. The closest one can come to the actual ship is to use the plans of William A. Baker indicated above, who did extensive research into the design of the ship. At the least, a kit of MAYFLOWER II would be the better choice of those currently available. The actual MAYFLOWER ship will forever remain a mystery both as regards what she really looked like, what rig she carried, and what her ultimate fate was.