What is the Mayflower?

Liam Heffernan: 00:00:40

On this day in: 1620

The events that followed have been retold, mythicized, and immortalized as one of the defining moments in the colonization of the United States. So in this episode, I want to know more about the voyage, the people, and the reality of what really happened. As I ask, what is the Mayflower?

Welcome to America, a history podcast.

I'm Niamh Heffernan, and every week we answer a different question to understand the people, the places, and the events that make the USA what it is today foreign. To discuss this, I am joined by a professor of history, anthropology and economics at the University of Southern California.

His research interests include colonial North America and Native American history, and he's published numerous influential articles on the pilgrim's voyage to Plymouth. I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Picture Peter Mancle.

Peter Mancall: 00:02:03

Thank you for having me, Liam.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:05

Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to get you on the podcast.

And I think this is one of those topics that people probably think they know more about than they actually do. So I'm really keen to kind of get into the nuts and bolts of this.

Peter Mancall: 00:02:19

Yeah, well, you know, it is. It is. The Mayflower, you know, is so embedded in American folklore and culture. I mean, what it means in history is. We will discuss.

But, you know, I think anyone who's ever been to an American school has heard of the Mayflower and has some sense of it. And in part, it's part of our national tradition because it's embedded in.

In the holiday of Thanksgiving, which is one of the things that the Pilgrims did. So.

Liam Heffernan: 00:02:50

Yeah, and I mean, I guess, you know, before we get ahead of ourselves and start talking about, you know, Plymouth, Massachusetts and Plymouth Rock and everything else, talk to me first about Plymouth Devon, because, you know, this. This whole story starts in my little land of the uk, doesn't it?

Peter Mancall: 00:03:06

Well, you know, it's interesting. It's an interesting question.

I mean, yes, a Plymouth Devon is important, but the people who we call pilgrims, most of them had already left seeking religious freedom.

They'd already gone to Leiden, and so they were sort of a ship had to go get them from Leiden, bring them back to Plymouth, and then they made the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean.

So, I mean, Plymouth, like many places in England in the early years of the 17th century, is the people that are wrestling with the religious controversies of the time.

And those controversies had begun almost a century earlier when Henry VIII decided to separate from what we now call the Catholic Church or the Roman Church. And so the Reformation spreads to Britain. Henry launches a series of initiatives.

He declares himself, through the act of Supremacy, the head of the Church as well as the head of the state. They dissolve the monasteries and they're sort of religious tensions that ensue from there on.

And one of the things that we have to remember is that one of the things that the Protestant Reformation did was it told people to go and read scripture themselves, to not necessarily rely on the intercessor of. Of a priest, of a Catholic priest. And so I mentioned this, which might seem unrelated to early Plymouth.

I mentioned this because all those people have now gone off reading both scripture and then commentaries on scripture began by the late 16th century to have lots of debates about it.

And while Henry VIII might have thought he was launching a national church, by the end of the 16th, and especially in the early years of the 17th century, there are divisions within that church. And one of the great divisions are these people who were religious dissenters we typically call Puritans.

We don't always use that word, but it's a word that many people, certainly the shorthand, and a subset of that group of Puritans are the people who Americans typically refer to as the pilgrims. They didn't really call themselves pilgrims.

It's a term that William Bradford, their greatest historian, who we'll talk about later, I'm sure in this episode, William Bradford refers to them as.

That the name sort of sticks and it differentiates them in America from the people who went to Plymouth, the people we're talking about today, from the people who would later go to Massachusetts.

So Plymouth in Devon is one of the places where these debates are going on, and it prompts some of these people to seek religious freedom elsewhere, and hence the earlier voyage to Leiden.

Liam Heffernan: 00:05:39

What I don't fully understand about, you know, all of the religious divides at the time, particularly in Britain, is fundamentally they're all worshiping the same God, they're all reading the same book. It's. It's baffling to me that the, that that division was so. Was so violent.

Peter Mancall: 00:05:59

Well, Liam, we would need to speak for many, many hours to try to understand what is going on. But I mean, so I, you know, the shorthand for this one, I sort of. I try to use a visual shorthand sometimes. And so, you know, I go back.

So before the debate between the religious dissenters of the early 17th century and the Church of England, there's this campaign to sort of just wipe out certain vestiges of Roman practice. Of Catholic practice within Britain.

And you can still go to many churches across Britain and see statues, see sculptures, statues whose faces have been, have been destroyed.

Speaker C: 00:06:37

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:06:38

The monasteries are destroyed. I mean, this whole monastery, that's hard for us to imagine how much wealth and land they controlled. But they're destroyed.

You know, now many historians, many British historians have argued for many years, you know, why did Henry VIII do this? And that's beyond what we're talking about today.

But one of the things that Luther had in mind when the Reformation, when he launched this Reformation and his followers, and they're not the first people to ever dissent against the Church, they just happen to become the most successful. He has in mind this idea of a more immediate relationship to scripture.

And once you sort of say there's not going to be a single person, a priest, taking orders from the Vatican who's telling you what to believe, but instead you are reading this text, it's not that hard to figure out that sometimes people are going to come to different interpretations of it.

And what happens throughout the 16th century, post Luther, is these very intense debates, mostly on the continent, not mostly within what we now think of as Britain or Britain and Ireland.

Speaker C: 00:07:43

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:07:43

e talking about In England in: 1620

vent called the peasants war,: 1525

So it's very hard for us in the modern world to really understand what it is that's driving people to these conflicts.

So without getting political, which I'm not going to get in this podcast, I am old enough to remember what used to be the shorthand was referred to as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and that which lasted for a long time. And one could say they're looking at the same sort of texts and whatever. I'm not arguing what the troubles are about.

I'm just saying religious tension is not gone from our world, even in the world that we know, in sort of the English speaking world of modernity.

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:50

Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I think, as you say, we don't necessarily want to open that.

Peter Mancall: 00:08:55

I was using as an example of people disagreeing.

Liam Heffernan: 00:08:58

Exactly.

So thinking, before we get on specifically to the Mayflower voyage, were there any other big kind of driving factors that compelled the pilgrims to decide to leave Britain and seek the new world?

Peter Mancall: 00:09:15

Yeah, so I think that's A really great question and a really sort of foundational question. So there are people in New England and Plymouth here.

What was New Plymouth then, but Plymouth, now Massachusetts, you know, who believe that this was the most important migration, the most important development, you know, in early American history. But in point of fact, it is, by many measures, not particularly significant.

The most significant voyage that ever left from Plymouth was when Sir Francis Drake departed. Sir Francis Drake would eventually be the first person to survive, first European to survive navigation around the world.

Commander Magellan dies on his. On his barium. So Drake is certainly very famous. Comes right out of Plymouth.

There are, by the time of the Plymouth travelers, there had been over 100 years of English people going to the seas, including heading towards the Western hemisphere. The Cabots go, you know, in the years after Columbus.

uter Banks of Carolina in the: 1580

They're English people following Sir Walter Raleigh, who think that the Orinoco in Guiana is going to be where colonies are going to take place. And of course, if you come to the east coast, United States now, and you say, where are the origins of the United States?

sts showed up at Jamestown in: 1607

f that, all of which predates: 1620

But that context is also really important because when the Pilgrims set sail, when they plan their voyage, they know about lots of others who have gone before them.

And that's very important for them, right, because they sort of have some sense of how long the voyage is going to take, some sense of where the voyage is going to take them, right?

These sea routes had been more or less figured out by then, you know, what to sort of pack, although no one was very good at that in the 17th century. But so they had a lot of information and they also knew. And I think this is the last thing I want to say on this point.

They also knew that it was dangerous.

And that's very important because when we talk about people who migrate, in part for religious reasons, we say to ourselves, why would they do it if it's dangerous? And I think to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I think they really believed that they were part of an unfolding plan of God, of their God, who was either going to get them there safely because that was part of the plan, or was. Or they were going to have some other thing. I think they really believed.

And that faith is embedded in a lot of the early documents for Plymouth and then Massachusetts and New England more generally.

Liam Heffernan: 00:12:45

And, you know, it sounds like this wasn't a case, as I. I think we can often believe about this, that they weren't discovering anything. They were. They were just seeking a better life. They were. They were avoiding the religious persecution that they were facing at home. And they.

They already knew of this new world of America and they believed that there was a better life there than there was at home, presumably.

Peter Mancall: 00:13:11

I think that's exactly right. I mean, there have been descriptions of the place where they actually went. Champlain, the French explorer, had been there earlier.

Champlain had actually mapped the exact place where Plymouth would become established.

Captain John Smith, famous in American lore, had already sailed the coast of New England, written a book called the Place New England, described the many riches to be found there. So, yes, they have a very specific sense. And of course, the story that I've just told you is all about the Europeans.

There have been native peoples living in this territory for hundreds of years who did not need to be discovered, who were. And peoples who, before the Pilgrims went over had been engaged in trade with Europeans sailing along the coast.

Speaker C: 00:13:57

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:13:58

So there's a lot that's happened beforehand.

u were sitting in Plymouth in: 1620

And that was an important part because though these people were driven by religion, it costs money to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and they needed to find something to export back. And the Plymouth colonists were aware of that from day one.

Liam Heffernan: 00:14:37

Yeah.

And probably an important caveat, before we continue the conversation, when we talk about discovering America, actually, you could argue that America didn't need to be discovered because there were so many Native American tribes already living there. It wasn't really. It wasn't a place to be discovered. Right, Correct.

Peter Mancall: 00:14:53

No, no, it was already. Well, it was already well settled. That's one of the important things about using, about using. Champlain is here. We have someone coming.

He's from France. He's coming over. He's sailing by this territory that the English would later claim. And he's describing the communities that are there.

ually, over the course of the: 1620

You know, the Pilgrims and then the later body of the Puritans would come to some justification how they could coexist with native peoples. In the end, those relations broke down. But at first, I do think there was this idea that there would be coexistence.

Liam Heffernan: 00:15:38

the actual voyage itself. So,: 1620

Peter Mancall: 00:15:46

There's supposed to be two ships. There's the Mayflower and a ship called the Speedwell.

And it's the Speedwell, I believe, which is the one that went over and fetched the people who are living over in Leiden. So they come back and they convene in Plymouth, and then they set sail, and they originally leave in July.

And pretty quickly, the Speedwell seems to develop problems. So they pull into Dartmouth and they hang around for a week, 10 days, try to fix it. Then they said, okay, let's try again.

And so the two ships go out into the ocean, and they're approximately 300 miles out to sea. And they come to the conclusion the Speedball's not going to make it. So they go back to Plymouth.

And, you know, our records are imperfect, but as far as we know, some people decided, you know what? I'm done. And so they stay, and a bunch of them get on the Mayflower. And the Mayflower was not that big a ship. It's like 95, 96ft long, right?

And by the time all the passengers, you know, from the speedball get on, there are 102 people on this ship. It's cramped, and there's sort of a cross section.

We know that there's a woman far into her pregnancy because she gives birth, you know, on the voyage, another woman who's pregnant, who gives birth soon after they get to Plymouth. So we know that these are families.

So there are children, infants, children, adults, and then there are people who are not part of the religious group who are going over sort of on this vessel to start start their new lives. And then there's the crew, you know, who are. Who don't seem, from the basic narrative we have of this to have been especially friendlier with.

With the pilgrims and the others. And William Bradford will eventually write the history of this.

We'll talk about the one person who died during the voyage, and it was a sailor, and I think he calls him a lusty sailor. And he dies. And I'm not sure. I don't recall Bradford telling what he dies of.

But the pilgrims, of course, see this as maybe, well, God's taking care of them a little bit, right? Getting rid of this obnoxious, you know, young guy. It's a little harsh. But anyway, so almost everyone survives this.

I think it was 66 days, you know, at sea. They arrive in November, if you've been to New England, you know, in November, the leaves are off the trees, the fields have all been harvested.

The fruit is gone from the trees. I mean, you know, it's. It is not the ideal time. And in those days, it was much colder than it is now.

It was sort of still part of the Little Ice Age, and so it was colder, so it was a tough time to get there. And as far as we know of those original migrants, about half of them die by the following year.

Speaker C: 00:18:42

Right?

Peter Mancall: 00:18:43

So, I mean, it was a brutal start to them.

You know, we tend to bathe them in such glory that this is so important for the history of what we shorthand refer to as America of the United States, you know, that we talk about this tragedy that befell these people, right?

You know, had they maybe gotten there earlier, maybe they would have gotten in more food, that had more time to build shelters, blah, blah, blah, maybe they would have survived.

,: 1617

And so while these people we call the Pilgrims show up and it's late in the year, they're also not really having any contest with the local population, because right where they landed, that population had been devastated by this disease. And so, you know, it's sort of, you know, maybe the way to think about it is the voyage happens. It's uncomfortable. Almost all of them survive it.

They go to this place where there is had just been widespread death. They get there late in the year, and then they experience for different reasons, Widespread mortality.

Liam Heffernan: 00:20:09

I mean, they must have thought, you know, after, you know, what, two months or so at sea, with the equivalent of what, 1, 1 foot of space per person. You know, you get off the boat in this, like, huge, like, new land, and you must think, great, like, the worst bit is over. Let's start a new life.

Was there any kind of, like, honeymoon period for them?

Peter Mancall: 00:20:31

Oh, that's a. William, that's such a great question. No is the answer. So the reason we're talking about them, you know, we're talking about them because they're historical figures.

eople that went to Roanoke in: 1584

We are talking about these people in part because among them was William Bradford, who becomes the governor. There's actually supposed to be a governor. He dies quickly, Bradford takes over. And then Bradford, about 10 years in, starts to write a history.

And that history becomes a book that we call of Plymouth Plantation, not printed at the time, but the book survives. And that becomes the great historical written narrative of. Of early English America. There's no equivalent to it.

There are a lot of people who write a lot of things, but there's no equivalent of Uplift Plantation. And so you ask the question, did they have a honeymoon?

William Bradford, in this very vivid prose now, he's writing this 10 years after they've landed, right? He describes their arrival in coming into what he thinks of as this dense forest.

And as he constructs the scene, surrounded by his words, wild beasts and wild men and what multitude they didn't know. And then he goes on, and they're forever liking themselves to biblical characters. So there are these biblical references that go through this.

And he says, you know, at one point, you know, these people out in the woods are readier to shoot them full of arrows than otherwise.

And then you drawing on this rich scriptural tradition, he says of these people, now, if you've been to Plymouth or you've been to Cape Cod, it's very flat. You know, it is very flat. A place with big tides and very flat land.

And Bradford, sort of evoking that, says there was no Mount Pisgah to Mount this is where Moses went to look down on the promised land, to say there are better times to come. Moses doesn't get there for a reason we don't talk about anyway. But Bradford says, we have nothing like that.

We can't go climb mountain and look down. And then in this sort of classic Phrasing of these religious dissenters, he said, so what did we do? How do we receive solace?

We look up towards God, right? And God.

And so he embeds in his historical narrative that this is the unfolding of a divine plan and that God wasn't necessarily going to make them succeed, but God was going to determine what happened to them.

Liam Heffernan: 00:23:14

So then what did happen in those early months? Because, I mean, it was obviously quite rough, but they must have had a plan of some sort.

Peter Mancall: 00:23:23

Well, so while they're on the Mayflower, and this becomes one of the other reasons that they become important in American lore, the religious among them. So let's say half of the people on the boat, maybe some more than half the men among that group get together because it's very patriarchal society.

And they create this thing called the Mayflower Compact where they bind themselves to each other and they basically say, we're going to look after each other and we're going to have some sort of representatives. Doesn't really. It's very short document, basically going to govern ourselves and we're going to take care of each other.

So from early on, there is the sense that they're going to look after each other.

Now, their legacies, what that means later in New England history where that sort of notion of taking care of each other, looking after each other becomes spying on other people. Right.

I mean, one of the reasons that there are these famous witchcraft episodes later in America, later in New England history, in this part of New England history, is because these people are very in tune to looking what their neighbors are doing. So the Mayflower Compact is not in that spirit of spying. It's in the spirit of let's take care of each other.

So they go over and one of the things about them, you sort of ask, you know, before, you know, what was Devin like? You know, what are these people sort of like, Devon's a port town, right? Devon is not.

I mean, there's farming in Devon, but in Plymouth, I should say, Plymouth is port town. You know, these people are not farmers. You know, these are probably. We know more about the Puritans will come later.

But these are basically town dwellers. They were involved in. In weaving cloth, right? They were not the people that raised the sheep. They were not the people that planted the crops.

You know, they were probably not even people that built the houses. Like, these were people of a certain group who'd clustered together because of their shared interests in religion and work together.

So imagine these people, they've sailed across the ocean. It's been tough. They get there in wintertime and, you know, they need to figure out, how do we live? So they could look at the houses of Patuxent.

This is this Wampanoag community which had been there and which. There's only one person left to Squantum, known as Squantor. There's only one person around.

So presumably, I mean, and Bradford doesn't describe this, presumably they are taking advantage of the fact that the land had been cleared recently, taking advantage of the fact that there were some form of shelters there and they're moving into it, but they are not well equipped. And when people say, well, that doesn't seem like a very smart thing to do.

Why didn't they come over with farmers and people to tend their herds and all these things? That ultimately becomes, I think, to me and to many other historians, the real proof that they were really committed to their religious faith.

Because I think they really thought that God was.

If they were going to survive and they didn't know it, if they were going to survive, it would mean that God would find a way to teach them how to live in this place. So not. It's not a new place in terms of human occupation, but new to them kind of a place. So it was rough.

Liam Heffernan: 00:26:41

It confuses me. The, the. The Mayflower pilgrims are. Have been kind of mythicized to such an extent that the. We.

We all those of us with little knowledge of what actually happened, kind of think of them as these kind of pioneers of the New World. They came over and started, you know, these, These settlements that became the United States. And it was all thanks to. To these pilgrims.

Actually, from what you've said, it sounds very much like they were having a pretty rough time in Britain. They were seeking a new life.

There wasn't really much strategy at all besides the fact that some other people had been over to America and, um, it had worked for them. So they were seeking a new and better life there.

Peter Mancall: 00:27:27

Yeah, well, I think that's right, Liam, but I mean, I think I would say that as we try to get into their heads, and it's so hard to get into the heads of people lived 400 years ago.

Speaker C: 00:27:36

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:27:36

I mean, we all just have to acknowledge they lived in a very different world than we do.

Speaker C: 00:27:40

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:27:40

But if we were to get into their heads, I think we would have to say they have some knowledge, as I mentioned, they have some knowledge of the area from other people who'd gone there. But this idea of faith is driving them.

And so one of the reasons that they're so important in American culture is this idea that we see them as pioneers of religious freedom. People who sort of stood up against the state, literally stood up against the Church of England.

Speaker C: 00:28:13

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:28:14

Stood up against religious persecution, didn't accept the legitimacy of the Church of England. They were separatists. The larger body of descendants were non separatists. It's kind of a weird distinction, but whatever.

But these are people who are being persecuted for their faith. And their faith is so important to them that they separate.

Now, there is a tradition of people doing that in America and there are traditional people doing that in other parts of the world.

Speaker C: 00:28:35

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:28:36

That is one way to think about them. That that was so important to them that they.

It's not that they put aside their worldly needs, is that their worldly needs were not going to define what they did. So in that sense, they are very different from the people that went to Virginia. Now, the migration Virginia is going on at the same time.

up in urban areas starting in: 1607

Speaker C: 00:29:04

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:29:04

I mean, in fact, that's so similar that where the Pilgrims think they're going, they're going to North Virginia. Right. I mean, that's. That they're just going to the northern part of this. It's going to be a separate colony.

And so they think, because these people planned it, but those other people are also English subjects of the king. They're not primarily religious dissenters. They're going for economic kinds of reasons.

And so, you know, what American historians do or what people in America do is to sort of say you have this religious driven migration to New England and this economic migration driven to the Chesapeake region. The reality is more muddled. The people that went to Virginia were absolutely religious.

There are all sorts of rules about going to church that they were not irreligious in any way that we know. And the people that go to New England certainly understood worldly goods.

If you read Bradford's up Plymouth Plantation, you can see they are looking for things to ship home, to make money, to pay off their debts. So we don't want to oversimplify religion versus economy. But there are that said distinctions in individual motivation.

And I think it's fair to say that the group that go to Plymouth, this idea of religious freedom, practicing their form of Protestantism without the persecution of the state, without the persecution of the Church of England, was more important to them, that they were willing to go into an area that they were not economically well prepared to settle.

Liam Heffernan: 00:30:35

Yeah, and actually, maybe that is the crux of why the Mayflower Pilgrims have been held up in such high esteem through history is because where everyone else perhaps went to America for economic, political, imperial reasons, and that when you could then start to consider sort of Native American implications, I mean, that, that's a fairly hard history to sanitize. When you look at some of the reasons why maybe they were settling, whereas the Mayflower pilgrims, it sounds like a much more value driven voyage.

And actually there's something a lot more easy to idealize about that, I guess.

Peter Mancall: 00:31:17

Yes, I think that's a fair way of. I think that's a very fair way of putting that. And it's not a coincidence.

One of the things that helps define them in America, as you put driven by their values, was that a couple years after they get there, a year after they have this meal with local native peoples, and this becomes embedded and becomes historic origins of what is now the modern holiday, our holiday of Thanksgiving.

And so though Thanksgiving now in America is about sales in department stores and parades and our version of football games, it nonetheless has this sort of patina of religious sincerity to it. Right. That it is a religious act to give thanks to whoever we think is the greater power in the universe.

Well, that sort of helped the Pilgrims maintain a presence in America because there's always, as the stereotype of the Pilgrims comes up every year at Thanksgiving, I would say it's a rule at the New Yorker magazine, maybe not a real rule, but that every year there's going to be one cartoon making fun of the Pilgrims and it's going to come out in, in November. So they remain these people.

And in American culture, the Pilgrims, it's always winter, they're always trudging through the woods, they're always going to church. Right. They're never having any fun. Right.

And so this whole idea of this sort of puritanical element of American culture we attribute to these people, fairly or unfairly.

So it's a combination of when they got there, this historian Bradford, who wrote about them, and then the fact that they get linked to this repeating ritual which enables them to maintain this presence in American culture over now, over 400 years.

Liam Heffernan: 00:33:06

So then when we look at the, that lasting legacy, you know, of, of the Mayflower Pilgrims, as I'm calling them, what do you, what do you think that is and how, you know, besides just, you know, being the, the, you know, honorary guest of Thanksgiving, how do you think they've shaped America?

Peter Mancall: 00:33:29

Well, I'm not sure I would say that they shaped America themselves. I think that. I mean, there was a relatively small number of people who went to New Plymouth.

There were times in the late: 1620

I wrote an entire book about a guy named Thomas Morton who has fights with them, and the Pilgrims kick him out and exile him back to England. So even among the English, they're all not getting along.

dissenters comes, arrives in: 1629

tts, would absorb Plymouth in: 1693

Speaker C: 00:34:20

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:34:20

So Plymouth itself becomes a town in this larger colony. Now, having said that, I'm not sure the Pilgrims, the Mayflower Pilgrims, are that important.

I do think that that larger body of colonists who comes over, of whom we often just link them together, does make certain contributions to American culture.

I mean, I do think, and though many people would argue on this point, I do think there is something embedded in what becomes United States about this notion of religious freedom.

Speaker C: 00:34:53

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:34:54

It's embedded in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Right. That is a real thing here. I mean, we might debate what it means, but that is a real thing. And part of that does date back to these people.

These people were very learned, many of them who came over. And I think it's no coincidence that the first college created in the United States is created in Massachusetts.

Cambridge is not that far from Plymouth. And I think that that was important for creating. Harvard has started to create basically ministers to tend to the growing population of New England.

I think that these Pilgrims and then larger body of Puritans are important for showing that, showing English people that they can survive and thrive. They are, from a demographic point of view, after that first terrible winter, they're incredibly successful. I mean, the large up.

The people in plymouth, skip the mid 7th century, are having 10 children, you know, and they're surviving to adulthood.

Speaker C: 00:35:54

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:35:54

So in many ways they are thriving demographic model, and they. They do impose certain ideas about how to live in that kind of environment. So I do think they make contributions.

Do I think those have been overblown? Well, I think from my tone you can tell. Yes, I think they've been overblown, but it doesn't mean they're not important, of course.

Liam Heffernan: 00:36:11

Yeah, no, that's fascinating, actually. And I think just there's so much that I think gets lost in the memory of the pilgrims that you've really enlightened me on.

And I'm sure our listeners as well, about sort of the reality of that. And I think you're right in that I do think the actual impact of the voyage itself and of that initial period has been perhaps overstated.

And it almost negates maybe the long term influence that the pilgrims themselves and their children and ancestors ultimately had, because I think it's just easier to think they arrived at Plymouth Rock or as it's now known and that was it, the New World and heroes. But actually their impact probably had a slightly longer tail to it, as you've sort of explained.

Peter Mancall: 00:37:03

It's very complicated.

And one of the things that we didn't talk about, because we're only talking about those first years, is I mentioned that they hoped to coexist with native peoples.

But in: 1637

I said before, they think everything is the unfolding of a divine plan. They don't know what God's plan for them is.

Speaker C: 00:37:42

Right.

Peter Mancall: 00:37:42

So maybe God intended them to go over. Maybe God intended them to be what John Winthrop would later say Massachusetts. This bar and this idea about a city on a hill.

Much debated concept in American history. Much debated, much misunderstood concept in American history, but they didn't know. So they made a decision.

Like many people across the Atlantic in the 17th century, they made a decision to think that there was a better life awaiting them. And for those who survived, you could argue that that was true.

Liam Heffernan: 00:38:14

Absolutely. Well, what a way to end. Peter, I can't thank you enough for joining me on the podcast.

For anyone who's listened to this and has enjoyed the episode and wants to find out more, we're going to leave links to everything that we've mentioned in the show notes so that you can go check all of that out. Peter, for anyone that wants to connect with you, where can they do that?

Peter Mancall: 00:38:38

Well, they can, they can. I mean, the best way to connect with me, I hesitated to say this is via email, but I mean, I am on Facebook if someone wants to connect with me via.

Via that just at. I think Peter Mancal. I've got an unusual last name. I'm easy to find.

And if you're interested in larger residents of this story, I do have a book coming out next year in which these people, I describe them somewhat prompt prominently. So.

Liam Heffernan: 00:39:04

Well, there you go. What a way to sort of set up the sequel next year when your book's out. But Peter, now, it's been great having you on the podcast.

You know, thank you so much for joining me.

Peter Mancall: 00:39:16

It's been a pleasure. Liam, thanks for talking to me this morning.

Liam Heffernan: 00:39:18

Thank you. And you know, for anyone else that is listening, do remember to rate and review the podcast wherever you're listening to this.

And of course, if you follow the podcast, you'll get all new episodes just appear in your feed and there are also links in the show notes.

If you do really love what we do, you can support us from as little as $1, which helps us keep making the show and, you know, just makes everyone really, really happy. So thank you all so much for listening and goodbye.

Speaker C: 00:39:56

Sa.