The Mayflower was an aging cargo ship that had hauled wine between England and France and reeked of it. Its passengers included English separatists who had fled to Leiden in Holland, where farmers were forced into grueling textile work washing wool. With the 12 year truce between the Dutch and Spain ending and King James I courting Dutch alliances, they chose North America despite Jamestown’s death toll. The plan used two ships, but the Speedwell had been refitted with oversized masts whose torque pulled its seams apart. After repeated turnbacks it was abandoned, eating up rations and money and pushing departure into September storm season. The Mayflower sailed with 102 passengers and about 30 crew in a hull roughly 100 feet long and 25 feet wide, with passengers confined to a gun deck of about 1,600 square feet and a five foot ceiling above a hold of dogs, pigs, goats, and poultry.

Its tall castles caught the westerly gales like fixed sails, and in one storm the main beam cracked. A passenger’s iron jack screw, packed for raising house beams, cranked it back into place. Only one passenger, a young servant, died at sea, a baby named Oceanus was born, and John Howland survived being swept overboard by grabbing a trailing halyard. Storms landed them at Cape Cod, far north of their Virginia Company patent near the Hudson River, and when hired strangers declared the contract void, the leaders drafted the Mayflower Compact before anyone went ashore. Wintering aboard, half the passengers and about half the crew died. The Wampanoag showed survivors how to grow crops. Captain Christopher Jones sailed home in about a month in spring 1621 and died roughly a year later.

• Crossing took about two months against the prevailing westerlies.
• The crew struck all sails in the worst gales to save the masts.
• By 1624 the idle ship was appraised at 128 pounds and sold to a ship breaker.
• A lingering rumor says its timbers built a barn in Buckinghamshire.
• An estimated 35 million living people descend from its passengers.