The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* Read Online Free PDF Page A

people, with such scorn and contempt,” Cushman wrote, “as if they were not good enough to wipe his shoes.... If I speak to him, he flies in my face as mutinous, and saith no complaints shall be heard or received but by himself.” In a letter hastily written to a friend in London, Cushman saw only doom and disaster ahead. “Friend, if ever we make a plantation God works a miracle, especially considering how scant we shall be of victuals, and most of all un-united amongst ourselves and devoid of good tutors and regiment. Violence will break all. Where is the meek and humble spirit of Moses?”
    When it finally came time to leave southampton, Cushman made sure he was with his friends aboard the Speedwell. He was now free of Martin but soon found that the Speedwell was anything but speedy. “[s]he is as open and leaky as a sieve,” he wrote. several days after clearing the Isle of Wight off England’s southern coast, it was decided the Speedwell needed repairs, and both vessels sailed for Dartmouth, a port only seventy-five miles to the west of southampton.
    It was now August 17. The repairs were quickly completed, but this time the wind refused to cooperate. People were beginning to panic—and with good reason. “Our victuals will be half eaten up, I think, before we go from the coast of England,” Cushman wrote.
    The months of tension had caught up with Cushman. For the last two weeks he had felt a searing pain in his chest—“a bundle of lead as it were, crushing my heart.” He was sure this would be his last good-bye: “[A]lthough I do the actions of a living man yet I am but as dead.... I pray you prepare for evil tidings of us every day.... I see not in reason how we shall escape even the passing of hunger-starved persons; but God can do much, and His will be done.”
    They finally departed from Dartmouth and were more than two hundred miles beyond the southwestern tip of England at Land’s End when the Speedwell sprang another leak. It was now early september, and they had no choice but to give up on the Speedwell. It was a devastating turn of events. Not only had the vessel cost them a lot of money, but she had been considered vital to the future success of the settlement.
    They stopped at Plymouth, about fifty miles to the west of Dartmouth. If they were to continue, they had to crowd as many passengers as would fit into the Mayflower and sail on alone. To no one’s surprise, Cushman gave up his place to someone else. And despite his fear of imminent death, he lived another five years.
    It was later learned that the Speedwell ’s master, Mr. Reynolds, had been secretly working against them. In Holland, the vessel had been fitted with new and larger masts and—as any sailor knew, when a ship’s masts were too tall, the added strain opened up the seams between the planks, causing the hull to leak. By overmasting the Speedwell, Reynolds had provided himself with an easy way to deceive the Pilgrims. He might shrug his shoulders and scratch his head when the vessel began to take on water, but all he had to do was reduce sail and the Speedwell would stop leaking. soon after the Mayflower s et out across the Atlantic, the Speedwell was sold, refitted, and, according to Bradford, “made many voyages ... to the great profit of her owners.”
    In early september, the wind began to blow west across the North Atlantic. The provisions, already low when they first set out from southampton, had shrunk even further by more than a month of delays. The passengers, cooped up aboard ship for all this time, were in no shape for a long journey. But on september 6, 1620, the Mayflower set out from Plymouth with what Bradford called “a prosperous wind.”
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    â—†â—†â—† By the time the Mayflower left Plymouth, the group from Leiden had been reduced by more than a quarter. The original plan had been to relocate the entire congregation to