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

and ridicule of the sailors—they did everything in their power to help the carpenter repair the fractured beam. They had brought along a screw jack—a mechanical device used to lift heavy objects—to assist them in constructing houses in the New World. With the help of the screw jack, they lifted the beam into place, and once the carpenter had hammered in a post for support, the Mayflower was able to continue on.
    several times during the passage, the conditions grew so bad that even though it meant he would lose many hard-won miles, Jones was forced to “lie ahull”—to roll up the sails, and let the waves take his 180-ton ship. At one point, as the Mayflower lay ahull, a young servant named John Howland grew restless down below. He saw no reason why he could not venture out of the ’tween decks for just a moment. After more than a month as a passenger ship, the Mayflower was no longer a “sweet ship,” and Howland wanted some air. so he climbed a ladder to one of the hatches and stepped onto the deck.
    Howland quickly discovered that the deck of a storm-tossed ship was no place for a landsman. Even if the ship rode the waves with ease, the gale continued to rage with astonishing violence around her. The shriek of the wind through the rope rigging was terrifying, as was the sight of all those towering waves. The Mayflower lurched suddenly, Howland staggered to the ship’s rail and tumbled into the sea.
    That should have been the end of him. But dangling over the side and trailing behind the ship was the topsail halyard, the rope used to raise and lower the upper sail. Howland was in his midtwenties and strong. When his hand found the halyard, he gripped the rope with such desperation that even though he was pulled down more than ten feet below the ocean’s surface, he never let go. several sailors hauled Howland back in, finally snagging him with a boat hook and dragging him up onto the deck.
    When William Bradford wrote about this incident more than a decade later, John Howland was not only alive and well, but he and his wife, Elizabeth, were on their way to raising ten children, who would, in turn, produce an astounding eighty-eight grandchildren. A Puritan believed that everything happened for a reason. Whether it was the salvation of John Howland or the death of the profane young sailor, it occurred because God had made it so. If something good happened to the Pilgrims, it was inevitably interpreted as a sign of God’s approval. But if something bad happened, it didn’t necessarily mean that God disapproved; it might mean that he was testing them for a higher purpose. And as all aboard the Mayflower knew, the true test was yet to come.

    â—† Cross-staff: navigational instrument used to measure latitude. By pointing at the sun and sliding the vane along the notched staff, a sailor could calculate the angles to arrive at latitude.
    â—†â—†â—† Unknown to Jones and any other sailor of the day was the presence of the Gulf stream—a current of warm water flowing up from the Caribbean along the North American coast, across the Atlantic, and past the British Isles. sailing against the Gulf stream would slow down any voyage, and the Mayflower had managed an average speed of just two miles an hour since leaving England back in september.
    Jones had a cross-staff, a three-foot-long stick that enabled him to calculate his latitude, or north-south position, within a few miles. But he had no reliable way of determining his longitude, or east-west position. This meant that after all the bad weather they’d encountered, Jones had only the vaguest idea of how far he was from land.
    He knew the Mayflower was well north of her destination, the mouth of the Hudson River. But at this late stage in the voyage, with disease beginning to appear among the passengers and crew, Jones needed to find his way to the coast as quickly as possible. so he made a run for it, sailing