Mayflower Myths
Dr Simon Targett explains why we might have America’s founding story of the Pilgrims all wrong
Do we have the story of the Pilgrims all wrong?
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower setting sail from Plymouth, England, on 16 September, carrying its 102 passengers and 30 crew to the New World. They would land in what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, on 21 November and on 26 December the passengers disembarked on what would become Plymouth, Massachusetts. This historic journey has become an integral part of the founding story of the United States, with the Mayflower Compact an example of the governmental framework for the country to come.
However, this may not be a particularly accurate founding story for America. Indeed, as we learned speaking with Dr Simon Targett about his book New World, Inc. (co-authored with John Butman) the origin of the USA really dates back earlier and the motivations for its foundation may be both different from those of the Pilgrims and perhaps more in keeping with the image America has of itself today.
“If the Pilgrims were to come back today, they would be hugely surprised at the way their story has become the founding myth because they were just one of many groups going across the Atlantic in search of a new life,” Targett tells us. “In the classic telling of the Pilgrim story, you get the picture of a solitary and devout group of people, motivated by piety rather than profit, bravely crossing the dangerous ocean, getting to Plymouth Rock, surviving that first tough winter, and then giving thanks in a ceremony that became Thanksgiving. But the real story was very different. By 1620, when the Pilgrims went to America, the Atlantic was pretty much a highway with lots of vessels going back and forth, and the Pilgrims were one group among many that was originally trying to get to Jamestown and be part of what was a fast-expanding settlement.”
Even the precise motivations for the journey can be called into question according to Targett. “There, they could practise their religion but that was not what prompted them to leave Europe,” he says. “Although their last port of call was Plymouth in England, they originally came from Leiden in the Netherlands and there, as Separatists from the Anglican Church, they enjoyed as much tolerance of their religious beliefs as they could wish for. So it is a mistake to think that they were motivated principally by the desire for even more freedom to follow their religious beliefs. What really motivated them was a desire to bring up their children in an English manner – which they found hard to do in the Netherlands – and to enjoy a better standard of living. And it is not a little ironic that they turned to a group of merchants to help them achieve their dreams.”
The importance of pioneering traders and merchants is the focus of Targett and Butman’s book, New World, Inc, which tries to place the founding of America in the longer historical context of exploration and trade from North America to Europe that
“PRETTY MUCH FOR 150 YEARS, THE STORY OF THE PILGRIMS WAS FORGOTTEN”
had been going on since the 1550s. “When I think of America I think of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bill Gates, and some of the big brands, Mcdonald’s and all of that,” says Targett. “It’s about entrepreneurship. It’s about making your way in the world. And as we dug deeper into the archives, we came across some different people, the merchants and their associates, whose story began not in 1620 when the Pilgrims reached America, but much earlier. We realised that their story hadn’t been properly told. Hence we called them ‘the Forgotten Founders’.”
The driving force behind these new commercial ventures was a desire in England to find new trading routes to the Far East and particularly China, a desire that became all the more urgent when the French reclaimed the port of Calais in 1558, removing England’s foothold in mainland Europe. A young entrepreneur named Sir Humphrey Gilbert was pivotal in directing attention to the west as a solution to this challenge. “One of Gilbert’s ideas was to reach China by going through what would later be called the North West Passage – through the icy Arctic waters of what is now Canada – rather than through the North East Passage,” explains Targett. “Again, as we explain in New World, Inc., he didn’t succeed, but he did trigger a renewed effort to get to China. In fact, it’s worth mentioning that for the first third of our book we don’t really talk about America. But we think it’s important to understand this backstory in order to understand how America and the British Empire came to be. Gilbert’s role was critical, and he sparked a whole series of adventures. We think that from his time onwards you can trace, albeit through a number of zigzags, a consistent path to the first permanent English settlements in the early 1600s.”
What’s particularly interesting about these histories of entrepreneurs travelling west from England to open up new trading opportunities, sometimes as a palliative to economic challenges at home, is that they feel more connected to two of America’s core values: the pioneer spirit and the American Dream. That said, the pioneer spirit also seems appropriate to the Mayflower Pilgrims.
“The pioneer spirit and the American Dream are really two separate things,” says Targett. “The pioneer spirit is reflected in the old idea of ‘Go west, young man’, and of course people went west, got to America’s east coast, and then over the next 200 years kept on going west until they reached the Pacific. So there was absolutely that pioneer spirit, and it manifested itself in various ways. There was a pioneer spirit in the way the sailors confronted physical danger, there was a pioneer spirit in the way the merchants created modernstyle investment vehicles like companies, and there was a pioneer spirit in the way the first settlers tried to interact with the local indigenous people.”
The American Dream, however, if we take it to be about working your way from rags to riches, sits better in the story of those who came before the Pilgrims. “As for the American Dream, we do say that some of the earliest settlers in Jamestown were the first people to live the American Dream.
Jamestown had a terribly difficult birth as a settlement and it was only thanks to people like Thomas Smythe and his merchant associates – who kept sending people and resupplying the settlement – that it survived. Some of the poorest settlers went as indentured servants who were promised their freedom and some land if they worked for five to seven years — and survived. The first group went in 1607 and in 1614, when their period of servitude ended, some decided to return to England. But some decided to stay, and they were given parcels of land and told they could farm independently and keep the fruits of their labour for 11 out of 12 months a year. Only for one month a year did they have to produce corn and other things that would be given to the rest of the settler community.”
For many of the settlers, this would have been a gigantic leap forward in terms of their social and economic standing from what they could have hoped to achieve back in
Europe. “This was really the beginning of the idea of private property and remember, these people could never have dreamed of being landowners or landholders back in England. So the idea that hard work, discipline and diligence would be paid back with greater riches and greater wellbeing and security – which is really the essence of the American Dream – was formed at this early stage. Of course, there were great risks too, and many people who left England to go to America didn’t survive. But those who did, those who gambled and saw their gamble pay off, did live that American Dream.”
“SOME OF THE EARLIEST SETTLERS IN JAMESTOWN WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE TO LIVE THE AMERICAN DREAM”
That this dream ultimately came at the expense of the indigenous people who already lived on these lands and later the work of enslaved people remains the dark heart of this tale and one that gets swept to one side by the Pilgrim story and its images of hospitality and community. So how did the story of the Mayflower, as important as it was to the expansion of European settlers into North America, become the founding story of the US?
“For an answer to this question you have to look to the American Civil War period of the 1860s,” says Targett. “Pretty much for 150 years, the story of the Pilgrims was forgotten, lost and not much thought about. And, of course, the great Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, hailed from Virginia, from the south, so Jamestown was more commonly the story that they talked about and remembered. But in the 1860s a young woman, Sarah Josepha Hale – a magazine editor best-remembered as the author of the nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb – wrote to Abraham Lincoln and suggested a day of national reconciliation or a day of thanksgiving as a way of healing the divisions between the Unionists and the Confederates, between the north and the south.”
The story had found new interest in the 1850s thanks to papers detailing the journey being discovered in the library of Fulham Palace, London. Of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, was a voice from America’s recent past and this recollection of America before it had fully formed itself into a nation naturally felt relevant to the current events.
“Lincoln was likewise excited by the whole thing and authorised a day of thanksgiving towards the end of November, which of course has been celebrated ever since,” says Targett.
“So, in a way, the reason why the Pilgrim story has been put on a plinth is because of its link with Thanksgiving and with a national celebration when the country comes together and people temporarily put aside their differences.”
Does all of this make the Mayflower’s story any less important? Not particularly. It merely places this 400th anniversary in a greater context of a nation that was already planting its seeds in the continent long before the Pilgrims arrived. The very nature of what America has come to stand for makes more sense when this wider understanding is brought to bear.