Misery, disease and death: the Mayflower’s American legacy

Exhibition marking 400th anniversary of voyage to New World will highlight the plight of native tribe

THE story of the Mayflower has become one of the most potent in history: 102 brave pioneers who set sail for the New World and helped to lay the foundations for the United States of America.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the voyage and it will be commemorated with a new exhibition in Britain.

But while the event will acknowledge the courage of those early pilgrims, it will also ask British visitors to confront the truth that English colonisers brought misery, disease and death to the Native Americans.

“It is uncomfortable. It is difficult. But if we’re not going to tell that story in 2020 then when are we going to tell it?” said Jo Loosemore, co-curator of The Mayflower 400: Legend and Legacy exhibition at The Box, a new £40million museum opening in Plymouth, Devon, this year.

The show will be with representatives noag tribe, which had for thousands of years occupied the land that came to be known as New England. It will tell visitors that the local tribes were already suffering at the hands of English traders before the Mayflower’s arrival in 1620, with some sold into slavery.

“If we were doing a traditional telling, probably that story wouldn’t be included. Clearly, it is important that it is,” Ms Loosemore said.

“Traditionally, the dominant story has been English and separatist, and I think what struck me very early on is how rich the stories that we haven’t been telling actually are.”

Paula Peters, spokesman for the Wampanoag, said: “We’re very pleased to be standing up as equals on an international platform to tell our story. So often the story of the Mayflower is just about the boat. The Mayflower lands and the pilgrims are depicted as founders, not takers.”

Ms Peters said of the settlers: “They originally got off the boat, in what is today known as Provincetown, Cape Cod, and raided stores of food in one of the villages of the Wampanoag.

“The original treaty that was made between the Wampanoag and the colonists was not an honest agreement. Almost immediately there was a land grab by colonists coming over from England. And they also brought with them the law of the king, and there is no way the Wampanoag would have agreed to be subjugated to the law of the king.”

Thanksgiving in the US marks a day of feasting between the Wampanoag and the English in 1621. But Ms Peters said: “It is a holiday born out of a very fanciful myth. Quite honestly, only one paragraph has ever been written about that event. In terms of the Wampanoag and native people, Thanksgiving perpetuates this myth that we welcomed colonisation.”

Only half of the 102 passengers who made the voyage on the cargo ship survived the first winter. “What is rarely told is the brutality, the challenge of those early English settlements in America,” Ms Loosemore said. “I hope it is an exhibition that surprises people and enables people to perhaps realise that this isn’t the story that they thought it was.”

The Box opens on May 16 with Mayflower 400: Legend and Legacy.